EVERY DC Comics Crisis Explained!

in the DC Comics multiverse the crisis events are probably the most important things ever however they are notoriously complicated so I'm gonna do my best today to explain what a crisis is and also go over the plot of every single crisis that DC has ever had strap yourselves in because this is going to take a while starting with crisis on earth one the Justice League of America from Earth one and the Justice Society of America from Earth to what would occasionally team up and interact other universes would sometimes get on the action but the term crisis was always used to describe these stories however the term crisis has since evolved to refer to a series of large-scale event comics that involve multiple universes that also has large multiversal altering effects Young Justice number one in 2019 gave an in continuity definition for them stating that an earth crisis is when an unnatural event changes earth against its natural evolution there have been seven in total now I'm sure that people in the comments are going to happily tell me how wrong I am but by using these definitions I think that these events are every crisis that DC Comics has had crisis on Infinite Earths from 1985 zero-hour a crisis in time from 1994 Infinite Crisis from 2005 fatal crisis from 2008 flashpoint from 2011 virgins from 2015 and Dark Knight's medal from 2017 Oh would you look at that seven events the same number that was mentioned in The Young Justice definition and before people say that identity crisis or heroes in crisis should count yes those do have the word crisis in the name but they are not crisis events those books affect things on a local level not on a huge multiversal scale still we've got seven huge books to look through so I'm going to give you the TLDR for each of them if you'd like me to cover any of these events and dedicated videos so I can dive deeper then let me know down there in the comments so let's start things off with the first and most famous 1985's crisis on Infinite Earths it was getting hard to juggle the continuity of multiple universes and DC had also acquired new characters from rival publishers that they wanted to incorporate into their main universe so crisis on Infinite Earths cept in Judas the multiverse and consolidates all the aspects that writers wanted to keep into one new earth this was also one of the two reboots that DC has had yeah contrary to popular belief DC has only reset its main calling book universe twice and yes we will be covering the second one later in this video anyway the general plot of crisis on Infinite Earths is relatively straightforward there's these two powerful cosmic beings the monitor is the guardian of the multiverse and the anti-monitor is the ruler of the antimatter universe now despite being a single universe the antimatter universe is actually a dark parallel to the multiverse the anti-monitor took it upon himself to start destroying universes because of the symbiotic relationship between the multiverse and the antimatter universe you see whenever a universe is destroyed the antimatter universe expands and as a result the anti-monitor grows stronger this prompts the monitor to assemble a team of heroes and villains from throughout the surviving multiverse in order to solve the destruction there's lots of fun team ups as the heroes fight throughout time in multiple universes and even a big climactic battle at the dawn of time itself the stakes are also super high with the fate of the multiverse in jeopardy and the heroes that are killed off aren't just lesser-known dudes I mean Supergirl and the flash are both killed off in this book but even though there was death aplenty there were still new heroes that rose up like Guy Gardner officially joining the Green Lantern Corps and the creation of a new doctor light although the good guys were eventually victorious only five universes were saved but as a result they were sort of fused together to create one universe called new earth this fusion also messed with time which created a brand new continuity that writers could explore these two continuities are what people are referring to when they use the term pre-crisis and post-crisis next up is probably the least talked about crisis zero-hour a crisis in time from 1994 this had the goal of streamlining DC's continuity again but it was also marketed as a sort of sequel to crisis on Infinite Earths but the resulting book really didn't live up to the hype and was instead very much like most other nineties comics it was loud unnecessary convoluted and very forgettable it also doesn't help that with only five issues zero hour was a lot shorter than crisis on Infinite Earths which means that even though it deals with some pretty big stuff the previous event was a tough act to follow and as a result zero our kind of lives in its shadow the premise is simple enough its crisis on Infinite Earths but with time as a result there's a lot of nonlinear storytelling which makes things very confusing at its core the main conflict of zero hour is that time is being destroyed from both ends threatening to destroy all of reality when they meet in the middle while this is happening it characters from throughout time start popping up all over the timestream the past the future and even alternate timelines the bad guy of this event is called extant this is actually just a new name for a previous villain named monarch who used to be a hero named hawk you know from Hawk and Dove yet it turns out that extant wasn't the true big bad he was simply just a pawn of parallax this guy is Hal Jordan a former Green Lantern that went evil and is trying to undo the mistakes was passed by remaking the universe in his image like the previous crisis zero our aim to streamline and shake up the status quo Hawk man's really crazy situation was cleaned up see my dedicated video for more detail some characters died the atom was aged down to eighteen the Justice Society was aged up etc despite the best efforts of the heroes parallax actually managed to end time itself and were treated to this really cool sequence of everything fading to white with the comics panels slowly coming back into existence as time restarts the heroes rally their strength for one last straw and a well shot arrow from Oliver Queen is what ended up defeating parallax with a new character named damage being able to become a new big bang and recreate all of existence but with some minor adjustments to the DC timeline some of the characters that were killed during zero hour were revealed to be fine but there are still plenty that didn't come back but that's okay because Power Girl had a baby during the conflict so that means that life ultimately won yeah this is a pretty dumb book [Music] this brings us to Infinite Crisis in 2005 which is basically a proper sequel to crisis on Infinite Earths so at the end of the 1985 crisis there are a few characters that were transported to a sort of paradise dimension Superman and Lois Lane from earth to Alexander Luthor from earth 3 and superboy-prime from our real world in this dimension the four of them were able to look in on how new earth has gotten darker over the years stuff like Blue Beetle getting shot Wonder Woman snapping a guy's neck Batman creating a sentient spy satellite to spy on the world super humans and like the entirety of the nineties this made the four of them really uncomfortable and when Lois got sick Superman thought that the only way to make her better was to bring back their universe earth to in all of its hokey Golden Age glory and physically replaced new earth with it naturally this led to conflict with the Heroes of Newerth who clearly didn't want their universe to essentially be destroyed now unbeknownst to Superman Alexander actually had a scheme of his own bring back not just earth to but the entire multiverse in hopes of finding the perfect universe even before the four survivors left the Paradise dimension to enact their plan of resurrecting earth to Alexander had actually been leaving to set the events he needed into motion such as uniting all the Earth's villains and manipulating superboy-prime into causing a war between some alien planets so while Superman was trying to bring back earth - and Alexander was trying to bring back the multiverse superboy-prime was basically not involved and he instead went on a jealous rampage against the Superboy of new earth Alexander's plan actually ended up working out but bringing back the multiverse wasn't going to be enough to save Lois and she ends up dying which turned Superman against Alexander but really Luthor didn't care all that much he was busy playing mad scientist with reality mixing and matching worlds in an attempt to craft the perfect universe but he was defeated by the heroes honestly though even though Alexander's scheme was the main plot of Infinite Crisis all of this kind of took a backseat near the end of the book in favor of more of superboy-prime stant roams with the combined might of the new earth and earth to superman they fights superboy-prime through space through the ruins of Krypton and through a red Sun and even though all three of them were two powered superboy-prime was defeated and a bloody fistfights and was taken prisoner by the Green Lantern Corps although all of the new universes that were created by Alexander Luthor collapse back together at the end of Infinite Crisis this was the spark that led to the multiverse being recreated properly during the 52 event but that's a totally separate thing and is somehow not a crisis now we're at the final crisis in 2008 and although the name implies that it's the last one there is clearly more to come considering the runtime of this video okay so this story is super complicated as it involves a notoriously complex group of characters called the new gods out of all of the stories that I'm going to talk about today Final Crisis is the most wrapped up in metatextual narrative so the leader of the evil new gods Darkseid managed to get a hold of the anti-life equation which is a mathematical formula that allows someone to override a sentient beings freewill basically they turn into a bunch of zombies and are now an extension of Darkseid with this now in his arsenal the evil new gods possess human avatars so that they can use the equation to take over Earth Darkseid orchestrates the death of the good new gods chief soldier Orion with a special bullet and he gives one of his henchmen named Libra the special task of uniting the earth supervillains to get them to spread the equation all across earth with most of the world's population under his snare Darkseid effectively took over the entire planet and since it's the cornerstone of the multiverse his presence there was threatening to destroy all of reality Batman recovered the bullet that was used to kill Orion and completely violated his no gun policy by shooting Darkseid with it but at the same time Darkseid blasted Batman with his Omega sanction this sent Bruce on a massive time-traveling adventure where he became a caveman and a cowboy and some other stuff but I have a full video diving into that if you're looking for more information anyway Darkseid survived but the Flash's managed to bring the Grim Reaper of the New Gods to his doorstep which purge Darkseid from his human avatar now Superman who had just recently gotten back from the future enlist the help of many heroes and villains alike to build a device called the miracle machine which is arguably the most powerful weapon in the DC Multiverse it's powered by element X a metal of pure possibility and the machine has the ability to turn any thoughts into reality but even a stray thought could cause cataclysmic destruction however Superman is a perfect being and he was able to effectively use this contraption by singing at a frequency that shattered Darkseid's entire essence I should have warned you that this is a really weird book but yeah the miracle machine is literally deus ex machina an all-powerful machine that brings about the end of the story which granted Superman's one true wish a happy ending so now let's talk about the second reboot of the DC Universe 2011 s flashpoint this was a very unique crisis because well it wasn't supposed to be flashpoint was just going to be a fun and self-contained flash story but DC was like hey let's use this as an excuse to reboot our entire universe again now although there were a bunch of tie-ins to flashpoint it's still a mostly self-contained story and as such it's pretty easy to explain so very Ellen's origin involves his mom being killed by his arch-nemesis the reverse-flash since the flash has the ability to travel through time he decides to try and save his mom from ever being killed as a result the entire world is altered becoming very different and very dark there's a massive war between Atlantis and the mascara Bruce Wayne was shot in the alley causing his dad to become Batman and his mom to become the Joker there's no Superman and instead cyborg is the world's greatest superhero and a bunch of other stuff kind of like that Barry retained all of his memories from the previous world and although his mom is alive this world was clearly a lot worse than the one that he left so Barry tries to do something about it but realizes that he doesn't have his powers the rest of the book is a lot of what you'd expect they explore the new world Barry gets his powers again he teams up with other heroes has a showdown with a splash and stops himself from ever saving his mom so that things could go back to normal but here's where there's one big change remember how I said that this ended up becoming a multiversal reboot well DC introduced a new character named Pandora as in Pandora's Box Pandora she revealed that long ago the universe was fractured into three parts which happened to be the DC universe vertigo comics and wild storm comics which DC had recently acquired by using Barry's time traveling as a catalyst she merges all three properties together to create one brand new multiverse this became the new 52 a company-wide reboot with fresh takes on all of DC stuff with new properties from Wildstorm and vertigo sprinkled in there for good measure DC has since dropped the new 52 branding so much like crisis on Infinite Earths this is now known as the post flashpoint universe I was regretting this but now we have to talk about what is widely considered to be the worst crisis of all time its convergence from 2015 so this book was put out while DC was moving their offices from New York to California and it feels very half-baked so there's this dude named Telos who works for a big bad guy called Brainiac and he's gathering cities from throughout the multiverse and alternate timelines regardless of continuity and he's making them all fight to see which one is the strongest pre-crisis post crisis flash points Ellis worlds cartoons video games literally anything that DC has ever made is on the table and you better believe that there are plenty of tie ins there are 40 tie-in titles - convergence and honestly this is where a lot of the story for this event takes place but since I'm only talking about the core books in this video and that's all that most people read this is why people think that this book is so bad you see DC was putting out a book called earth 2 which was a post flashpoint reimagining of the earth - universe convergence is actually a kind of sequel to all of that stuff those characters are the main focus of convergence but they're really not involved in all the big multiversal fights you know the interesting thing about this event core convergent series is basically them fighting off and later befriending Telos and helping take on a new bad guy named demos all of the characters and cities ended up going back to their proper place and time but with one big difference v-0 our version of parallax and the pre flashpoint Superman actually go back to crisis on Infinite Earths in order to change the outcome of the event and I'm sure that many of you guys are probably wondering well what happened what exactly changed we actually don't have any idea because they didn't show it to us but the end result is that now every single world and timeline does exist in DC's mega verse which is kind of like a multi multiverse I know it all sounds really confusing but this was all done so the DC could start a new initiative that they called DC you they wanted to emphasize story over continuity which means screw the continuity writers can now write about whatever they want because now the original crisis was undone and yeah fans hated it so DC swept all of that under the rug and now they kind of just pretend like convergence and DC you never happened but hey let's end things off on a high note [Music] just two years later DC actually made a good crisis called Dark Knight's metal fun fact this book was originally going to be called dark crisis but the new name is very very appropriate so metal is basically just Batman the crisis because this entire thing revolves around him as if DC Comics hasn't already revolved around Batman for like 30 40 50 years okay so remember how I mentioned that Batman was sent hurtling through time during Final Crisis well that attracted the attention of a dark god named barbados he lives in a dark parallel to the multiverse called the dark multiverse oh and if you're wondering if this is related to the antimatter universe the already established dark parallel to the multiverse no they are totally separate things anyway over the course of the post flashpoint continuity Batman has been exposed to various special metals with mystical properties it turns out that all of this was actually orchestrated by Barbados because once Batman touches the final metal Barbados can you him as a portal to escape the dark multiverse into the regular multiverse and that final medals name is bat mein iam this whole plan actually ended up happening and Barbados arrives with a group of his henchmen called the Dark Knights they're a bunch of murderous Bruce Wayne's from throughout the Dark multiverse that are insanely powerful and they're led by the Batman who laughs he's Batman but also the Joker this book is full of some crazy stuff like a Justice League Voltron mech messages that are sent through time and space by the power of rock music and so much more pure dumb fine I'm especially a fan of how issue number one depicts the Justice League in the form of that iconic hand gesture at the end of the day the Justice League dons armor made from element X which is that metal of pure possibility that I mentioned earlier and uses it to kick the collective asses of Barbados and the Dark Knights and they have a sick party at Wayne Manor afterwards and hey that's everything that is every single one of the crises over at DC Comics at least for now because there's been word bubbling about a brand new crisis on the horizon but at the time of this recording it's still shrouded in mystery that's all I've got for today and like I said these were all hyper cut-down in order to fit in time so there are plenty of details that I did not talk about if you'd like me to cover any of these events in greater detail then be sure to let me know down there in the comments below but anyway I hope you learned at least a little something new and hopefully I'll see you next time

Channel: Comic Drake

Views: 550,618

Keywords: ComicDrake, Comic Drake, Comics, Comic Books, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Final Crisis, Flashpoint, Convergence, Zero Hour, DC Comics, dc universe, comics explained, Comicstorian, Arrow, The Flash, superboy prime, dc crisis, dark nights metal, the batman who laughs, infinite crisis, new 52, dc rebirth, justice league

Id: A4KOHFCz5gA

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019