Back in the Silver Age of comics, the Flash was one of the most boring characters around. He was in the Justice League alongside Superman, Wonder Woman, the Green Lantern, and Batman. And his one and only super power? Running really fast.

So various stories tried to make the Flash more interesting, to give him something that other characters simply couldn’t do. In one of these stories, he ran so fast that he wound up in another dimension – a parallel Earth or an Earth-2, if you will – and he wound up speaking with the original Flash from the Golden Age. Thus the DC Comics multiverse began, which did a great job of waging war on good storytelling for many years.

On the one hand, having multiple parallel universes populated by the same familiar heroes had some great potential. It allowed DC to do things with their most popular characters that they wouldn’t have dared to do otherwise. The Golden Age Superman revealed his identity to Lois Lane and married her. Batman and Catwoman hooked up, had a child, and Dick Grayson took up the mantle of Gotham City’s protector when Bruce Wayne retired. Fans who didn’t like those stories could focus on the mainstream universe.

Over the years, though, things got more confusing. Earth-1 and Earth-2 stopped being the only main universes, and we got dozens of other parallel worlds, each with their own subtle changes to continuity. With so many universes out there, storytelling also suffered. One story – I can’t remember if it was considered in-continuity or not – had Batman finally get shot and killed by a criminal. The result? A nice little funeral followed by a Batman from a parallel universe stepping in and taking over. Basically, that story highlighted the biggest problem with so many parallel universes – nothing has consequences anymore.

So in the 1980s, DC put together a mega-event called Crisis on Infinite Earths that would clean up the multiverse once and for all. It featured some pretty shocking events for the time. Supergirl was killed off, as was the Flash. (The Flash, though, had it coming for starting this whole mess in the first place.) By the end of the story, the multiverse was destroyed, leaving only a single Earth, which would be the main continuity for the DC Universe.

For about 25 years, the problem of the multiverse was solved. But then another problem began to rear its ugly head. This problem was one of comics creators. Many modern comic writers were budding young fans around the time that the original Crisis happened. Fondly recalling the multiverse, they decided to bring it back in the event Infinite Crisis. This crossover event had such notable instances as Superboy Prime punching the wall of reality and breaking it. That’s right – Superboy one-shotted reality. Take that, subspace!

All of a sudden, the problems with the multiverse are back. As an example, the Question of Earth-1 died recently. That’s not a big deal, though, because the Question of Earth-4 is still alive and kicking. They’re identical in every way, and all it will take is some of the all-too-common dimensional travel to have Earth-4 Vic Sage replace the Earth-1 Question. Similarly, readers got to see Superboy Prime beat Superman from Earth-2 to death. The whole image of the world’s first superhero getting brutally beaten becomes severely diminished when you consider that Earth-1 Superman was standing about 10 feet away at the time.

On top of the storytelling problems of having a multiverse that the characters are aware of and interact with on a regular basis, we have the accessibility problems. Part of the reason that Crisis on Infinite Earths happened in the first place was to make it easier for new readers to understand the goings-on of the DC Universe. Now there was just one Superman, on Batman, and one Wonder Woman. (There were still thousands of Green Lanterns, but that’s an exception, not a rule.) By the time Infinite Crisis was released, a full generation had passed where there was only one DC Universe. So unless you had been reading DC Comics in the early 1980s, you suddenly had no idea what the heck was going on. And for younger fans – the teenagers that comics supposedly target – everything they’ve learned about their favorite characters in their few years of collecting suddenly becomes insignificant because somebody hit the big red reset button. In an industry that is constantly shrinking because of its inability to attract new readers, DC Comics inexplicably decided to stop targeting new readers and instead focus on the ever-shrinking demographic of middle-aged men who have been collecting comics for the past 25 or more years.

I personally think the whole multiverse is a terrible idea. It can work in small doses to tell some interesting stories that shouldn’t become part of an established character’s continuity, but that’s about it. Marvel gets that effect through their What-If line of comics, neatly sidestepping the storytelling problems by having those tales take place in their own isolated universe that none of the other characters, save for the nearly-omniscient Watcher, are aware of.

Fortunately, the return of the multiverse is most likely only a temporary thing. It’s the constant cycle of comics: try a new, shocking idea to pick up sales, wait until said idea tanks, and then reverse it and pretend it never happened. Wash, rinse, repeat.