What if Crisis on Infinite Earths never happened? by Juan "Mr. Anonymous" Garcia

Introduction

For a moment, he stirred and remembered.

He caught a glimpse of a great fortress
in the frozen wastelands of the north.
Of a lost paradise on a distant world.

He saw a time when he had no blood on his hands,
and never would.
When the violence of hatred and mistrust,
the temptation of moral compromise,
could no more overcome him
than a droplet of water could conquer the sun.

But then the memory slipped away
like the dream it was.

"Ode to a Dream" by Tor Kinlok, frontispiece to the Kingdom Come novel

Hi everyone. I'm Mr. Anonymous and I'm here to write a DC Comics fanfic because I like DC Comics, I really do. I have always enjoyed its superheroes yet while the idea of Superman and his fellow Justice League heroes appeal to me there are some stories in which that idea is not always well expressed. Such stories aren't told for the sake of malice, far from it; even the best comics' writer has the occasional bad day. After all, as Paul Levitz wrote in the introduction to Huntress: Dark Knight Daughter, he is fully aware that the stories he wrote in his earliest days—stories retold in Huntress, whose titular character he created—might not have been perfect, but he tried his best and for that, he hopes the reader can forgive him any failings. I know I do.

Nevertheless, that bad stories do occasionally happen is something that I will not dispute and so in the name of happy mental exercise, I will ask what if things had been a little different? What if in the past few decades, DC Comics had taken the path less traveled? We will in effect ask, "What if the Crisis on Infinite Earths never happened?"

Written in 1985 to coincide with its fiftieth anniversary, Crisis on Infinite Earths is the single biggest DC story of all times. Even now, decades later, its history is divided into pre-Crisis and post-Crisis. The event not only removed the multiverse concept that had been central to DC Comics up until then, it also launched a tide of revisionism that led to character after character being rewritten. Such drastic changes left long time readers stunned to learn that not only did the characters they so loved no longer existed but had never existed. There was also no overall plan to coordinate things which lead to glaring contradictions. For example, in 1987 writer/artist George Perez reintroduced Wonder Woman as a brand new heroine at the same time her little sister Wonder Girl was "left on the books;" where then did Wonder Girl come from without Wonder Woman to be her big sister? The headaches lasted for years.

What if, then, Crisis on Infinite Earths never happened? Now, I am not going to ask what if Crisis never happened from an in-continuity perspective. I won't ask how pre-Crisis Superman would fare against Doomsday. No, what I am asking is what if there had only ever been a natural progression and not an abrupt shift. What if DC had opted for soft reboots only and only allowed changes that could fit within established continuity? It could have happened. When Batman was rebooted in the wake of Crisis, writers took advantage of the event to remove certain events but the bulk of his pre-Crisis adventures, though modified, remained intact.

I've decided to examine this idea in a metafictional context: it is 1986 and as the last issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths is hitting the stands, various writers and artists meet to discuss the future of the DC Universe. Would this happen? Do DC's writers work like that; check in daily as if it were a nine-to-five job? Maybe not, but if not, let us suspend disbelief and imagine what could have been. Let us imagine if DC Comics had relaunched its superheroes without "the trend of sweeping aside the work done by those who came immediately before". What if there had been "an honest attempt to synthesize the best of all previous eras"? What if the "'cosmic reset' notion [had] been replaced by a policy of 'include and transcend' with regard to past continuity"?

This story is split into nine parts, this introduction, the prologue, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Justice League, DC Universe as a whole, the epilogue, and the conclusion. It borrows from a vast multiplicity of sources and my personal ideas of how pre-Crisis elements could have been integrated into the post-Crisis era from the beginning. I hope you like. ;)

Author's Notes: This entire story was originally plotted out and this introduction written in mid to late 2010, well before DC decided to reboot its entire line with Flashpoint and the new 52. This total reboot stands in stark contrast to the patchwork of reboots that happened after 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths where some things remained the same (Green Lantern) but other things were changed drastically (Wonder Woman). Therefore, the entire purpose of this metafiction is itself "retconned" as it was supposed to ask what a softly retconned DC universe might have been like and Flashpoint and the 52, instead of modifying that Universe, completely ignore said Universe that I ask would have been like if it had been softly retconned.

In fact, it is worth noting that the post-Crisis DC Universe was retconned to a degree with 2005's Infinite Crisis which undid much of The Crisis on Infinite Earths by restoring various pre-Crisis events to continuity to create a world not unlike the world I imagine in my story… before, of course, Flashpoint and the 52 did away with everything.

From Crisis on Infinite Earths, to Infinite Crisis, to Flashpoint , to the new 52 (and with Zero Hour in between)… the retcon of a retcon of a retcon.

But hey, that's DC for you! ^_^