Crisis (DC Comics)
A crisis in the DC Universe is an event with potentially great consequences, often involving multiple universes and sometimes even threatening their existence.
From 1963 to 1985 the term "crisis" was used to describe the annual events in which the Justice League of America of Earth-One and the Justice Society of America of Earth-Two met and worked together, usually in an incident involving one or more of the parallel worlds of the DC Multiverse. This usage culminated in 1985's year-long Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which the Multiverse was eliminated. After several years of disuse, the term "crisis" was applied to several events with either "universal" stakes or substantial character consequences, such as Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis.
In the two decades after 1985, "Crisis" by itself came to refer specifically to Crisis on Infinite Earths, especially when used in house pre-Crisis and post-Crisis.
Characters in the DC Universe sometimes use the term "crisis" in the same sense, referring either to any great threat, or as "the Crisis" in reference to the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, either as they happened or as they were commonly remembered in the revised history after the fact.
With the publication of Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, and the announcement of Final Crisis, the use of the term within the DC Universe has shifted. The Crisis on Infinite Earths is sometimes referred to as "the first Crisis". The Infinite Crisis has occasionally been referred to as simply "the crisis", and a character from the 31st century called it "the middle Crisis"
Read more about Crisis (DC Comics): "Flash of Two Worlds", "Crisis On Earth-One!" and "Crisis On Earth-Two!", "Crisis On Earth-Three!", "Crisis On Earth-A!", "Crisis Between Earth-One and Earth-Two!", "The Super-Crisis That Struck Earth-Two!" and "The Negative-Crisis On Earths One-Two!", Undeclared Crises, "Crisis On Earth-X!", "Crisis in Eternity!", "Crisis On Earth-S!", and "Crisis in Tomorrow!", "Crisis in The 30th Century!" and "Crisis in Triplicate!", "Crisis From Yesterday" and "Crisis From Tomorrow", "Crisis Above Earth-One", "Crisis On New Genesis", "Crisis Between Two Earths", and "Crisis On Apokolips", "Countdown To Crisis" and "Crisis in Limbo", "Crisis On Earth-Prime", "Crisis in The Thunderbolt Dimension", "Family Crisis", Crisis On Infinite Earths, "Last Crisis On Earth-Two", and "The Final Crisis", "A Second Crisis", Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, "Crisis Times Five", Identity Crisis, Countdown To Infinite Crisis, Crisis of Conscience, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Collections
Famous quotes containing the word crisis:
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)