Flash War Introduced A New Type of Crisis to the DC Universe

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for The Flash #50 by Joshua Williamson, Howard Porter, Hi-Fi and Steve Wands, on sale now.

“Crisis” is a word that should strike fear not just in the heart of any hero of the DC Universe, but also any fan of DC Comics. The word has come to symbolise the biggest of stories, the most deadliest of stakes and the most dangerous of enemies. Usually, but not always, with some sort of multiversal twist which serves as a soft-reset for the current continuity, a Crisis is the sort of all-hands-on deck mega event that only DC Comics can do with its superhero universe and it’s a word that isn’t thrown around lightly.

However, this week’s The Flash #50 drops that very word in a cliffhanger which knows exactly what it’s doing, suggesting a very different kind of Crisis than one we’ve ever known before… a single person with a massive grudge against The Flash and his family.

A Man Named “Crisis”

As a result of the events of “Flash War” and the battle in Hypertime between Barry Allen, Wally West and Hunter Zolomon, time travel is in disarray and the twenty-fifth century as we know it has began to break down. That’s the trouble with Hypertime, your reality can always be supplanted by a more convenient one at a moment’s notice.

Luckily, the Renegades — future Reverse Flash hunters with powers modeled after the Rogues of the twenty-first century — survived the timeline reboot, but not for long. With the temporal upheaval comes collateral damage, which causes the future’s incarnation of Iron Heights to bust open and free its only inmate, who promptly erases the Renagades from the timeline and swears vengeance on The Flashes for “what they did to [him]”

The final shot of The Flash #50 lingers on the destroyed cell door, which features the label “Inmate: Crisis” suggesting that’s the name or at least designation of this character, plus a strange design that looks like worlds overlapping with each other, backed by a roman numeral for the number two. The phrase “Worlds will live. Worlds will die.” is heavily associated with the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, as is the image of worlds overlapping, merging and splitting apart, suggesting that this character may come to be the catalyst for a new Crisis scale event.

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A History of Crisis

The first “Crisis” event in DC Comics predates Crisis on Infinite Earths by several decades and marked the beginning of an annual tradition of crossovers. “Crisis on Earth-One” took place in 1963’s Justice League of America #21 with its second part “Crisis on Earth-Two” coming a month later in #22. The story saw the first meeting of the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America, serving as a sequel to “The Flash of Two Worlds” and kickstarting the return of the fan-favorite Golden Age team. “Crisis on Earth-Three” took place a year later, in which the two teams met the evil Crime Syndicate of America” and later stories to bear the Crisis name introduced the Nazi-occupied Earth-X, the world of Captain Marvel in Earth-S and even a crossover with “our world” known as Earth-Prime.

Crisis On Infinite Earths was a way not only for DC Comics to celebrate fifty years of publishing, but to bring together its confusing and disparate multiverse into a single cohesive shared universe. It introduced the cosmic villain known as The Anti-Monitor who was travelling the Multiverse and wiping out worlds and by the time it was over, there were five worlds left: Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-Four (home to the Charlton characters such as The Question and Blue Beetle), Earth-X and Earth-S, which were merged into a new, singular world with a shared history.

Later stories to use the Crisis name have either attempted to fix some of the continuity problems caused by the original — such as Zero Hour: Crisis In Time — or served as a throwback to those original stories — such as the “Crisis Times Five” storyline in JLA. A key part of modern stories dubbed Crisis is usually some sort of drastic change to continuity and they serve as a soft reset for the DC Universe, such as Infinite Crisis which briefly recreated the infinite Multiverse only to coalesce those worlds into the newly dubbed “New Earth”.

Occasionally, the word “Crisis” is used to convey scope without being the same sort of soft reset as Infinite Crisis; Identity Crisis makes changes to continuity, but in the form of retcons to the past that supposedly always happened and Final Crisis has a multiversal scope, but doesn’t really change anything about the history of the DC Universe. The upcoming Heroes In Crisis miniseries from Tom King and Clay Mann seems to fit into this category of Crisis as a more personal look into the lives and traumas of DC characters, but these new developments in The Flash #50 suggest that there are more Crisis related stories coming down the pipeline.

There’s also Doomsday Clock, which isn’t a Crisis in name but feels like it’s brewing to have Crisis-level ramifications. While we haven’t seen much of it yet, a big selling point for the series is the eventual confrontation between Superman and Doctor Manhattan, and the supposed reveal of what was done to the timeline which screwed everything up. The series is a crossover between two worlds under DC’s ownership and seems to be hinting at the return of both the Justice Society of America and the Legion of Super-Heroes too along the way, making Doomsday Clock somewhat of an unofficial Crisis-level event.

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Who Is Crisis?

So, we have a new character with the name or designation “Crisis” that is able to erase the Renegades from their own timeline with just a thought, and who uses ominous “Worlds will live. Worlds will die.” phrase associated with Crisis on Infinite Earths.

The obvious guess is The Anti-Monitor, the villain who kicked destroyed the infinite multiverse over thirty years ago. The recent return of the infinite multiverse at the conclusion of Dark Nights: Metal is something the Anti-Monitor wouldn’t be happy about, but the desire for vengeance against the Flash Family seems almost beneath his notice and he was only recently defeated in Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok’s “Darkseid War” storyline in Justice League.

Based on the character’s build, it looks like it could possibly be Darkseid but why designate him “Crisis” in Iron Heights. A more plausible suggestion could be Monarch, the villain of Zero Hour, who would have the power to wipe away the Renegades in the blink of an eye. A personal pick would be Superboy Prime, who has reason to hate the Flash family and has had access to the powers of the Time Trapper before, but the build doesn’t look quite right for him.

Whomever it is, the DC Universe isn’t ready for another Crisis — Metron said as much during “Darkseid War”, the fabric of the DC Universe literally can’t sustain another Crisis — but now there’s a being loose in the future so powerful and destructive he’s likened to a one man Crisis, and that means bad things for the Flash Family when he eventually makes his way to the present day.