I'm really not understanding the purpose of it, how it happened, etc. Was it just to revamp the DCU? I'm not understanding.

We really want explain it to you, but I didnt read the serious. All I know is flash drastically altered the timeline. I wasnt to reboot DCU

Purpose? There is no purpose. They wanted to reboot DC and came up with some event to explain "how" it happened. It lacked the same impact and meaning that Crisis on Infinite Earths did.

The Flashpoint timeline happened when Barry Allen went back in time to stop his mother from being killed...that resulted in a new timeline....so once he realized what happened he went back in time and stopped himself from stopping his mother's death....the timeline started to fix itself but from what I gathered the Cloaked Lady intervened and merged the DCU, Wildstorm, and Vertigo Universes together so that it stood a better chance at defeating an upcoming, unidentified threat...and as it turns out they were always meant to be one universe but something happened that caused them to splinter...the merged result is the New 52 or what most people call it the DCnU

@JediXMan said:

@danhimself: I thought Vertigo was always part of the DCU?

Some of it may have been but I'm pretty sure that a majority of it was it's own separate universe....like the John Constantine in Hellblazer is a different John Constantine than the one in Justice League Dark and the Search for Swamp Thing mini....you'd be better off asking @aztek_the_lost about it...he's the local Vertigo expert

@JediXMan: It was a side universe with characters crossing over as needed as of DCnU it's part of DC proper. My understanding was that it was created to be a more adult orientated comics

I always thought Vertigo was like a line between Universes. Where characters that wouldn't exactly fit well wit normal DC characters stayed, they could jump into the DCU when they needed to but could also be completely self contained. But then again I'm just guessing...

Flashpoint is like one of that stories that you change a little thing and all the world change, then he makes the things right again but this "lady" emerges and alter everything, not very explaining to the New 52, too many tie-ins to explain what happened in each little aspects although I liked the end, was a sweet thing.

Not necessary to read, the lady is the guilty of the reboot not the event itself, if you wanted to know why the reboot was made (in comic reasons) is this: