Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1713281-20130222183152/@comment-3361105-20130222191521

This page is kind of messy, but most of what you need to know is on this page: Multiverse

Basically, the very early Golden Age characters were retconned to have been from another earth called Earth-Two, which was home of the Justice Society of America.

In the Silver Age, Barry Allen crossed dimensions to Earth-Two, and met his Golden Age counterpart, Jay Garrick.

Eventually, there turned out to be quite a few of these other earths, which became known as the Multiverse.

In 1985, DC decided to streamline their continuity by merging all of the other earths into one, using the major event Crisis on Infinite Earths.

As a result of that story, a lot of people died, all of the Earths but three were destroyed, and those were merged into the one we called New Earth. There was no more multiverse.

There were still a few continuity holes that needed to be fixed, so about a decade later, DC created the Zero Hour event, which fixed a few of the remaining continuity errors (and caused a few more).

In 2006, DC decided to bring back the Multiverse by using characters who were left over from the original "Crisis" via Infinite Crisis, in which several of the old earths were recreated. I forget exactly how, but the end result was that 52 DIFFERENT earths came to be (except New Earth, which remained pretty much the same, apart from a few retcons).

THOSE earths were numbered like Earth-2.

In 2011, DC had a Flash story going called Flashpoint, where the timeline was altered, and everybody was dramatically different. In order to "set things right", a mysterious woman named Pandora had Barry Allen (who came back to life a few years previous, after dying during Crisis on Infinite Earths) recreate the timeline in a new way, which would combine all of DC's disparate properties (which lived on their imprints rather than within the main DCU), such as the Wildstorm Universe, Dakotaverse, and the Vertigo Universe.

The result was the so-called DCnU (which we are referring to as Prime Earth), and its event the New 52.

Because the timeline was altered from the beginning of time onward, everything could be completely different from previous versions - and a lot of stuff was/is. For the most part, only the Batman and Green Lantern books are behaving as if nothing had happened at all, whereas other characters are entirely different.

So, basically, up until 2011, everything was ESSENTIALLY the same old characters in the same old multiverse, with only minor retcons. The New 52 is a different multiverse with - in some cases - dramatically altered versions of characters, and major retcons.

I hope that helps.

It's not nearly as confusing as you might think. You can read any story arc from any time period and just jump right in.