For better or worse, Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s Crisis on Infinite Earths destroyed the DC Multiverse and changed DC Comics forever in 1985.
Things didn’t start out so robust, however. The original idea behind Crisis was simply to make the DC heroes more accessible to readers, especially Marvel readers.
“The series would simply end with the rebirth of the Earth and all the heroes would start the next month and not one of them would ever know that the Crisis had ever happened,” said Wolfman in an interview with 13th Dimension in 2018. Wolfman further elaborated by saying he felt every DC character should be restructured for every new generation – at least, every two decades.
While this sounded good on paper, actually restarting the DC Universe over from scratch wasn’t what happened. What we actually got from Crisis on Infinite Earths was a half-reboot that made a bigger mess of DC continuity that the publisher is still repairing four decades later.
The Aftermath of ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ was Half-Cocked
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As Wolfman stated, the goal of Crisis on Infinite Earths was to put every DC character on one Earth with one streamlined history. This sounded like an easy enough goal to achieve, especially since Wolfman already had a well-established DC canon to manage. The problem, however, was that the DC Multiverse came with conflicting canons, most notably Earths 1 and 2 due to Golden Age and Silver Age overlap. Addressing this overlap would have required retcons for the new timeline to work. This dynamic also spotlighted the biggest problem with the execution of Crisis: a lot of details were not carefully thought out at the editorial level.
Before Crisis on Infinite Earths was approved, no one had carefully mapped out what the new DC Universe would look like, and no conversations were seemingly had about the continuity holes Crisis would inevitably create. One major such hole was how DC was going to reconcile the Golden Age and Silver Age histories of duplicate characters, especially Hawkman. This wasn’t helped by the fact that not every editor and creator working for the publisher in 1985 was on board with erasing 50 years of DC canon. One such creator that pushed back against Wolfman’s goal of getting rid of the multiverse was Roy Thomas, who was (at the time) expanding DC’s Golden Age mythos on Earth-2.
Thomas was also in the middle of creating the second generation of Justice Society heroes with Infinity, Inc. when Earth-2 was suddenly destroyed at the conclusion of Crisis. This meant that Thomas had to make significant retcons to his own work in order to comply with the new post-Crisis canon. When reflecting on Crisis, Thomas believes that Wolfman set out to fix a problem that didn’t really exist, and, ironically enough, compounded the very problem he thought he was fixing with the Crisis event.
“It didn’t wind up really being solved even by the series, as Marv has admitted, since DC immediately began to undercut it with more parallel worlds,” Thomas told Syfy Wire in 2019.
‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ Fixed Non-Existent Problems
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Though the Crisis reboot helped revitalize the DC brand in the late 1980s, Crisis inker Jerry Ordway also acknowledges that the reboot came with problems of its own.
“Being around as long as I have, I see it as a blessing and a curse, because many characters are being relaunched and renumbered over and over, to the point of damaging the very tapestry or continuity that Crisis tried to preserve and streamline,” Ordway said in the same SyFy interview.
To Ordway’s point, the aftermath of Crisis on Infinite Earths saw tentpole characters like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman rebooted with new origins, while the Teen Titans, Justice League, Justice Society, and even Infinity, Inc. kept their histories largely intact. Rebooting the tentpole characters in particular created the biggest continuity holes that weren’t so easily repaired with retcons, leading to more soft reboots like Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis down the line. The latter event, along with 2007’s 52, eventually restored a version of the DC Multiverse.
Further compounding the confusing restructuring of DC continuity was the Flashpoint reboot that launched DC’s New 52 era in 2011. The Flashpoint reset repeated the Crisis mistake of only rebooting certain characters from scratch, and others were largely left intact. However, unlike the Crisis reboot, DC Comics was quick to roll back the post-Flashpoint changes by restoring some version of the post-Crisis continuity with 2016’s Rebirth initiative. While this may have solved the tonal issues with the New 52, it unfortunately didn’t fix DC’s continuity problem – instead, it made things even more confusing. This trend only continued with the events that followed Rebirth.
After 2020’s Dark Nights: Death Metal and 2022’s Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths restored some version of the pre-Crisis multiverse canon, DC continuity has since become largely amorphous. In 2025, no one really knows what stories, characters, or concepts are still canon anymore. While it’s highly likely that this will all be addressed in Mark Waid’s upcoming miniseries New History of the DC Universe, it’s undeniable that after 40 years that Crisis on Infinite Earths did irreparable damage to DC continuity. Ironically, the Crisis reboot could have actually succeeded long-term had just a few aspects/elements been done differently. It was these light touches, as it were, that would’ve helped DC reach its goal of a truly unified DCU.
DC Should Have Kept, Not Rebooted the Golden Age Trinity
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As mentioned, the biggest complication that came out of the Crisis on Infinite Earths reset was the decision to reboot Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman with new origins while not doing the same for the other DC heroes. This now meant that Superman was no longer the world’s first superhero, and that Golden Age heroes like the Justice Society of America were now his predecessors. This drastically undermined Superman’s significance to DC lore. Likewise, this meant that the Justice League was now the Justice Society’s successors, which reduced the significance of Infinity, Inc. to merely children of the older Justice Society heroes.
Another way that rebooting Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman convoluted DC canon was the immediate impact it had on legacy characters like the Huntress, Power Girl, and Fury. The Huntress was originally created as Helena Wayne, the daughter of the Golden Age Batman and Catwoman that resided on Earth-2. After Crisis, both the Earth-1 and Earth-2 versions of Batman were erased and replaced with the new version created by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli in Batman: Year One. This also meant the Huntress could no longer work in the new continuity with her original history intact, and was killed off in Crisis on Infinite Earths’ finale.
Helena Wayne was rebooted three years later as Helena Bertinelli (now the sole survivor of a massacred crime family). While retooling Helena Wayne as a mafia princess sounded like a good compromise in 1989, it also started a frustrating problem with the character having a severely divisive (and confusing) history in the main DC canon. Apart from the fact that Helena Bertinelli has had her origin reworked multiple times before Flashpoint, DC has also resorted to creating new versions of Helena Wayne’s Huntress. The latter could have simply been resurrected as she was buried on the post-Crisis Earth.
Likewise, Power Girl has not benefited from the Crisis reboot. After Crisis on Infinite Earths killed the original Supergirl that resided on Earth-1, the Earth-2 Superman went into limbo. Similarly, the Earth-1 Superman was replaced with the post-Crisis version created by John Byrne. Though Power Girl survived Crisis on Infinite Earths with her history intact, DC still decided that Superman should be the only surviving Kryptonian. This meant giving Power Girl a new origin and creating a new non-Kryptonian Supergirl. This then led to Power Girl being re-imagined as the granddaughter of the Atlantean Arion for the next 20 years.
From there, 2006’s Infinite Crisis restored Power Girl’s original Earth-2 history and established her as one of the few survivors of the Crisis event. While restoring Power Girl’s Earth-2 origin did allow her to reclaim her original history, she also remained stranded on the post-Crisis Earth. This left her in a position of not being able to reclaim her place as Superman’s successor. She especially became redundant with the reintroduction of the original Kara Zor-El Supergirl around that same time.
DC Could’ve Merged the Golden and Silver Age Histories
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In many ways, Power Girl was worse off for having her Earth-2 history restored because it left the character rudderless on an Earth that already had a main Supergirl. Without the legacy of the Golden Age Superman to anchor her, Power Girl still lacks any real purpose as a character, and this has reflected in her stories post-Rebirth. Similarly, Lyta Trevor (aka Fury) was quickly written out of the post-Crisis continuity despite having originally survived the reboot.
Though Helena Kosmatos was created to replace the Golden Age Wonder Woman as Fury’s mother, this change unfortunately caused Fury to lose her appeal. Because Fury was a new character at the time of Crisis on Infinite Earths, being Wonder Woman’s daughter was her major selling point. Her husband, Hector Hall, suffered a similar problem, since his parents – Hawkman and Hawkgirl – were also compromised by the Crisis reboot. More specifically, DC was unable to reconcile Hawkman’s Golden Age and Silver Age mythos for over 30 years – until Robert Venditti found a solution for it in his 2018 Hawkman series.
Of course, how rebooting Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman impacted these Earth-2 women is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s also the impact their new origins had on the Teen Titans and the Justice League because their histories were left intact. Dick’s reason for becoming Nightwing, for example, had to be changed because it was no longer compatible with Batman’s new history. Wonder Woman’s new history also resulted in more future retoolings of Donna Troy’s origin.
Likewise, Wally West succeeded Barry Allen as The Flash, which effectively established that the classic Justice League was now decidedly older than the Trinity. There’s also the problem that erasing Clark Kent’s Superboy years had regarding the Legion of Super-Heroes, with the latter squad earning just as many reboots to compensate for that loss.
All of this mess could have been easily avoided if DC had kept Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman as 1930s-1940s heroes with their more iconic Silver Age developments replacing the outdated Golden Age versions. By keeping Superman as the first superhero to inspire the Golden Age of heroes, this would have kept the Justice Society’s history intact. (Even more so with Wonder Woman later joining the team.) Likewise, if the Golden Age Superman had started out as Superboy in the 1920s, this would have also kept the Legion of Super-Heroes’ origin intact.
Since Superman and Batman never formally joined the Justice Society, they could have easily been the founders of the Justice League a little over a decade after the Justice Society’s formation. Similarly, this could have fostered the rise of the second Flash and Green Lantern (who later joined the team), and it would not have been hard for other Golden Age heroes like Aquaman to then carry over. Meanwhile, Green Arrow could have also just as easily joined the Justice League – despite starting out with the Seven Soldiers of Victory in the 1940s. Likewise, Wonder Woman could have simply made the move to the Justice League once the Justice Society disbanded in the mid-1950s.
But this isn’t the only problem keeping the Trinity as Golden Age heroes would have solved; it would have especially strengthened DC’s generational heroes. By not having these older heroes overstay their welcome, this would have allowed their successors to truly get their time in the spotlight.
DC Needed to Let Older Heroes Age and Promote Generational Legacy
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Another concept that suffered from the Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot was the notion of generational legacy. This problem was once more caused by the decision to reboot Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman with new origins and keeping them perpetually young. The same eventually applied to the Justice League heroes, which also negatively impacted the Justice Society’s own successors. Because the Justice League heroes never age, the Justice Society heroes find themselves in a weird place of being the old guys who fought in the 1940s, with Infinity, Inc. starting out in the 1980s. Both groups of heroes also have to depend on time travel to appear in the present DCU from their respective timelines.
It’s understandable from a business standpoint why DC wants to keep publishing Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Justice League as the company’s most highly profitable properties. At the same time, not giving these characters their time has resulted in two problems. The first is that it robbed their own successors of their own time to shine. The second thing it did was cause all of these characters to stagnate, with modern day creators not being able to truly go in bold new directions. This has resulted in creators retreading the same storylines that have already been told in “different” ways, and that has robbed these characters of any meaningful growth.
The biggest offender on this front is Batman, who keeps fighting the same battles with his iconic villains in “different ways,” but these battles never lead to any significant change. For instance, how many times has a villain like the Joker tried to push Batman into breaking his no-kill rule? How many times has Batman landed on the same conclusion of “I have to be better than you?” This is only one example of the many recycled storylines Batman gets every year.
At best, DC had a golden opportunity to challenge Batman in new and interesting ways in 2018, when Tom King originally wanted him to marry Catwoman. Though DC ultimately backed out on the nuptials, allowing Batman and Catwoman to marry would have at least explored new questions:
- Can Batman truly commit to a marriage if he’s still committed to crimefighting?
- Will Catwoman actually retire her own lifestyle to make the marriage work?
- Can Batman and Catwoman truly work as a couple, or is this a marriage doomed to fail?
- Can these two people raise an emotionally healthy child together, or will that child need therapy later in life?
- Would the birth of a child get Bruce to retire, and let his many Robins and Batgirls take over the crimefighting business?
The latter in particular would have easily resolved the problem of Batman having more Robins than he has Batarangs. But this actually spotlights the other reason the Crisis reboot failed in the long-term: By maintaining a status quo, DC started to see a decline in definitive storylines for its characters by the late 2000s. This was despite the high innovation these characters saw in the late 1980s and 1990s.
After Flashpoint in particular, the decline in definitive storylines took an even steeper dive. Once again, this could have been avoided by simply giving each hero their time and allowing a new generation of heroes to take their place after a few decades. While it’s likely DC saw (and continues to see) the prospect of aging their tentpole heroes as financially risky, one character related to Batman already proved otherwise: the Huntress.
With the success of the Huntress, pre-Crisis Earth-2 proved that Batman could meaningfully age, marry, have children, and pass away without a comic book resurrection. By allowing his adult daughter to take over protecting Gotham, this revitalized Batman’s legacy in a fresh, new way that hasn’t been done since. While the Earth-2 Dick Grayson was never able to outsell the Huntress as Batman’s successor, his Earth-1 counterpart did prove to be a huge success as Nightwing and as the leader of the Teen Titans. In a more streamlined DC continuity, Nightwing would have simply replaced the Earth-2 Dick Grayson and would have inherited the latter’s career as a lawyer and diplomat in his later years.
Keeping Batman a Golden Age hero would have also allowed his daughter to continue operating as the Huntress for the next two decades, with her history mostly intact. Since Joey Cavalieri was in charge of writing Helena Wayne at the time of Crisis on Infinite Earths’ development, there’s a good chance he would have still created an Italian-American survivor of a massacred crime family as Wayne’s eventual successor. She may or may not have still been called “Helena Bertinelli” (due to no longer being a re-imagined post-Crisis Helena Wayne), but would have likely still existed. (This all would have been on brand for Cavalieri as he had already introduced Italian-American characters into Wayne’s stories prior to Crisis.)
DC Need to Ditch the Status Quo of Perpetual Publications
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Of course, by keeping Helena Wayne active in the post-Crisis continuity and aging Nightwing to Batman’s age, this would have resulted in major changes to later Robins like Jason Todd and Tim Drake. But these characters could have still existed as the teen sidekicks of the Huntress and Nightwing. Likewise, Cassandra Cain would have made more sense being adopted by Barbara Gordon as she succeeded the latter as Batgirl and was mentored the most by Barbara. Damian would have also likely been introduced as Helena Wayne’s long-lost half-brother (with Talia al Ghul still being his mother) instead of Bruce’s “surprise” son.
Outside of the Bat Family, the Super Family would have similarly benefited from Superman remaining a Golden Age hero. This would have obviously required merging Supergirl and Power Girl into one character, but this may have actually benefited Kara in the long-term if her story went the New 52 route. She would have simply started out as Superman’s Kryptonian cousin he raised with his wife, Lois Lane. Like the New 52, she could have simply started out as Superman’s teenage sidekick, Supergirl, before later taking on the name Power Girl as an adult, and starting her own company as Karen Starr.
Superman’s retirement would have similarly allowed Power Girl to take his place as the Earth’s protector, and he could have shifted focus to raising his son, Jon, with Lois. Likewise, Wonder Woman could have kept Donna Troy as her little sister, ending a frustrating trend of Donna receiving multiple new origins. Wonder Woman could have also kept her daughter Lyta, with Donna most likely being the cool aunt. Hawkman’s problem could have similarly been resolved much earlier by using reincarnation to his advantage (the way Venditti explored in that Hawkman run). Going this route would have also kept Hector Hall as Hawkman’s son.
Lastly, they could’ve readily kept the Justice Society and Justice League as separate teams that co-existed at roughly the same time. This would have allowed Infinity, Inc. and the Teen Titans to meaningfully explore the different legacies of both teams. In turn, this would have effectively made them all second generation heroes. The heroes that came after these in the post-Crisis continuity (i.e., Stargirl, Jakeem Thunder, Cassandra Sandsmark, and Conner Kent) could have easily become third and fourth generation heroes.
While DC fans, creators, and editors will likely never reach an agreement over the usefulness of the Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot, one thing does remain certain: it could have actually worked as a long-term change with more careful planning and even more thoughtful execution. Wolfman’s goal of putting all the heroes on one Earth was not impossible to achieve. It just required better transparency with creators and editors about shifting company goals (i.e., making DC characters more accessible), the promise not to retcon 50 years of canon, and to simply streamline the existing DC mythos into one definitive timeline with an emphasis on thoughtful storytelling.
Retcons would have still been inevitable, but these could have still been kept at a minimum. All that was needed was for DC to ditch the status quo of keeping the tentpole heroes active for decades and decades on end. By prioritizing generational legacy (a concept that proved successful on Earth-2), this would have kept all of these characters’ rich histories intact without the need to reboot them for every generation. Instead, each generation of fans would have had heroes made specifically for them to match their experiences. Characters like the Huntress and Nightwing already did this for Gen X DC fans. All the characters that followed Crisis could have simply been another generation’s heroes.
Nailing the Crisis Would Have Made DC More Accessible
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Personally, getting the Crisis reboot right the first time would have made it easier for me to get my friends who love DC movies and TV shows to read the comics. There are a lot of good stories in the source material they’re missing out on because they’re put off by DC’s confusing reboots and retcons – both of which have made DC’s continuity even less accessible to new and casual readers.
Since the original Helena Wayne Huntress, Power Girl, Justice Society and Infinity, Inc. are my favorite DC characters, getting Crisis right the first time would have done a lot to help these characters thrive in the decades that followed. It would have especially avoided a situation of convoluting the Justice Society’s rich history to make it compatible with the Justice League’s own history. Not rebooting the Trinity would have also avoided a lot of the continuity holes this created for the Justice Society brand. It would have especially avoided giving Power Girl the status of being the spare “Earth-2 Supergirl” who simply carried over from the pre-Crisis multiverse, but who has no true place on an Earth with a Supergirl.
While the Huntress has remained a popular character (both as Helena Wayne and Helena Bertinelli), not getting the Crisis reboot right the first time sharply divided her fanbase in the long-term, to the point of fueling misogyny towards Wayne in particular. Though DC does recognize that Helena Wayne has a passionate fan following, they also have not been able to figure out how to reintegrate her into the main DC canon without undermining her status as the original Huntress and second generation Justice Society hero.
Every change that DC has made to Helena Wayne in particular (to make her more compatible on an Earth where Batman and Catwoman never achieved the milestones of their Earth-2 counterparts) has severely reduced her significance as a legacy hero. It has notably reduced her to being nothing more than a gimmick, especially with her more recent reboot as the “Kid from the Future.” This trope is already severely limiting in its story potential, namely because there’s not much that can be done with this idea without involving Helena’s parents. This is a major downgrade from her original pre-Crisis incarnation, who got to exist as her own character with her own career (as a lawyer) and relationships that allowed her to escape her parents’ shadow.
But, once again, all of this could have been avoided had the new DC Universe been more carefully mapped out before greenlighting the Crisis storyline. Had Wolfman especially gotten his way of Crisis being a real fresh start and not the haphazard half-reboot it eventually became, DC continuity would be in a much stronger place, especially with an emphasis on generational legacy and good storytelling.
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