User blog comment:ClarkWayne/Differenating heroes of Earths 1 and 2/@comment-220364-20111030180424

For what it's...

Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-S, Earth-X, and so on are late constructs with in the stories. It is doubtful, very doubtful, that the writers from 1939 through 1956 or 1961 were thinking "These Batman stories are separate from those. They happened on parallel Earths." The origin story for Barry Allen (1956) uses it as a plot element in a way - the inspiration for his costumed ID comes from a comic book about Jay Garrick. And "The Flash of Two Worlds" cemented the idea.

From that point stories got "assigned" to an Earth. Most pre-1956 characters and history was assigned to Earth-Two. The Quality characters, after DC bought them, mostly to Earth-X as of "Crisis on Earth-X". The Fawcett characters, when licensed, to Earth-S. And the Charlton characters to Earth-4. For the Fawcett and Charlton characters it was neat and tidy - there were no "crossover" stories with other DC characters that didn't involve the "parallel Earths" line.

The Quality and pre-1956 characters though... it's messy. Some, like the Martian Manhunter, it can just be ignored. and take them as a "frontrunners" of Earth-One. Most, like Garrick or Alan Scott are easy to just relegate to Earth-Two in total. Then you have set that appeared long after the "line of demarcation" in 1956 without a clear break from the previous stories. With those, it could be safe to say we don't have the "originals" any more since DC has to break up the story to fit the multiverse model.

In some ways it might be interesting to actually see an attempt at a DCU done with the "originals". It would play havoc with some characters as we are used to them today - Batman for example would be in his lat 90s and the "sidekicks" from the `60s would possibly be grandparents.