The Anti-Monitor

The Anti-Monitor

(pop culture)First seen in Crisis on Infinite Earths #2 (1985), the Anti-Monitor, an ebon-armored eradicator boasting unfathomable cosmic power, was DC Comics' most notorious mass-murderer. DC's “multiverse” was a science-fiction plot device borrowed to allow the publishers' Golden Age (1938–1954) and Silver Age (1956–1969) versions of characters to coexist on alternate worlds (i.e., the Earth-One Flash and Earth-Two Flash). Throughout the 1970s, more parallel worlds were introduced as DC purchased characters from defunct companies, and by the 1980s the publisher felt that its expanded universes should be streamlined into one. To achieve this goal, writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez produced the epic Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985–1986), a twelve-issue series featuring the cosmos-quaking conflict between two omnipotent beings: the Monitor, a benevolent surveyor of manifold realities, and his bloodthirsty doppelgänger from the anti-matter world of Qward, the Anti-Monitor. Abetted by his destructive shadow demons, the Anti-Monitor augmented his might by annihilating and absorbing myriad realities, killing billions and threatening to extinguish life in all eras and universes. The Monitor drafted DC's greatest superheroes from various timelines—as well as some supervillains—to stand against the Anti- Monitor in a multi-chaptered clash that resulted in the deaths of the Silver Age Supergirl and Flash, plus some outmoded DC characters beyond salvaging. Crisis #11 (1986), the series' penultimate chapter, pitted the towering Anti-Monitor in deadly battle with a leviathan-sized Spectre at the dawn of time, but in the final issue, it took the combined might of virtually every DC champion to destroy this mightiest of supervillains.