Room for Everyone (Except You Know Who)

 Well, I'm sure you've all seen this by now:

LITERALLY overwriting Morrisons's personal black light poster of the multiverse.

It's the summation of Barry's survey of the multiverse in Dark Crisis; Big Bang, which was

--what is the word I am looking for...?--

Oh yes:

fun.

I'd almost forgotten it.

No irony. DC:BB was fun.  Any reader knew that the Anti-Monitor wasn't going to kill Barry and that Barry wasn't going to destroy the Anti-Monitor and that it was just an excuse for a grand tour of the multiverse.  I was certainly amused at just HOW baldly it STEPPED ON Grant Morrisons's grand art project of The Orrery of the 52 Worlds, as if it were some quaint medieval remnant describing the spheres of the heavens. Wallace West (if they are using his new nickname yet, they didn't here, or Barry didn't, because, you know.... Barry wouldn't) was the perfect gee-whiz sidekick that Wally West just can't be any more and it showed how much Barry Allen really NEEDS that.  In one issue, I now "get" Wallace as a character and he has a clear literary function; keep that up, DC.  As for Barry himself, it nailed his character, not just in repeated scenes but in ONE LINE: 

Isn't that just Barry Allen in a nutshell?

I once wrote that Barry Allen is the only true "superhero" among DCs iconic heroes, and this is a good example of why.  No matter how fantastical the concepts he encounters, he himself grounds them with his down-to-earth police scientist viewpoint.  

FLASH FACT: Grounding things is what Barry does, just like a lighting rod.

Anyway, the list of worlds on the Multiversal Mystery Tour had

• some surprises (MAD respect for the inclusion of Earth-59, which has NEVER been mentioned since it's first appearance), 
• some things I'd never even heard of (like Earth-2020), 
• some things I wish I'd never heard of (such as Earth-49), 
• some welcome reinstallations (e.g., Earths 93, 10, 2, 3, 4, 5), 
• some timeline-solvers (Earth 54), 
• some transmedia sops (Earth-789, for example), 
• some gated retirement communities (Earth-22, thank gods), 
• and, of course, home (Earth-33, although WHY it is numbered "33" I CANNOT figure out for the life of me, any clues will be appreciated).

I have some TINY quibbles, of course.  I wouldn't expect them to specify every multimedia version of their IP but, really now, a nod to the CW's Arrowverse would definitely have been in order (or did I miss it?).  I take umbrage at the Batman'66 villains being characterized as "exceptionally benign" since they quite literally tried to KILL BATMAN EVERY WEEK, which is NOT something that happens in any comic book and never has. Campy they may have been, but BENIGN they were not.

But on the whole? This is brilliant in its simplicity. Finally, DC is knuckling down at doing its homework to keep its promise of "everything you've read/like HAPPENED... somewhere, sometime."  Not in a vague muddle of personal continuities or timey-wimey hypertime, but on an actual world with a number. Whether it ever gets identified and labelled or even acknowledged, mentioned, hinted, or implied, you can go to sleep knowing that somewhere that story or character you loved is "comic-book real".

Except for Nocturna.
Squash that.

Is that silly? YOU ARE DARNED RIGHT IT IS. But it's COMIC-BOOK silly.  And it WORKS.  Why didn't DC ever think of this before?

Oh, wait, that's right: this is nearly exactly the concept they thought readers were too DUMB to understand in the mid-1980s, leading to the elimination of the multiverse (a concept that every OTHER publisher and genre embraced afterwards).  Well, it took nearly forty years but this is basically DC saying: "yeah; that a mistake. Let's try that once more, but with a little more thought."

And the concept (unlike the original multiverse or Grant Morrisons Art Project) is clearly designed to be elastic. This is evidenced by some of their choices already:

• lumping some groovy properties together into Earth-47;
• expanding the Superman Red/Blue 'imaginary story' into its own world with Batman Blue and Grey;
• allowing the Filmation universe  (Earth-1956) to stand as one where, yes, Superboy would have been the first hero;
• creating parallel worlds for versions of the Shazam Family and Justice Society BUT STILL HAVING VERSIONS ON EARTH-0 (that's especially ingenious, as it lets them have their cake [all their original adventures are true!] and eat it too [we can adapt their pasts and stories to incorporate them into our principal continuity!]).

This is very forward-looking, if any future storylines turn out to be dead-ends, well... they don't have to be bulldozed, exactly; they can just be relocated to a numbered cul-de-sac in the suburbs of the DCU, where you can visit them if you really want to, and the rest of of us can simply drive by on our way to the Big City.

Why, there's probably even a universe where everything is like Detective Comics 1-26, populated with nothing but heroes like Slam Bradley and Gumshoe Gus, The King and Cosmo the Disguise-y Guys, squarejaws like Bret Lawson and Bruce Nelson and Larry Steele and Steve Malone and Bart Regan (SPY!), Buck Marshall and Hot Trail Hogan, incomprehensible detectives like Speed Saunders and Inspector Kent and Mr. Chang, the Crimson Avenger, Fu Manchu (okay, maybe not Fu Manchu), and Hope Hazard G-Woman!

C'mon; don't you still wonder whether she ever found the Z-ray and escaped the cave headquarters of Xavier, Ruler of the Underworld?

Sure you do.

I do hope that DC takes what seems like a next logical step to me: a monthly, even quarterly, TITLE that just features a few story one-and-done stories set on  different worlds each issue.  That could be...

--what is the word I am looking for...?--

Oh yes:

fun.

I'd almost forgotten it.

My review of Multiversity #1

At the risk of continual comics curmudgeonliness--

Grant Morrison's Multiversity #1, which I was looking forward to, is (of course) a disappointing, muddled mess.

It's another rehash of the pet themes he's been slinging around ever since his days on Animal Man (transquartomuralism, writer as god, reader and the reader's world as part of the story, realities beyond and alongside other realities, the music of the spheres, etc.).

My voice doesn't sound like that.

I think this one is left over from an old Morrison Doom Patrol comic.

Don't ask me, buddy.  I' can barely play Heroclix.

"Blah blah, blah blah blah BLAH blah blah!"

Apparently Grant's changed his name to Lex Luthor, now.

Me, too!  Ever since Gardner Fox TOLD us that in Sept. 1961.

It's called a key change, Grant.

In other words, exactly the same hodgepodge of the same concepts Morrison so spectacularly failed to make word in Final Crisis.

These are fine ideas (even if he's repeated them about 8000 times too often), but, once again, his fractured, kaleidoscopic viewpoint makes it impossible for him to tell a coherent story.  At times, in fact, it seems composing a complete sentence escapes him.

I'm sorry, sir; your application to the Brotherhood of Dada must be submitted on paper
in the form of a tone poem or collage.

And, sure, it makes a little more sense after a second reading. But doesn't EVERYTHING (with the exception of Identity Crisis)?!

In my hobby of choral shows, we call people like Grant Morrison "Concept Producers."  They can produce concepts, but they can't produce actual SHOWS.  They have fascinating, out of the box ideas... but THEY can't carry them out. Other more sensible, down-to-earth, coherent, logistically-oriented people have to be there to do that for them, or it all winds up a flaming mess.  Like Multiversity.

Grant Morrison is such a person. He needs an editor--or a writer-- to put his ideas into action.  Until then...

Finally, something Grant and I can agree on.

Even ... a woman!

For those of who weren't really in the game before the original Crisis, Superboy explains the Multiverse to you.


Note the progression of Bizarre Multiversal Translations:

A criminal.

An ape-like creature.

"Even a woman!"

If this panel appeared in a comic book today, entire websites to condemn it and What It Says About The Industry As A Whole would spring up like mushrooms overnight.

52 Fixes

I was happy to note in the final issue of 52 that Rip Hunter was going to check on whether anything in the past of New Earth had changed as a result of Mr. Mind depredations.

Let's hope so. DC's already quickly and subtly put both Black Canary and Wonder Woman in the original JLA.

I can think of a few things that deserve to be fixed or eliminated. At least, 42 of them, in fact; I ask you to supply the remaining ten!

1. Donna Troy. Please, DC, stop trying to be so metatextual with Donna. If there must be a Donna Troy, keep it simple. Hippolyta wanted a sister for Diana, and the gods let her make one; end of subject.

2. Jason Todd. Let's just say Jason, who was older when he was Robin than we remember, survived his brush with 900 numbers, retired from Robinhood, then got ticked and came back when he found out Batman had gotten a new Robin.

3. The Rolling Heads of Ganglords. While you're taking the cosmic whiteout to Jason's past, make sure you dab the scene where Jason brings a duffel bag of severed heads as trophies to a gang meeting. If you want to use him as a "Black Sheep" hero, that's fine, but we don't really need heroes (in the DCU) who kill people and cut off their heads.

4. Hush. You don't really need me to explain that, do you?

5. Aquaman. It occurs to me I may have mentioned this one before. This is about the third reality-altering event in the last few years to provide a perfect opportunity to return Aquaman to a version recognizable to the public, both in appearance, powers, and behavior. You blew it the last couple times; don't blow it again.

6. Lex Luthor. If there's any concrete reason that Luthor's presidency needs to remain in continuity, I can't think of what it might be. Let's go right from CEO Luthor to Project Everyman Luthor to Mad Scientist on the Loose Luthor and leave it at that.

7. Black Lightning. Let's lose "Education Secretary" Pierce, Dead Niece, and Young Adult Daughter Who Sprung Full Grown from the Head of Judd Winick. While you're at it, consider losing the Head of Judd Winick as well.

8. The Joker. I think we could all struggle along just fine without having to remember Last Laugh.

9. Bizarro. Likewise Emperor Joker. Stick with the simple and more traditional "failed clone of Superman" backstory. It's more consistent with his usual portrayals anyway.

10. The Slab. Almost forgot, Last Laugh is what moved the Slab to Antarctica. Either (a) forget about "the Slab" entirely (b) re-place it wherever it originally was.

11. Gorilla Grodd. I have no idea what writer was stupid enough to change Gorilla Grodd into a carnivorous primitive generic monster, but he's already cashed his check, so let's just forget it happened and move on.

12. Catwoman. Most people ignore the absurd, insulting, and out of character idea that the freaking Catwoman was ever a prostitute. Let's just make that official policy, shall we?

13. Knightfall. Really. What would it hurt for this whole thing to have happened on some other earth? We can forget Bane, Azrael, and Shondra Kinsolving in one fell swoop; I find that an irresistible trifecta.

14. Obsidian Age. No one understood it, no one liked it, and it didn't do anything.

15. Millenium Giants. See "14. Obsidian Age".

16. Booster Gold. I think we can all agree that remembering that Booster saved President Ronald Reagan from assassination is no longer in our best interests. Same with his sister, "Goldstar".

17. Extreme Justice. I mean, who's going to argue against that? Dan Vado? The Wonder Twins Fan Club?

18. "Slideways" and "the Kitchen". After all, why waste any time?

19. Black Canary. Let's put "Dinah gets raped and has her throat cut" in the same trash bin as "Dinah dates Ra's Al Ghul and falls in the Lazarus Pit". Then we can all be happy.

20. The Sea Devils. The Sea Devils are not, and have never been, environmental terrorists; the Sea Devils are, as everyone knows, superior beings. Have them be just as they originally were, but hosting an underwater "Josh Bernstein" style adventure series on TV. Because you know they know how to work the camera!

21. Plastic Man. No, not his illegitimate son; Fernus. Send Fernus to the furnace, wrapped in, well, pretty much anything else Joe Kelly's written for DC. This one, by the way, works well with forgetting Emperor Joker (#9), which is what gave us "Scorch".

22. Vibe's death. I mean, can't we just say he got really really sick for a while? Please?

23. The Sword of the Atom. I'll say more on this later. A lot more. But let's just keep "Ray and Jean break up" and jettison the part about the Littles living in the Amazon jungle.

24. Lana Lang. Oh, where to start. Lana is pretty much a one-person generator of Stories That Need to Be Retconned/ Erased by Hypertime / Punched by Superboy / Eaten by Mister Mind. Starboy; Insect Queen; Lana the Manhunter; Conduit. Those are all safely gone, so let's send Mrs. Pete Ross, Vice-President and President Ross, little baby Clark Ross, and Luthorcorp CEO Lang to join them. Lana is most meaningful when she symbolizes the wonderful small-town life that Clark had to give up in order to be Superman.

25. Wonder Woman. Bana-Mighdall, and all that that implies (including Artemis The '90s Extreme Wonder Woman).

26. Green Lantern. At this point, is there any really reason to keep the "Hal Conquers the Universe/ Becomes the Spectre" baggage? Corrigan died and the Spectre created trouble before finding a new host. Pretend Hal got killed by Sinestro or a falling ceiling tile or venereal disease. Or never died at all.

27. Green Arrow. Oh, yeah, and Green Arrow, too. Connor Hawke isn't worth screwing up with Ollie's age/timeline. No, really; he's not. He's just part of the failed '90s experiment of replacing Silver/Bronze Age characters with Iron Age hipsters. It's enough to show that Ollie's a jerk every time he opens his mouth and give him an ex-prostitute for a kid sidekick; he doesn't need an ex-junkie ward, an illegitimate son he intentionally ignored, and Kevin Smith's revivification of Ollie Queen that managed to "rape our childhood" by turning Stanley & His Monster is a typical Alan Moore/Vertigo tale of incestuous child molestation/satanic worship.

28. Red Arrow. Speedy was hooked on cocaine for ONE ISSUE, people, thirty years ago. "Beloved" as that atrocious story is supposed to be, it's crippled the character ever since. Brad Meltzer can force real JLAers to say how wonderful he is every issue, but he'll never be more than the Drug Addict Leaguer as long as that story remains in continuity.

29. Hawk & Dove. Not just the two female ones; the previous versions, too. Vietnam, the Lord of Order & Chaos, Monarch ... face it, folks, everything they touch goes straight to Heck.

30. Matrix Supergirl / Australian Alexander Luthor/ They Stole Luthor's Brain. Sure, it was fun while it lasted, but it seems to already be out of continuity or part of a general consensus of silence.

31. Brainiac. This one's rather a mess, so everyone's left it alone for quite a well. But we could have our cake and eat it, too, I think: Brainiac is a renegade Coluan genius who augmented his intelligence by incorporating AI directly onto his skull, and has lost his humanity (or "coluanity", I guess) as a result. This works with his three main character points: "freaky alien collector", "evil computer", and "ancestor of Brainiac 5".

32. Kyle Rayner. I like Kyle; I have always liked Kyle. He's sexy, fun, clever at using his powers. But he's in the way and his absurd near-deification as Ion is a pig in a dress no matter how they spin it. Kyle; enjoy Earth 8.

33. Leslie Thompkins. I have literally not heard of anyone who approved of "what they did to Leslie Thompkins." If you want her out of the way, let her stay abroad doing missionary work. But let's just say that Spoiler died from her wounds and Leslie wasn't able to save her, despite her best efforts.

34. Captain Marvel. Do we really have to wait until Trials of Shazam is over before we declare it null and void?

35. Nightwing. Okay, it's not really a retcon per se, but I think that "Nightwing" as a brand, is badly damaged (and in many ways, never really flew). Despite the resonance with Kingdom Come/Earth 22 (which I hate), let Dick Grayson become Red Robin. Maybe then writer can write him as Robin Grown Up rather than a confused Marvel-lite member of the Legion of Super-Emos.

36. The New Guardians. I think I'd pay to forget the New Guardians.

37. Primal Force. I'm one of the few people who actually bought and liked Primal Force, the doomed "Shadowpact" of its day. But that time is over now.

38. Hawkman. Hm. That's hard to narrow down, isn't it? Pure confusion eliminates most unpleasantness from Hawkman's backstories already. But Golden Eagle's betrayal of Hawkman was a big waste of the character (and, like everything Hawkman, very confusing). Scratch that.

39. Firestorm. I'm pretty sure there's only one thing I'd change about the current Firestorm: the cancellation of his series.

40. Dr. Thirteen. I don't want a world without Dr. Thirteen in it, and I don't think the Phantom Stranger would either. Making me unhappy is one thing ... but you really want to tick off the Phantom Stranger?

41. The Penguin. Can we ignore all the "Penguin as punching bag" stories? For pete's sake, the Penguin was Burgess Meredith, not Peter Lorre. I want to see him start to kick some tailfeathers.

42. Two-Face. As long as we're forgetting the Hush thing, let's forget Vigilante Dent and the whole clumsy "I'll rip my face open" thing.