How Did People Recall the Events of Crisis on Infinite Earths?

Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me. Today, we reveal how the DC Universe remembered the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths post-Crisis on Infinite Earths!

It's funny, Crisis on Infinite Earths is one of the most famous comic book storylines of all-time. However, oddly enough, the very nature of the storyline led it to be rarely even referenced until the events of Infinite Crisis brought it to the forefront. Therefore, it is fascinating to see how people remember the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths after Crisis on Infinite Earths ended with the Multiverse being combined into a single reality.

Crisis on Infinite Earths was a 12-part series by Marv Wolfman, George Perez, Dick Giordano and Jerry Ordway that turned DC's Multiverse into one single reality.

The story had four major events of note in it.

First off, there was the destruction of most of the worlds of the Multiverse, leaving just five worlds left protected by the Monitor, the good equivalent of the Anti-Monitor, the jerk who wanted to destroy all of reality so that he could rule over the nothingness of it all...

Once we got down to just five worlds, the Anti-Monitor tried two major attempts to destroy the five worlds before they could be merged into one single world that would be strong enough to fend off Anti-Monitor's machinations.

The first time around, he built a sort of world-crushing device that would have merged the worlds before they were ready and would have just crushed the five worlds into each other. This was stopped by Supergirl, who died in the process...

Next up, Anti-Monitor made up this big anti-matter cannon that was powerful enough to destroy the remaining worlds. The Flash, Barry Allen, sacrificed his life to stop this cannon and save the remaining worlds...

Okay, so the worlds successfully merged into a single world. This was not enough to stop the Anti-Monitor, as he just showed up on this world with a bunch of these evil shadow demons at his command...

He was ready to destroy the world just due to him being pissed off at this point...

The heroes fought back...

And ultimately, they were able to destroy him (with the guy who delivered the final blow, the Superman of Earth-2, going into a pocket dimension with his wife, Earth-2 Lois Lane plus the Alexander Luthor and Superboy of Earth-Prime)...

The problem, of course, is that once the superheroes saved the day and destroyed the Anti-Monitor, there was now one merged Earth and this merged Earth had a brand-new continuity. Wonder Woman, for instance, was not even in existence until "modern times" and there was no such thing as Earth-1, Earth-2, etc. Therefore, the question became "What, then, did everyone remember of the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths?" as the whole concept of the event, as noted above, was that it erased the previous history of the DC Universe.

Obviously, if your deal is to erase the Multiverse, you're not going to have heroes remember the fact that a Multiverse USED to exist but doesn't anymore. So DC mostly avoided showing too much of the events of Crisis period. The notable exception was the Psycho Pirate, the villain who aided the Anti-Monitor in his mission and thus the only person on Earth who absolutely remembered the events of Crisis as they actually occurred. Otherwise, Crisis was only mentioned obliquely for the most part for years until finally Infinite Crisis revealed the truth.

So how, then, did the superheros recall Crisis after Crisis? Read on to find out!

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The first major acknowledgement of the events of Crisis, in the sense that they actually showed the actual events of Crisis in the Post-Crisis continuity, was in Secret Origins Annual #2 from 1988. Robert Loren Fleming and Carmine Infantino showed Barry Allen strive to take over the world from the Anti-Monitor's anti-matter cannon....

This story is famous for another reason, but I'll address that aspect of it in another column in the future. For now, let it remain as an example of how the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths happened Post-Crisis.

The next, most notable example, would be Flash #150 (by Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn, Paul Pelletier and Vince Russell), which showed the basic set-up of Crisis in the Post-Crisis universe in a time-travel story where Barry Allen is killed in the past before he could sacrifice himself in Crisis, so Wally West goes back in time and tries to win Crisis without Barry to no avail, but reveals how he (Wally) and the other heroes recall the events of Crisis. Essentially, it was now the case of the Anti-Monitor trying to wipe their universe out and Barry just destroyed an anti-matter cannon of the Anti-Monitor before the heroes teamed up to destroy the Anti-Monitor...