![]() ![]() The DC Universe typically has its comic books set in fictional cities, such as the cities of Gotham City (based upon New York City, New Jersey and Chicago) and Metropolis (based in part upon Toronto, though like Gotham, it also serves as a New York City analog in the comics). Many fictional countries, such as Qurac, Vlatava, and Zandia, exist in it. ![]() ![]() The basic concept of the DC Universe is that it is supposed to be just like the real world, but with super-heroes (and super-villains) existing on it. In 2011, DC merged DCU, Vertigo, and Mindstorm in an event called Flashpoint. Some of these worlds were quite similar to Elseworlds tales, some a direct parallel to Pre-Crisis worlds like Earth-Two and Earth-S. As later revealed in the pages of 52, a new Multiverse was created, consisting of 52 parallel universes. The Infinite Crisis event (2005-2006) remade the DC Universe yet again, with the changes made currently being determined. The entire process was parodied in Alan Moore's meta-comic, "Supreme: Story of the Year". In 1998, The Kingdom reintroduced a variant of the old Multiverse concept called Hypertime which essentially allows for alternate versions of characters and worlds again. For example, one told the story of Bruce Wayne as a Green Lantern, another presented Kal-El as if he'd lived in the time of the American Civil War. ![]() Meanwhile, DC has published occasional stories called " Elseworlds", which often presented alternate versions of their characters. The Zero Hour limited series (1994) gave them an opportunity to revise timelines and rewrite the DC Universe history.Īs a result, almost once per decade since the 1980s, the DC Universe experiences a major crisis that allows any number of changes from new versions of characters to appear to a whole reboot of the universe, restarting nominally all the characters into a new and modernized version of their lives. Crisis also had failed to establish a coherent future history for the DC Universe, with conflicting versions of the future. However, this arrangement removed the mechanism DC had been using to deal with the passage of time in the real world without having the characters age in the comics. To address this, they published the cross-universe miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, which merged universes and characters, reducing the Multiverse to a single DC Universe with a single history. Although retcons were used as a way to explain apparent inconsistencies in stories written, editors at DC came to consider the varied continuity of multiple Earths too difficult to keep track of, and feared that it was an obstacle to accessibility for new readers. In order to continue publishing stories of its most popular characters, maintaining the status quo became necessary. Over the years, as the number of titles published increased and the volume of past stories accumulated, it became increasingly difficult to maintain internal consistency. The writers gave designations such as " Earth-One", " Earth-Two", and so forth, to certain universes, designations which at times were also used by the characters themselves. In addition to allowing the conflicting stories to "co-exist", it allowed the differing versions of characters to meet, and even team up to combat cross-universe threats. To explain this, they introduced the idea of the Multiverse in Flash #123 (1961) where the Silver Age Flash met his Golden Age counterpart. Similarly, they had characters such as Batman whose early adventures set in the 1940s could not easily be reconciled with stories featuring a still-youthful man in the 1970s. For example, they introduced new versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman and many others in the late 1950s, with similar powers but different names and personal histories. Over the course of its publishing history, DC has introduced different versions of its characters, sometimes presenting them as if the earlier version had never existed. However, the majority of National/DC's publications continued to be written with little regard of maintaining continuity with each other for the first few decades. The fact that DC Comics Characters co-existed in the same world was first established in All-Star Comics #3 (1940) where several superheroes (who starred in separate stories in the series up to that point) met each other, and soon founded the superhero team, the Justice Society of America. The concept of a shared universe was originally pioneered by DC Comics (originally known as National Periodical Publications) and in particular by writer Gardner Fox. ![]()
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