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One of the key aspects of theModern Age of Comic Books was that it was the beginning of bigevents. In 1984,Marvel Comics debuted the first largecrossover,Secret Wars, a storyline featuring the company's most prolificsuperheroes, which overlapped into a 12-issuelimited series and many monthly comic books. A year later,DC Comics introduced its first large-scale crossover,Crisis on Infinite Earths, which had long-term effects on the "DC Universe"continuity.
In the early and mid-1990s, big events were regularly published by Marvel and DC, often leading to extra publicity and sales. These events helped fend-off competition fromImage Comics, and such events were more likely to become "collector's items." Some events, such as DC's "Zero Hour" and Marvel's "Onslaught saga" spanned a publisher's entire line while others only affected a "family" of interrelated titles. TheX-Men andBatman franchises featured crossovers almost annually.
Some of the most significant mid-1990s events, such asSpider-Man's "Clone Saga,"Batman's "Batman: Knightfall" and particularly, "The Death of Superman" caused dramatic changes to long-running characters and received coverage in the mainstream media.
These events led to significant sales boosts and publicity, but many fans began to criticize them as excessive and lacking compelling storytelling. They also complained that monthly series had become inaccessible because one had to follow a number of comics to understand the full storyline. By the end of the 1990s, the number of large crossovers decreased, but they were still launched sporadically.
Starting in the early 1960s,DC Comics maintained some aspects of itscontinuity through the use of amultiverse system of parallel Earths. A cosmic event in the 1985limited seriesCrisis on Infinite Earths merged all of these realities and their respective characters into one universe, allowing writers to rewrite from scratch such long-running characters asBatman,Superman andWonder Woman and also as an attempt at simplifying theDC Universe. In some ways, this helped revitalize DC's characters, though some fans debated whether such changes were necessary or beneficial.
SinceCrisis, the trend of suchretconning/revamping of characters' histories has increased in superhero comics, as has such large-scalecrossover events. Even DC found cause to revamp its universe again (but on a smaller scale) with 1994'sZero Hour: Crisis in Time! storyline. In the late 1990s, the concept ofHypertime was introduced, which stated that all comics published by DC (both before and afterCrisis on Infinite Earths) were canon and had taken place at some point in the multiverse.
In 2005, theInfinite Crisis series revived the idea of a multiverse. Following the events ofInfinite Crisis,Superman,Batman andWonder Woman have temporarily retired their costumed identities. The remaining heroes attend a memorial forSuperboy after he is killed bySuperboy-Prime. Time travelerBooster Gold attends the memorial, but when Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman do not arrive, the change in history makes his robot sidekick Skeets malfunction. This results in Skeets reporting incorrect historical data. Booster and Skeets search time travelerRip Hunter's bunker for answers, but find it littered with scrawled notes.
The series continues, exploring many of the changes wrought by the events ofInfinite Crisis, introducing new characters, killing off old ones, and putting others in new situations. The series concludes when Hunter reveals that a new multiverse exists, consisting of exactly 52 universes. The new multiverse is temporarily threatened byMister Mind, who has developed the ability to travel to each universe and "eat" portions of it, altering its history. Each new universe was initially identical to New Earth, but Mind's rampage altered the history of each universe, altering them all and restoring theDC Multiverse. Once Mind is stopped, it is revealed that newMonitors exist for each of the new universes, making 52 monitors in all.
In 1986, DC published two groundbreakinglimited series:Watchmen by a British creative team led by writerAlan Moore and artistDave Gibbons andBatman: The Dark Knight Returns byFrank Miller. The Watchmen helped usher in the era ofanti-heroes. It helped gather respect for the medium and set the bar for subsequent writers.
The Dark Knight Returns is a 1986 miniseries set in an alternate version of the 21st century, where Bruce Wayne has retired as Batman and have run amok in the absence of superheroes. However, Wayne is forced to become Batman again after he has an encounter with the Mutant gang andHarvey Dent (Two-Face) returns to crime despite years of psychological and cosmetic rehabilitation.
DC vs. Marvel is a 1997 comic book mini-series by DC Comics and Marvel. The plot was that two "Brothers" personify the universes that comics fans know as DC and Marvel. After becoming aware of the other's existence, the brothers challenge each other to a series of duels involving each universe's respective superheroes.
"Civil War" is a 2006 Marvel Comics storyline where the government passes theSuperhuman Registration Act following a battle among theNew Warriors and a group of villains (Nitro,Cobalt Man,Speedfreek, andColdheart) that results inStamford, Connecticut being decimated and most of the New Warriors killed. The act requires any person in the United States with superhuman abilities to register with the federal government and receive proper training. Those who sign also have the option of working forS.H.I.E.L.D., earning a salary and benefits such as those earned by other American civil servants. Characters within the superhuman community in the Marvel Universe split into two groups: one advocating registration as a responsible obligation, and the other opposing the law on the grounds that it violates privacy rights.
DC/Marvel
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