Story
The story begins when characters from alternate realities such as Alpha Centurion, an alternate version of Batgirl, and Triumph suddenly started appearing in the main DC Universe, to everybody's confusion; this happens because time is being somehow "compressed." Then a wave of "nothingness" is seen moving from the end of time to its beginning, erasing entire historical ages in the process (an effect similar to the anti-matter wave that destroyed many universes in Crisis on Infinite Earths).
The apparent villain of the story presented in the miniseries was a character named Extant, formerly Hawk of the duo Hawk and Dove (and a onetime Teen Titan). Extant had acquired temporal powers, using them to unravel the DC Universe's timeline. In a confrontation with members of the Justice Society of America, Extant aged several of them (removing the effect that had kept these heroes of the 1940s vital into the 1990s), leaving them either feeble or dead. However, the true power behind the destruction of the universe — caused by temporal rifts of entropy — turned out to be Hal Jordan, who had been widely regarded as the most distinguished Green Lantern in history. Calling himself Parallax, Jordan had gone insane, and was now trying to remake the universe, undoing the events which had caused his breakdown and his own murderous actions following it. The collective efforts of the other superheroes managed to stop Jordan/Parallax from imposing his vision of a new universe, and the timeline was recreated anew, albeit with subtle differences compared to the previous one, after the young hero Damage, with help from the other heroes, triggered a new Big Bang. Jordan survived Green Arrow shooting an arrow into his heart though.
This "blanking out/recreation" of the DC Universe was reflected in many of the tie-in issues; near the end of several of the tie-ins, the world began to disappear, and the last page of the book (or in some cases, several pages) had been left blank.
Read more about this topic: Zero Hour: Crisis In Time
Famous quotes containing the word story:
“Today one does not hear much about him.... The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“I know not whether the remark is to our honour or otherwise, that lessons of wisdom have never such power over us, as when they are wrought into the heart, through the ground-work of a story which engages the passions: Is it that we are like iron, and must first be heated before we can be wrought upon?”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)