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WHEN DC COMICS REVIVED THE FLASH, the
sales figures told the editors they had a hit on their hands.
But the Flash they brought back shared only his name and
speediness with the original Flash of the 1940s, and many fans
who still remembered the other guy kept asking if he would ever
show up in the new, revitalized series.
The funny thing was, the "old" Flash had already
made an appearance -- sort of -- in the new Flash's book. In the
new Flash's very first story (1956's Showcase Comics
#4),
Barry Allen was reading a comic book about the old Flash before
the accident that gave him his own speedy powers. Thus, in one
swoop, editor Julius Schwartz and writer Gardner Fox were able
to explain what inspired Barry to become a superhero and to give
older fans something to chuckle over (the Jay Garrick Flash
hadn't appeared in a comic since his title's cancellation in
1949).
The new Flash was a big hit, but there were still some fans
who wanted to see more of the old Flash. So, in Flash
#123, Fox gave them the team-up they were looking for. While
performing a trick for an audience, the Flash of "our"
world accidentally transports himself into a separate dimension,
one in which his comic-book hero was a real person. Fox
explained it by creating the other-dimensional world called
"Earth-2," a place that was home to all of DC's Golden
Age heroes. When the two Flashes met, they reasoned that Gardner
Fox, the writer of the original Flash comics, must have pierced
the dimensional barrier in his dreams and wrote down what his
mind saw on Earth-2.
Sure, it was a stretch, but it was believable enough for
comic fans, and suddenly all of DC's Golden Age heroes had a new
lease on life. Following the original Flash's re-appearance, the
original versions of the Green Lantern, the Atom, Batman,
Superman, and the rest met their updated Silver Age
counterparts. From there, it was only a hop and skip to the
Justice Society of America and the Justice League of America
teaming up on a regular basis to deal with menaces to both
Earths. The idea of parallel worlds also gave writers the
ability to create other worlds where they could deposit new
heroes and villains, or even imagine totally different versions
of the old heroes.
For more than two decades, it was an idea that held up pretty
well for DC's writers. But by the 1980s, it became clear that
something had to give. The introduction of more and more heroes
into the DC Universe made it difficult for writers and readers
alike to keep track of which hero was on which planet. This,
plus the fact that DC wanted to start fresh with its biggest
characters, led to the mini-series Crisis
on Infinite Earths, DC's attempt to clean house on a
cosmic scale by streamlining its titles into one coherent
universe.
It seems fitting that the book that started DC's
parallel-world development would be the Silver Age Flash's; his
death during the Crisis mini-series was a clear signal to
readers that the old order of things had passed. Of course,
readers in 1962 wouldn't know any of this yet; what they saw
back then was an ingenious way for DC's writers to bring the
company's rich Golden Age heritage into the Silver Age, allowing
both the new and the old to co-exist with each other to the
benefit of both.
By the end of the century, many of the original DC heroes
from the 1940s were still a part of the DC Universe, playing
pivotal roles in several series and acting as mentors to the
generations of heroes that followed in their footsteps
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