The good news: Barry and Iris are getting married. The bad news: Nazi supervillains from an alternate Earth are crashing the wedding.
KSiteTV has revealed that this fall's 4-part crossover between Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow will be "Crisis on Earth-X"! The crossover will air across two nights, Monday, November 27th and Tuesday, November 28th on The CW. Arrow will air on a special night at Monday at 9 p.m EST following Supergirl, just for the crossover only, while the other DC television shows will remain in their regularly scheduled time periods.
The official logline for the crossover states "With all of the heroes in town to celebrate Barry and Iris’s wedding, villains from Earth-X crash the festivities with a deadly agenda."
"We conceived this year’s crossover to be evocative of the annual Justice League/Justice Society crossovers we grew up with and looked forward to as kids," said executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg.
Even better, The CW and Warner Bros. commissioned artwork from comic artist Phil Jimenez, best known for his work on Wonder Woman and The Invisibles, to create a custom comic book cover paying homage to the annual comic book crossovers.
Jimenez said, "Some of the first DC Comics I ever read were those insane crossovers with a dozen characters from alternate earths and dimensions — the kind of stuff I later became known for! So when CW asked me to do an homage cover inspired by those amazing team up covers, I couldn’t resist, the chance to draw all of The CW’s DC superheroes in one crazy action sequence was insanely fun and exciting. And Romulo Fajardo’s colors brought everything to life!"
"Phil was the perfect choice to bring the comic book cover iteration of this idea to life," remarked Guggenheim and Kreisberg. "You can count on one hand the number of artists who could compellingly represent so many characters in a single image. Phil is one of them. And his design invokes the cover of Justice League (of America (vol.1)) #207, which was the 20th Annual JLA/JSA crossover. Our ten year-old selves are in heaven.”
Here's the full artwork from Phil Jimenez...
Created in 1973 by Len Wein and Dick Dillin, Earth-X first appeared in Justice League of America (vol.1) #107 as a parallel Earth in the Pre-Crisis multiverse, where Nazi Germany won World War II instead of the United States and the Allies. The Freedom Fighters, originally from Earth-Two, migrated to Earth-X in 1942 to help fight Hitler, but Earth-X's American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away from a heart attack in 1944, leaving the country in such a state that Nazi Germany was able to develop atomic weaponry. By this point, both countries were reluctant to use such destructive capabilities against the other for fear of retaliation that the conflict continued using conventional warfare. The war dragged on until Adolf Hitler's Nazi war machine had developed mind control technology that weakened the opposition's willpower ending the war in 1968 with complete Nazi victory. However, some proved to be immune to the effects of the mind control devices, and small resistance pockets began to form in various cities. Japan was originally an ally of the Nazis, but after winning the war and laying down their arms, the Nazis betrayed them.
In 1973, members of the Justice League of America from Earth-One and the Justice Society of America from Earth-Two arrived on Earth-X by way of a Transmatter Cube accident. They paired off with various members of the Freedom Fighters and helped them fight the Nazi threat. It was revealed that a computer brain had taken control from the Nazis and replaced the leaders with android replicas.
During the event known as Crisis on Infinite Earths, some of the history of Earth-X was merged with Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-Four, and Earth-S to form one composite universe. A similar reality (called Earth-10) was created at the end of the series 52 and a reality called Earth 10 appeared after the event known as Flashpoint.