In 1997 and 1998, DC released a series of comics taking place in a new universe. Green Lantern, for example, became a woman in a cloak with a green lantern. The Atom, one in a family line of heroes stemming from an early nuclear age experiment. The Doom Patrol, a group of time travelers, returning from the 2030s in the attempts to avert the World That's Coming. That's not what it was called, I just like the phrase.
Beyond that, the one-shots tended to take different approaches with the characters. Green Lantern hewed closer to the hosts of DC's old horror and suspense titles, acting as narrator for stories about people returned from the dead to complete one final act. Doom Patrol was one of those self-fulfilling prophecy time travel stories. The Flash - starring a bubbly teenage girl with light powers - was almost a cartoon, as her own father tried to capture or destroy her with an increasingly deranged series of goofy science super-weapons, only to have each one backfire like he was Wil E. Coyote.
Superman, written by Mark Millar, was about the surviving son of a bunch of highly unethical experiments the U.S. Army performed on African-Americans, gaining incredible intelligence and through that unlocking other capabilities of his mind. Like that whole thing about Deathstroke using the other 90% of his brain people supposedly don't, but if that turned you into Doctor Manhattan.
Wonder Woman was an extended play on the word "wonder" as the title character spends the entire issue locked in existential navel-gazing about whether she deserves to live, or is even alive, while fighting for her life. Because Peter David. Point being, the creators went a lot of different routes with these things.
The connections between the books gradually tightened as they progressed. Characters in other books would reference the original truth about the original Atom after it was revealed in that one-shot. The Joker - a mysterious madcap woman pulling pranks to humiliate and expose both criminals and corrupt authority figures - got two one-shots. John Ostrander and Jan Duursema wrote two stories about a mysterious cabal lurking in the shadows of the U.S. government that relied on magic, called Nightwing. The power struggle between it and a similar group in Europe spilled over into other books.
Eventually several of the heroes form a team, a "secret six", but they don't do much together before being curb-stomped (largely off-panel) by some Soviet Ultra-Humanite, who got very little page time and just sort of shows up to be a big enough threat some characters that were content to mind their own business decide to work together. Maybe even form a league, devoted to some higher ideal.
There was another mini-series of sorts in 2008, Superman's Reign, but that seemed to be more about some of the Tangent universe heroes popping into the DCU
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