Crisis On Infinite Earths

Rarely can you point to the moment when everything changes, but when you can, you need to pay attention. When it was coming out monthly, we all knew that Crisis on Infinite Earths was changing the way that comics worked, and that nothing would ever be the same. When it's collected, the story of Crisis is easily the most important of all the 1980s comic events. The DC Universe had been dealing with dozens of Earths to allow it to tell a series of different stories that both did and didn't connect. Crisis was launched to help collapse them all into one single storyline, where a reader could easily follow the entirety of the DC within a single timestream. It didn't last forever, but it felt like it would when it was all over. There were far-reaching repercussions to Crisis – significant characters died, others were re-imagined, and some of the most impressive science fiction storytelling ever attempted. With the powerful writing of Marv Wolfman and the undeniably perfect penciling of George Perez, it is the first truly great comics universe cross-over. Why it's on the list: The DC Universe can only truly be divided into two periods: before Crisis, and after.