Any comics fan will tell you: DC has a reputation for rebooting its line often. With its headline-grabbing "New 52" initiative as a recent example, the company seems to enjoy starting its stories from the beginning and discarding previously established continuity. Critics point to the company’s massive, universe-shattering crossover epics as prime examples: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, and most recently Flashpoint, which ushered in that controversial New 52 era. This happens so much, many readers now treat the next reboot as inevitable.

It may come as a surprise, then, to hear the DC Universe (DCU) has never been rebooted. While the company has absolutely tweaked its continuity, there's never been a full reboot on the entire universe. Not once. Geoff Johns, DC’s chief creative officer, recently remarked that the DCU has “an umbilical cord that goes all the way back to "Action Comics" #1, that connects the whole DC Universe." And that wasn’t just a catchy marketing phrase: it’s a fact.

This summer as DC rolled out its latest “Rebirth” line, which purports to restore lost connections to the past, it’s a good time to dive into the history of DC’s continuity and see how accurate Johns' remarks are. Has it really been one big story all along?

Before we dive in, it's important to understand the thought experiment known as the Ship of Theseus. Theseus wants to keep his ship in top condition. Whenever a plank rots, he replaces it. Once all the ship’s planks have been replaced, is it the same ship?

While this is a complex philosophical issue deserving its own discussion, for our purposes it’s fair to conclude, at least colloquially, it is the same ship. At each stage it remained the same ship as before. This is the definition of “the same” we use in everyday life. I’m the same person as when I was a kid, even though human cells are constantly dying and being replaced, like the Ship’s planks. Some might argue we’re not the same person, but by any colloquial, every-day definition we are. By extension, so is the ship and so is the DCU as we’ll see.







DC Comics

Margaret K. McElderry

The DC Universe

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the story that would become the DCU began. One might point to Action Comics #1, but there were earlier stories later revealed as parts of that universe.

Either way, Superman began his adventures in 1938, and Batman followed soon after. In DC and its sister company (called All-American Publications before the two eventually merged), various heroes began their careers and soon had monthly meetings to share their stories, as seen in All-Star Comics.

This was the Justice Society of America. The crossover book, starting in 1940, was the first proof that these heroes inhabited the same world. Superman and Batman were mentioned at the first meeting confirming they were equal denizens of the nascent DCU.

These heroes would continue having adventures throughout the “Golden Age” of comics, but eventually the industry took a down-turn and most of these superhero comics died off. The Flash, Green Lantern, the Sandman, Hawkman, the Spectre, and more were canceled at the time.

Not everyone was finished, though: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman survived. The few superheroes in the company now focused on westerns, World War II stories, and weird mysteries.

The Silver Age Reboot

In the 1950s, DC’s new editor, Julius Schwartz, began bringing back some of the old heroes and revamping them for a new era. This was perhaps the company's first massive reboot. The Flash, for example, was no longer college football player Jay Garrick; now he was police scientist Barry Allen.

Green Lantern received an even heavier overhaul: previously an Aladdin take-off with a magic lamp, the new Lantern was a space-cop empowered by aliens known as the Guardians of the Universe. Other characters received similar, sci-fi forward reboots, too.

But the company's core characters, Superman and Batman, never stopped. These were the same guys who’d worked with the Justice Society; their adventures had proceeded continuously since the inception. They hadn’t been rebooted.

Instead, DC's marquee dup began teaming up with the new generation of heroes, forming the Justice League of America. They made no reference to their Golden Age companions. If their world was the Ship of Theseus, multiple planks had been removed and replaced, but the ship as a whole sauntered on.

Ret-cons and reconciliations

So, what happened? Had Superman and Batman forgotten their Golden Age team-ups? Those stories had still happened, right?

By all indications in-text, they hadn’t. The new Flash, Barry Allen, was inspired by a comic-book he’d read as a kid—a book which followed Jay Garrick. This made it crystal clear the Golden Age stories were fiction to the new generation.

Terminology Let’s go through some basic terms. These may already be familiar to many regular comic readers, but it’s important to clarify how they’ll be used here. Let’s go through some basic terms. These may already be familiar to many regular comic readers, but it’s important to clarify how they’ll be used here. A reboot is a story starting over. After a reboot, no prior events would be remembered by any of the characters. The 2009 Star Trek movie was a reboot, starting with younger versions of the characters and a new storyline. A ret-con is a change to part of the backstory while continuing the story from its current point. For example, Spider-Man was ret-conned such that he’d met Mary Jane Watson much earlier in his life than originally shown. Total continuity wasn’t lost.

That led to continuity concerns, as readers had recently started caring about continuity. Thus, in one memorable issue of The Flash, Barry Allen met Jay Garrick. It was explained that Garrick’s adventures take place in an alternate universe, Earth-Two.

DC expanded on this, establishing that other Golden Age characters also existed on Earth-Two. Besides the old Justice Society, even Golden Age versions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman existed there.

This strategy provided a neat explanation of details that had been ret-conned over the years. Superman, for example, originally worked for the Daily Star but now worked at the Daily Planet without explanation. His editor, likewise, had changed from George Taylor to Perry White while being the same person by all indications. According to Golden Age stories, young Clark hadn’t become Superman until adulthood, but in Silver Age comics, he’d begun in childhood as Superboy.

Later, it was revealed that the Earth-Two Superman had worked for the Daily Star; “our” Superman never did. Readers now had two neat boxes in which to put these stories that fit together less and less.

Eventually, new back-up features even revealed what happened to these Golden Age heroes later in their lives. Earth-Two Superman settled down with Lois, while Batman married Catwoman, had a daughter, and died. Wonder Woman also married and had a daughter.

Ultimately, the Earth-Two explanation wasn’t quite so neat upon closer examination. When, exactly, was the cutoff point? If one reads the Superman or Batman stories from their start into the 1960s, there’s no clear indication where Earth-Two ends and Earth-One begins. The stories followed continuously, occasionally referencing each other.

Worse, the overt differences between the two universes had slowly piled up one at a time. Shrewd fans might have looked to the first mention of the Daily Planet as clear evidence that the stories were now taking place on Earth-One, except the paper took that name as early as 1940, well before the editor’s name had changed. There’s simply no way to tell which is which, because the comics had been written with one continuity as one story.

So which Superman, the Earth-One or -Two version, was the true heir to Action Comics #1? One might argue both were in different ways. One had undergone more retroactive changes, but both were the result of a continuous chain of events leading back to that issue. It was as if the river of Superman’s life had diverged.

But from another perspective, there’s a clear way to distinguish. It's a wrinkle to the Ship of Theseus problem: what if someone collected the planks as they were removed from the ship and built a new, identical ship? Which ship was truly the original? In this case, Earth-One was the original that had been modified as planks were removed, while Earth-Two was the copy made from pieces discarded along the way.

Today it’s difficult to discuss this divergence without referring to them as “original” and “copy,” and that colloquial usage is not invalid. Even though the copy is made from the same pieces, it’s not a continuation of the same ship but a reconstruction.

(Clearly this is a complicated question with multiple answers—if you define “the same” to mean “made of the same pieces,” then the new ship is the original. I’m following the everyday definition of “the same” discussed earlier).

Either way, in 1985 DC decided to rectify the situation by wiping the slate clean with another reboot.