After 1973, the world of comic books became familiar with the concept of a massive reset button. That year gave us DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths, a best-seller for DC — famously featuring a crying Superman, holding the broken body of Supergirl. It was both a smart bit of PR to attract new readers and a seismic shift for the industry in that it introduced the idea of narratively rewriting canon on a mass scale. While Marvel Comics beat their competition to the punch in terms of the company-wide crossover event with the original Secret Wars in 1984-1985, the concept of a full universal reboot was unheard of; now, it’s a contentious and long-lasting trope in comics, one that DC has repeated multiple times with Infinite Crisis and DC Rebirth and one that Marvel has imitated with 2015’s take on Secret Wars.
But 15 years ago, in 2011, DC Comics was in a very similar position to the one they were in back in 1981 when writer Marv Wolfman first pitched Crisis on Infinite Earths – their sales were declining, and they were once again tangled up in over a decade of convoluted lore. Crisis on Infinite Earths had solved the problem of the DC Multiverse by folding everything into one “post-Crisis” timeline, and in less than 20 years DC had reversed that decision by introducing 52 finite alternate Earths; naturally, another company-wide reboot seemed like the solution to their issues. The result was 2011’s Flashpoint, a storyline which saw Barry Allen, the second Flash, travel back in time to save his mother – a decision that wreaked havoc on the timeline and birthed the New 52, an immensely controversial reboot that incidentally led to one of the most beloved modern Batman stories.
