Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Mr. Majestic says he is from another Earth in the Multiverse.  Is the multiverse back?

Who can say anymore, Nape? At the beginning of the Post-Crisis, we were led to believe that the DC Universe was amalgamated into a single Earth with a single continuity ... which ultimately turned out to be a disaster in terms of overall DC continuity because everything was being rewritten and re-rewritten a zillion times over in an effort to fix the errors ... which wound up making things worse. Then we have the concept of Hypertime, in which divergent ocurrences in the DC Universe run their course. What are they if not parallel universes (which would constitute a multiverse). Then we have the reintroduction of the Crime Syndicate of America (or Amerika, if you wanna get picky), who are from ... you guessed it ... a parallel Earth! Gasp! And I won't even bring up the whole "Superboy Pocket Universe" crap. And on top of it all, we find out that the Golden Age (or Earth-2) Superman still exists in that "otherdimensional paradise" he entered at the end of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and finally found a way back to the mainstrean DC Universe, but refused to stay ... although I can't say I blame him.

In short ... you're guess is as good as mine. I don't think even the editorial staff at DC knows for sure.  :roll:

Sounds like the first use of the word "Multiverse" in years, anyway.  Unless Parallax mentioned it by name in "Zero Hour."

As I understand it, the official name for multiple realities is now "Hypertime."  However, only a handful of characters in the official DCU know it even exists, much less what to call it.  So if Mr. Majestic is from one of those alternate realities, he might very well call it something else...like the Multiverse.

I kind of like this notion.  It suggests that the Multiverse never stopped existing, despite the claims of Crisis #12.  We just started watching the adventures of a new Earth in 1986, one where no one happened to know about the Multiverse, and so for them it did not "exist." When some of them did discover the Multiverse, they called it Hypertime (being ignorant savages and all), but it's still the Multiverse anyway.  Meanwhile Earths 1, 2, 3, etc continue to exist as they always did, and somwhere the JLA and JSA are still crossing over once a year and having great adventures.  But we, alas, are stuck reading the adventures of a "backwater" Earth that barely understands the concept of a Multiverse, the one Earth where it's very, very, very hard to get to other Earths, so no one bothers.

In other words, just because we aren't allowed to see it anymore doesn't mean the Multiverse doesn't still exist.  We just got stuck on "Earth-Crap" for 20 years.

At least that's the way I'm going to view it.  It's much more likely someone just decided "Multiverse" was a cool word, so they brought it back for this storyline never intending to reference the original "Multiverse" we remember.

well, that's more like wishful thinking. Those Earths were clearly destroyed in that mini series. But, what happen to the Earth-1 Superman, aka the true Superman? He was around for a few months after crisis then just went away, unless you count "Superman: Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?" as a real story.

http://www.411mania.com/comics/reviews/article.php?reviews_id=905

Multiverse back, to be later merged into one and then brought back...to be merged into one, from this one, multiverses will emerge...

SuperMonkey writes:




It's been awhile since I've read "Crisis" (thank Heavens!), but as memory serves, those other worlds were never shown blowing up, burning up, splitting in half, etc.  They just disappeared into a white nothingness.  So whether they could all still be around depends on your definition of "clearly destroyed."

More importantly we must not forget the ultimate paradox of the "Crisis"...because it happened, it can never have happened. (!) The final thing Crisis ret-conned away was itself, because no story involving multiple earths can possibly have taken place.

Except for some odd comments from this or that character every few years (like Hal Jordan in "Zero Hour"), it seems that those who remember the Crisis at all remember it as something altogether different from what we saw.  For them it went like this:  the skies turned red, some cosmic threat loomed, the Flash died but the good guys won.  No multiple nothin', no "I used to live on Earth-2 but now I live on this merged Earth," no "wasn't there a Supergirl who died too?"...nada. Yes, there was that period when Superman remembered Kara (who now never existed), a period of a few months before he was rebooted.  And there was that mini-series where the JSA buried the Earth-2 Dick Grayson and Helena Wayne, but there are signs that never happened, either.  And starting with "Man of Steel" no. 1, we are dealing with a different Superman than the one published the month before.  The current Superman did not participate in the Crisis we read, even though the current Hal Jordan MAY have. (?)

My point is, nothing in "Crisis" is particularly binding on the DCU, since the entire Crisis has itself been effectively ret-conned away in the months and years since, and now according to DCU continuity it's something that never could have happened.  Even if I had seen those Earths "destroyed" in Crisis, it wouldn't matter, since by editorial decree, they never existed in the first place!  

If I want to believe the Multiverse still exists, who's to say I'm wrong?  Indeed, "The Kingdom" and various issues of "Superboy" tell us the Multiverse does indeed exist, just with a different name.  

Let's face it, "Crisis" is a terrible story that goes on for six issues too long and ultimately collapses under its own weight.  I still have an "Amazing Heroes" magazine from the time which details just how many times Wolfman contradicted himself and broke his own rules.  The series may have been pretty to look at (sometimes), but in the end it was just a corny gimmick; a way to make editorial changes via an actual "event" in the characters' lives.  It's kind of like that cartoon where Daffy Duck breaks the fourth wall and talks to his animator until he finally gets erased off the page.  And for my money, it should be taken with the same seriousness.  Whether or not you agree with the decision to wipe the slate clean in 85, the choice to do so in the form of a company-wide cross-over event was nothing more than a marketing gimmick, a case of bean-counters pulling the strings of writers and artists. (And in that regard, a sad harbinger of things to come)




If that doesn't qualify as a "real story," then I don't know what does! As far as I'm concerned it's the last real story ever told about Superman, written by the last real writer to ever work on the character.  And DC seems determined to keep it that way.




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I know it's an cranky old overreaction on my part, but the guy who wrote that review of "Whatever Happened" has me rolling my eyes.

He perfectly represents the knows-much-less-than-they-think-they-do-about-comics-history, WIZARD Magazine-worshipping crowd of trend-jumpers. The kind who delude themselves into thinking that EVERYTHING between ACTION COMICS #1 and the John Byrne revamp was a vast wasteland of childish garbage... "oh wait, except for those Alan Moore stories, of course, THOSE were good! Too bad he was the ONLY writer in fifty years who did anything good with the character."  

How could Superman possibly be so hugely popular for so long if poor writers spent all those decades making the concept WORSE? This question never occurs to them, for some reason.

Everyone has the right to their opinion, but I would really prefer that it be an INFORMED opinion. That guy doesn't seem to have done any of his homework at all before splattering his incorrect assumptions into the review.



Where to begin? He's obviously using third-hand information here... he thinks that Mort Weisinger was editing Superman right up until after CRISIS, apparently. Lois Lane was a stalker obsessed with becoming Superman's wife in the mid-Eighties? Really? There were MORE Kryptonians around, instead of FEWER? Classic villains like Luthor, Mongul, Vandal Savage and Brainiac WEREN'T being written as more three-dimensional and threatening? No one could relate to Superman/Clark (for unspecified reasons, I notice)?

How curious. All these mid-Eighties comics in MY collection apparently don't exist. In reality, the Seventies through the mid-Eighties seem to have been all hokey Silver Age reprints... except those great Alan Moore stories, of course!



Which, if you MUST use the concept of "Ages", had already ended in 1970...



Our spelling-challenged  reviewer goes on to describe how Superman has one final battle with his "rouge" gallery, including Lex "Luther".

Sigh. I know Mr. Baker's heart was in the right place, and I've got to admit that if someone had given ME ultimate power over the Superman mythos in 1986, I would have made my share of changes too... but he does himself a disservice by thinking that a few tired old cliches are all he needs to know about the pre-Moore history of Superman, in order to pass judgment on it.

We know that "Crisis" as it eventually came to be known was in the planning stages for a few years, and went through many didn't different rewrites until we ended up with the 12 issue event.

My feeling is that Wolfman didn't throw out all the earlier drafts, but kept some of them in the final script.  So in the final issues of Crisis we go through the different concepts for what might happen to the "infiinite universe(s)" before we get to the penultimate one at the end of issue 12 (but not the ultimate one which would take form after Crisis).

We get the five essential Earths that survive--a perfectly good concept, which would allow most of the continuities to survive--then we get an Earth where all the previous alternate histories did happen, but now everyone who has survived is living on Earth 1, the final last Earth out of all the Infinite number that had existed.  And then we get the idea of rebooting the universe so that there's only one pro-matter universe and one Earth (but also an anti-matter universe, I hasten to add), where the heroes remember the multiple Earths and those who died in the Crisis.

But this isn't the actual Earth we ended up with.

Also, remember the wierd nature of the Crisis, where it would hit a universe's entire existence--not just at some point in its timeline.  So the universe ended up never having existed at all.  This is why the Legion are involved in the event, because the Crisis hits in their time at the same "time" it hits the 20th C. Earth.  All of the universe and every moment of the universe is destroyed by the "Crisis."

So it is possible to tell stories that take place after the Crisis, but not really after the Crisis--if you can follow the wierd logic.  The Legion stories all take place after the Crisis happened in the 20th C.--so all these stories happened, but didn't happen.  And by the same logic any stories in the past happened, but didn't happen.  So the Superman stories after Crisis are still in a continuity which would eventually be destroyed and therefore (from a post-C DCU perspective) never have existed.

During the OWAW event a few years back there was a scene where some scientists (albeit comic book scientists) went on about the multiple universe theory, but I don't know if they actually used the word "multiverse."

However the Hypertime concept of the mulitverse is fundamentally distinct from the Gardner Fox multi-universe theory.

Mark Waid's concept of the Kingdoms--which seems to borrow heavily from Harlan Ellison--describes a bunch of timelines that grow together and grow apart, sort of like a tree.  In the Gardner Fox world these universes were each distinct from one another--their timelines were parallel, meaning the lines never came together.

Imagine a bunch of paved roads all headed in the same direction and all coming from the same direction, and all parallel to each other.  This is the Fox multiverse.  Now imagine some crazy guy with a steamroller who paves a path that zigs and zags and dispsey doodles across the medians between these roads.  This is the Waid multiverse.

That's what I said...a pathetic mess of a story.

Again, this is a case of the higher-ups deciding, "we want to start over from Square One." Fine, so do it by starting every title over with issue #1 in the same month.  But don't drag out a year-long storyline that makes no sense even by it's own rules and then render the whole thing pointless (and impossible) as of issue 12.



But then it's final destruction happens "off-panel," doesn't it?  So the "house that Mort built," arguably the most important continuity in a period where the superhero concept itself nearly died out, doesn't even get a goodbye?  Yes, "Whatever Happened" wrapped up the loose ends, but we're left to assume (as you are) that soon after that tale, the white-out came and claimed everyone.



In other words, order and logic versus chaos and contradiction.  By golly, that is a pretty good summation of the two.

First, let me say that I've never read Crisis on Infinite Earths. There, I've admitted my ignorance, so no one need point it out. ;) I have read about the Crisis on various websites. This free information has convinced me that I don't want to waste money on a story I wouldn't enjoy.

Nightwing has articulated a thought that has nagged at me. I've just never been clever enough or eloquent enough to put it into words. There is no post-Crisis explanation of the Crisis itself. Yet there are post-Crisis revisions of many pre-Crisis stories. Much like the historians in Orwell's 1984, the DC writers and editor can make history agree with the present.

I'm a fan of the pre-Crisis era. The Crisis doesn't appeal to me because it destroys those places (Earth-One and Earth-Two) and people (Barry Allen and Kara Zor-El) that I was familiar with and liked. The post-Crisis universe doesn't appeal to me because I don't see the point of having pre-Crisis stories re-explained to fit the post-Crisis "reality".

It seems rather silly to me that the Crisis itself is so popular among post-Crisis readers, considering that it is a story of an ending rather than a beginning. Its purpose is to end the pre-Crisis multiverse, something that it ultimately fails to do! After the Crisis, many series continued for months in a pointless limbo.  For the Crisis to have succeeded, all series should have ended concurrent with the last issue of the Crisis. The next month, new series would begin to populate the new universe. No references to prior stories at all. Clean slate and new chalk. DC didn't have the guts to do it right.

Imagine that Superman, the Batman, Wonder Woman, etc. all appeared brand-new, without trying to back them into 50 years of revised pre-Crisis history. Forget all the old characters and start over. No JSA during the Second World War. No JLA during the 1960s and 1970s. Just new heroes starting out fresh. That would have been preferable to all the idiotic attempts to revise the past.



I'm with Nightwing. Gardner Fox was tuned-in to Earth-One and Earth-Two. The brains at DC today are tuned-in to Earth-Crap. I'll just read my old comics, thank you very much.

Some links for you all :

the Unofficial Hypertime Website
http://www.geocities.com/hypertime2000/index2.html

Time and Hypertime

The Linear Men
The Crisis
Zero Hour
The Amalgam
The Kingdom
Have Hyperjacket, Will Travel
Cosmic Treadmills

http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/hypertime.html

Crisis on Infinite Earths Links:

this site covers :

Crisis on Infinite Earths
Kingdom Come
Treasuries of Peace, War, Hope, and Truth
The New Frontier

http://continuitypages.com/crisis.htm

First of all Mr. Majestic is from WILDSTORM a former studio of IMAGE comics.

and the Multiverse has always been there.. marvel also has it (Read Exiles, and the "Ultimate" universe, and of course the regular 616 Marvel universe)

The difference is that back on Pre-crisis the multiverse was well defined and extrapolatory that it made continuity shaffle..

A Multiverse can be good as long as it is disposable.

when did this happen?

Well...

Crisis maybe pointless as a retconning tool..

But it's still better than all the "Crisis wannabees"

Like Marvel Superheroes: Secret Wars..

and.. Infinity Gauntlet.

Here's an interesting question...If the destruction of each universe was happening at every point in time, then why was it perceived in every era as happening over a period of time with a big white wave?  It should occur all at once wiping out all existence in every era simultaneously.

But I don't really care.  The story made more than enough sense for me to enjoy it.  And enjoy it I did-sketchy metaphysics and all.

You know, I can respect DC's concern about putting off readers with too complex a Multiverse.  I can understand the desire to put that all away and streamline things.  The problem with Crisis is that it's the product of two ugly trends in comics: (1) the insistence that everything must somehow fit into "continuity", even if that thing is the end of continuity, and (2) the need to turn every change in editorial direction into a sales-generating "event."

Frankly, I'm for the old school of revisionism; if you don't like a character or concept, just stop using them!  Consider the Batman titles, overrun in the late 50s-early 60s by add-ons like Batwoman, Bat-Girl, Bat-Mite, Ace the Bat-Hound, etc.  Then it was decided to scrap all that and return Batman to his roots.  So did we get a multi-issue bloodbath where all those characters were killed?  No way.  Did we get a re-boot of Batman himself, starting over again with a new origin story?  Good lord, NO.  Kathy, Betty, Mite and Ace simply stopped appearing in the books.  One month they're all over the place, the next they are gone, gone, gone.  And readers got the message just fine.

Same thing when Schwartz took over Superman from Weisinger.  Kandor, Krypto, the Phantom Zone etc too much clutter?  Then stop writing stories about them.  Problem solved.

But guess what?  Someday when you need Kathy Kane again (for a story about the League of Assassins, as it happened), she's still there.  And when you want to go back to the Phantom Zone (for a cool mini-series), well you've got that, too.  

See, the beauty of having a rich and complex multiverse is that you can pick and choose from all sorts of great story elements whenever you want.  And if you don't want those things, you are under no obligation to use them.  If DC thought the Multiverse was too complex, why not just declare a moratorium on multiple-Earth stories for a while, and re-introduce the concept again slowly if and when the situation required it?  No need to kill all those people (except to pander to the bloodlust of modern readers)...simply shuffle them off to the sidelines and save them for a rainy day.  How hard could it be?  The Multiple Earth stuff really only came up a couple times a year in JLA and the Flash, and much less often in other titles.  Other than cancelling "All-Star Squadron," it wouldn't have hurt most books at all just to say, "hey guys, you can't do multiple Earth stories again until we say it's okay."

My big gripe is that Crisis wiped away decades worth of great ideas and characters and replaced them with nothing anywhere near as interesting.  And over time, as writers realized maybe they *liked* some of those ideas, they brought them back anyway.  The JSA is back in action, Kandor and the Phantom Zone are back, and so on.  Only they've had to be "reinvented," often with poor results.

I am a lot younger than you old timers, I just like the Sliver Age Superman the best, but I actually grew up watching Superfriends, The Superman Movies, Superpowers, reruns of the George Reeves Show and reading early 1980's comics! The best part about those comics were the whole idea of the different Earths. There was something really cool about seeing the Earth-2 heroes team up with the Earth-1 heroes or Captain Marvel. I was very young, but I got it all without anyone having to explain it to me.

After all this time, it turns out that the Multiverse might be closer to reality that we thought : http://superstringtheory.com/