Summary: Golden Age, Pre-Crisis, Post-Crisis, New 52, DC Rebirth. We take a look at the eras of the DC Universe.<br> Pre-Crisis, Post-Crisis, New Fifty-Two. DC Rebirth. What do these terms mean for the DC Universe? We’ll talk all about it straight ahead.<br> <br> Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.<br> Oftentimes these terms that I mentioned at the top of the program are thrown out without much explanation. What does it mean if a story is Pre-crisis or Post-crisis, or if it occurred after New Fifty-Two, or if this particular volume I’m reading is marked DC Rebirth? What does it all mean? Well we’ll go ahead and try and break this down into talking about the sort of broad stroke of ends in the DC Universe. And the reason why these particular advances are important is that they really do shape continuity. You might read a Superman story say from 1972 but it doesn’t have any tie-in to what Superman, as currently published by DC, has experienced today. So, when you know the eras you can also know what this particular Superman has experienced, and what is in his canon as opposed to a Superman from a previous era. I should note that this is one way in which DC is different than Marvel: if you take a character in the Marvel Universe, most events that have happened to them in comic books, wherever it was set actually happened unless it was retconned away, and they’ve done quite a bit of that. For example, in the 1950s there was a communism fighting Captain America who was introduced and was introduced as Steve Rogers, and he hung around for just a few issues and then disappeared. Marvel writers in the 1970s didn’t like this idea and so they said that that Captain America wasn’t really Steve Rogers. To be fair, that also answered a problem with continuity because Steve Rogers came out of the ice in 1964 after supposedly being there since World War II. So, if this 1950s Captain America couldn’t have been Steve Rogers, then who was he? So, the retcon tried to fix that and that is the nature of the retcon. DC uses them too, but they’ve also rebooted their universe a few times, so we’ll talk about that.<br> DC began the Golden Age of comics: they had Superman, they had Batman, they had Wonder Woman. In addition to that, through cooperation between All-American Comics and DC Comics we got the first superhero ever, the Justice Society of America, including the Golden Age Flash and Green Lantern. Well the Justice Society came to an end and left Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman as the only characters continuously published from the Golden Age, and that continued until the Flash emerged. The new Silver Age Flash, Barry Allen, was introduced in Showcase Number Four in 1956 and he was the first of the Silver Age superheroes. And there would be the introduction of a new Silver Age Adam, a Silver Age Green Lantern, a Silver Age Hawk man and several other beloved characters. At the same time Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, the characters who had carried over from the Golden Age got kind of a soft reboot. There wasn’t a conclusion, we’re starting Superman all over again, but the age and the years that have been since Superman’s lives occurred and Batman’s began to move forward a bit. Wonder Woman got a brand new origin story that was not tied to World War II, and she met many enemies for the first time that she had fought for years during the Golden Age of comics. And this was to make these heroes be contemporaries and fit in with their new Silver Age colleagues. <br> It would have been easy just to forget the whole Golden Age continuity, but Gardner Fox wrote for the Golden Age DC Comics, and he also wrote for the Silver Age characters and created them. So, he wrote a story called The Flash of Two Worlds which involved Barry Allen accidentally vibrating h...
