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One of the key aspects of the Modern Age of Comic Books was that it was the beginning of big events. In 1984, Marvel Comics debuted the first large crossover, ''Secret Wars,'' a storyline featuring the company's most prolific superheroes, which overlapped into a 12-issue limited series and many monthly comic books. A year later, DC Comics introduced its first large scale crossover, ''Crisis on Infinite Earths,'' which had long-term effects on the "DC Universe" continuity. In the early and mid-1990s, big events were regularly published by Marvel and DC, often leading to extra publicity and sales. These events helped fend-off competition from Image Comics, and such events were more likely to become "collector's items." Some events, such as DC's "Zero Hour" and Marvel's "Onslaught saga" spanned a publisher's entire line while others only affected a "family" of interrelated titles. The X-Men and Batman franchises featured crossovers almost annually. Some of the most significant mid-1990s events, such as Spider-Man's "Clone Saga," Batman's "KnightSaga" and particularly, "The Death of Superman" caused dramatic changes to long-running characters and received coverage in the mainstream media. These events led to significant sales boosts and publicity, but many fans began to criticize them as excessive and lacking compelling storytelling. They also complained that monthly series had become inaccessible because one had to follow a number of comics to understand the full storyline. By the end of the 1990s, the number of large crossovers decreased, but they were still launched sporadically. ==''Crisis on Infinite Earths'' to ''Countdown''== Starting in the early 1960s, DC Comics maintained some aspects of its continuity through the use of a multiverse system of parallel Earths. A cosmic event in the 1985 limited series ''Crisis on Infinite Earths'' merged all of these realities and their respective characters into one universe, allowing writers to rewrite from scratch such long-running characters as Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman and also as an attempt at simplifying the DC Universe. In some ways, this helped revitalize DC's characters, though some fans debated (and continue to debate) whether such changes were necessary to begin with or truly beneficial. Events such as the deaths of Supergirl and Barry Allen augmented debate with many fans. Since ''Crisis'', the trend of such retconning/revamping of characters' histories has increased in superhero comics, as has such large-scale crossover events. Even DC found cause to revamp its universe again (but on a smaller scale) with 1994's ''Zero Hour'' crossover storyline. In the late 1990s, the concept of Hypertime was introduced as an attempt to satisfy fans of alternate realities, by stating that ''all'' comics published by DC (whether pre- or post-Crisis) had taken place in some corner of reality. In 2005, the ''Infinite Crisis'' series revived the idea of a multiverse. Following the events of the Infinite Crisis series, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman have temporarily retired their costumed identities. The remaining heroes attend a memorial for Superboy in Metropolis. Time traveler Booster Gold attends the memorial, but when Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman do not arrive, the change in history makes his robot sidekick Skeets malfunction. This results in Skeets reporting other incorrect historical data. Booster and Skeets search time traveler Rip Hunter's desert bunker for answers, but find it littered with scrawled notes (See "Rip Hunter's lab" below). The series continues, exploring many of the changes wrought by the events of Infinite Crisis, introducing new characters, killing off old ones, and putting others in new situations. The series concludes when Rip Hunter reveals that a new multiverse exists, of exactly 52 universes, from Earth-0/New Earth (The primary Earth in continuity) to Earth-51. The new Multiverese is temporarily threatened by Mr. Mind, who has developed the ability to travel to each universe and "Eat" portions of it, altering its history. Each new universe was initially identical to New Earth, but Mr. Minds rampage altered each universes history, altering them all, returning the D.C. Multiverse after a fashion. Once Mr. Mind is stopped, and 52's World War 3 crossover concludes, it is revealed that new Monitors exist for each of the new universes, making 52 monitors in all. Many of the new universes resemble either popular Elseworlds Earths (Kingdom Come, Batman and Dracula) or are similar to the pre-Crisis Earths 2, X, S, etc. 52, World War 3, 1 Year Later, and Crisis Aftermath indirectly lead in to Countdown, which is confirmed to be counting down to the next big event, Final Crisis. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Events from the Modern Age of Comic Books」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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