question about DC's reboots.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Did Crisis, Zero Hour and Flashpoint create a new reality or did they overwrite the current reality?

[glennsim]

Did Crisis, Zero Hour and Flashpoint create a new reality or did they overwrite the current reality?

There's a lot of semantics there, but I'll just go with "overwrite the current reality" because in most cases there's no way to return to the old one, which would seem to be possible if it was a new one.

[stk]

Created a new one. The way the DC Multiverse has been explained previously, decisions cause branches to new universes. Endlessly. Flashpoint is the only one that seems to have worked as an overwrite in-story, but even that one probably just created a new, separate reality.

Returning to an old continuity is only as impossible as the publisher's reluctance to return to it. There have been many cases where previous continuities have been shown to still exist.

[glennsim]

Created a new one. The way the DC Multiverse has been explained previously, decisions cause branches to new universes. Endlessly. Flashpoint is the only one that seems to have worked as an overwrite in-story, but even that one probably just created a new, separate reality.

Returning to an old continuity is only as impossible as the publisher's reluctance to return to it. There have been many cases where previous continuities have been shown to still exist.

See, I don't see it that way. There have been times when, in the new continuity, we found out that there was some parallel timeline or universe where things looked a lot like the old continuity, but it wasn't necessarily the same thing. Sure, it might have been possible, but since they never did it, I don't think you can say for sure. There has never been a time when someone travelled back to the pre-Crisis multiverse, for example, that I am aware of. The closest thing I can recall is when they showed what was otherwise the post-Crisis version of the Crisis and the artist (accidentally?) included Wonder Woman, but I think that was an alternate Hypertimeline anyway.