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.