NEW TEEN TITANS #21 (Jul 1982)
DC Comics
DC Comics' editorial
department was going where no comics company had gone before. The idea
of a company-wide crossover was entirely new, so everyone was feeling
their way through the process. Marv Wolfman and Len Wein were charged
with overseering the CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS event, which had been
percolating since 1981, then delayed slightly to coincide with the
company's 50th Anniversary in 1985.
Marv had come up with the idea for the Monitor long before he became a
professional writer, but he incorporated the character into the story,
which was designed to collapse the Multiverse to a single universe with a
streamlined continuity. To provide readers a hunt that something big
was coming, he hit on the notion of having the Monitor mysteriously
appear in every one of DC's series, regardless of the era in which they
were set.
To test the waters for this idea, Marv and George Perez first showed the Monitor in
New Teen Titans #21 (July 1982).
In a January 1983 memo, executive editor Dick Giordano first laid out
the editorial what the series, then titled "The History of the DC
Universe," was going to accomplished. Here, editors were instructed to
work into their series at least two appearances of the Monitor observing
the heroes and villains in action.
This was reiterated in a January 1984 memo that listed which books would
be included and which ones excluded from the requirement.