Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths miniseries served to bring DC fully into the Bronze Age through a large battle involving nearly every character across their titles and the multiverse against the forces of the Anti-Monitor that stripped away much of the messy continuity of the preceding forty-seven years of continuity.

In the DC parlance, crises were those events in which alternate versions of characters from different universes interacted or crossed over. The first story was “Flash of Two Worlds,” which appeared in The Flash no. 123 (1961). Throughout the Silver Age of comics, DC stories featured various crises on alternate Earths, such as Earth-1, Earth-S, Earth-2, Earth-X, and so on. This crisis drew upon all of those various iterations of characters with an anti-matter wave that threatened to destroy all life. Wolfman’s story also posited a reason for the existence of alternate Earths, with a scientist from Oa (the home of the Green Lantern Corps) performing an experiment billions of years ago that simultaneously fractured the universe and created the anti-matter universe.

Wolfman wanted to tell a story of this scale and importance since he was a young fan and his devotion shines through on every page, with real stakes and a sense of importance even for tertiary characters. No death is unmourned and each sacrifice feels genuine. Pérez’s art, as always, is some of the best in the entire comic book medium, with careful attention to detail and a real feeling of action in every panel.

Following this story, DC rebooted its characters without the baggage of decades of often-convoluted continuity. This was so successful that it inspired later crises – like Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis – to shake things up across the company’s titles, some to mixed effect. While many preceded and followed this story, it remains the only one referred to simply as Crisis in shorthand. ( )