After diving into the multiversal oddities of Justice League Incarnate last week—and not realizing it was a prequel book to the next big event—I dug deeper into my backlog. From its depths, I pulled the event at the end of that multiversal journey: Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths by Joshua Williamson, Daniel Sampere, Alejandro Sánchez, Daniel Henriques, Danny Miki, Jack Herbert, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Cam Smith, Rafa Sandoval, Alex Guimarães, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Matt Hermes, and Tom Napolitano.

Dark Crisis is an Event Book, the first major Crisis of the decade, and feels like it from the onset as the Justice League essentially die in the opening page. Well, “die” in comic terms—they’re trapped in inescapable mental prisons that powers the villain Pariah’s cosmic engine, but that it’s own thing. But, after the events of Justice League Incarnate, the Great Darkness is beginning to seep into the Multiverse and, with the Justice League’s “death,” every f-tier villain is coming out to try to lay claim to the world. But it’s only Deathstroke’s own army of villains that has any success as he’s able to call upon the Great Darkness to pull more and more people under his influence. And all the while, a league of legacy heroes does what they can to keep the world from tipping into complete chaos before the final fight of the Multiverse pushes its way onto Earth-0. 

At the core of this story, though, is the conflict and history between Dick Grayson and Slade Wilson. The two have been at each other’s throats since the latter’s inception in 1980 and we’ve seen this play out over the past forty years with one of the most recognizable versions of this happening in theTeen Titans animated series in the early 2000s. And it’s at that point that Dark Crisis feels like it’s an event for the people who grew up on the DC animated series. While it’s coming nearly twenty years after the Teen Titans series, it’s coming right on time for the people who had grown up watching it to become more curious about these characters from their childhood. To see that character conflict play out on such a grand scale makes that original conflict feel all the more significant.

Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths is a massive event that pulls on all types of continuity, but it’s also an event that’s helped to establish the infinite universes within the DC Universe again. And it’s in these infinite universes that more and more stories can be told that can act as jumping-on points for those readers that were little kids watching Teen Titans and Justice League Unlimited reruns on Cartoon Network. It took around twenty years for DC to get to this point after those series had been canceled and that weirdly dark era of the New-52 faded, but they’ve finally found a way to potentially get those kids into comics. 

Get excited. Get In.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.