Monitor (comics)

The Monitor
The Monitor. Art by George Pérez
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	(in shadows) The New Teen Titans Vol. 2 #21 (July 1982) (fully seen) G.I. Combat #274 (February 1985)
Created by	Marv Wolfman George Pérez
In-story information
Alter ego	Monitor
Abilities	Omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience

The Monitor is a fictional character created by writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez as one of the main characters of DC Comics' Crisis on Infinite Earths limited series.

The character began appearing, along with his assistant Lyla, in numerous DC Comics titles beginning in 1982, three years before the Crisis began in July 1985; these appearances made it seem that he was some sort of weapons dealer for supervillains. This was all part of the setup Wolfman and the staff of DC Comics planned for the Crisis, showing the Monitor currying favor with villains such as Maxie Zeus, prior to calling on the heroes. The Monitor was depicted in the shadows for all of his appearances in DC's mainstream superhero titles, and his face was first revealed in one of their few remaining non-superhero titles, the war comic G.I. Combat issue #274.

Wolfman conceived the concept of the character long before plans for Crisis on Infinite Earths. He explained it in a 1983 interview in the Comics Journal:

"I had the character about 18 years ago. I called him the Librarian then because I didn’t have a good sense about names and thought that it would be a neat idea to do that. You know, one villain that the whole company could use. I didn’t have to sell it to Marvel, because they already had one universe, but when I came back to DC I indicated that I wanted to do it here. Everyone liked it but forgot to hand out the sheets I gave for their writers. So I have to redo it indicating how far you can take the character from month A to month B. Like for three months you can only show this much and after six months you can show that much, and at the end of a year we can reveal who that character is and start getting into interesting stories that all the writers can pick up on."

Thirteen billion years ago, the Multiverse was born due to tampering with the creation of the universe by Krona, a scientist from the planet Maltus who was attempting to see the beginning of the universe. As a result of his actions, an infinite number of parallel universes were brought into existence side by side, separated only by minuscule vibrational differences, none of them as strong as the single universe that existed earlier would have been.