For years, the thing that most kept me out of comics, more than the notion of it being for children, was the issue of continuity. It’s hard enough to collect comics as is, but studios force you to not only keep up with a character but drastically alter that character’s origin, life, and mannerisms on the whims of writers and the players at the top who see nothing but green in the potential for overhauls to sell. This places the burden square on the consumer, and it’s probably why DC Comics started slipping to Marvel, whose characters weren’t as old and thus didn’t require updates from old heroes who mostly existed to be World War II propaganda. To fix it, writers initially created two Earths; Earth-One was for the Silver Age heroes, the rebooted, younger versions of the original Golden Age heroes. Those guys were given Earth-Two. And the editors saw that it was good.

This move was a great short term fix, but anyone with a modicum of foresight could have seen the inevitable coming; if another Earth could be created, then why not another? And another? Soon, everyone and his brother had a baker’s dozen of slightly different versions of himself, and only people who had been reading long enough saw all this happen and thus could adjust easier. However, varying origin stories posed an issue to new converts: I want to start with definitive stories, but there is more than one Superman. Do I find each one’s great stories, or do I pick one or two? Is he really dead or is this just some lame copy? So, to sort it out- and make a nice profit in the process- DC hired Marv Wolfman to write a miniseries that would at least try to sort out DC’s glaring continuity issues for their 50th anniversary. The result was Crisis on Infinite Earths.

**spoilers and more after the break**

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