Welcome to another installment of Judgment Calls. This month I will
attempt to explain DC's re-introduction to the multiverse, HYPERTIME! Also, I will be
ranting about Superman: The Animated Series, because of what they are going to do to my favorite
character, Green Lantern.
First, let's talk about the DC Mutiverse, shall we? I would like to
remind everyone that I'm a young writer and I was around 3 years old
when Crisis on Infinite Earth's came out, so please forgive me for minor mistakes.
OK. The DCU started in the late 30s to early 40s with all sorts of masked
"Mystery Men" heroes, and the Justice Society of America. Well, because of
outside forces, comics sales dropped and so to increase comic sales,
DC revamped several heroes, doing away with their pasts and changing
everything but their powers and their names. They started with the Flash.
This wasn't much of a problem back then because there weren't any comic
readers over 12, so none of them would really notice. So began the
Silver Age: so in the DCU, there never was a JSA and their former
identities never existed.
It wasn't long before some people noticed that there were new
heroes and had questions about what happened to the old ones.
This is where it gets complicated , so stay with me. There was
more then one Earth, and the Silver age heroes lived on Earth-1 and the
Golden age heroes lived on Earth-2 (kind of backwards, if you ask me)
The first Earth 1-2 crossover started with the character that started the whole
thing, the Flash. This idea was simple enough: two earths, almost
everyone has got a counterpart, even though the Earth-1 and Earth-2
Superman, and Batman are almost identical.
That idea was going great, and if they could have 2 Earths, why not have
more? You see, DC had bought out several other comic companies and didn't know how to
integrate those heroes into the normal continuity, so they just said they lived on different
Earths. Heck, they even had an Earth that was supposed to be
us, and it allowed writers to write themselves into stories. Whenever a
writer felt like it ,they could just make another Earth if they thought it would make
for a good set-up or story. Well as you can tell, it got confusing.
People needed score cards just to keep track, something had to give and that
event was the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Before THE Crisis, there were many other crisises. The first comic to
introduce the multiple Earths idea was called Crisis on Two Earths. There
was Crisis on Earth-2, Crisis on Earth-X, and so on. So there was
some meaning to calling the mini-series Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Crisis was
DC's attempt to make everything simple again, to integrate all of DC's characters
in to one Earth and universe. Through a lot of killing (like the killing of the Barry
Alan Flash, I think it was because he started the whole thing), through a lot of
destruction, Crisis resulted in one universe.
Now there were continuity wrinkles to iron out. Basically, all the Golden
Age heroes were active around WWII, then they all slowly got older and retired.
About "Ten Years Ago," is when all the Silver Age heroes started heroing. Also,
Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman never existed in the Golden Age. This
left some plot holes that could be explained away. So anyway, almost all DC titles
got revamped in the mid 80s to make more sense. Now get this: all the heroes know
there was a cosmic event, and all of them remember something about another
Earth and remember some key figures dying, BUT they think they managed
to stop it and they all think their history was always the way it was. DC
explained away major wrinkles and tweaked the continuity here and
there.
In one of those major DC crossover events, ZERO HOUR, DC tried
again to iron out some wrinkles. Which led to more tweaking of the DCU
continuity, and even started the Legion books completely over. Even
though DC had Elseworlds Tales and other things, DC kept trying to insist
that there was only one DCU. Well, you know that couldn't last. So the thinkers down
at DC thought up a way to have a multiverse again. HYPERTIME!
Leaning heavily on the Kingdom Come Elseworlds storyline, a villain
of unimaginable power (Gog) is marching through time killing Superman
over and over and over. Well, the story ends up with the Superman, Batman,
and Wonder Woman of the present time and of the Kingdom Come future
fighting Gog. During the battle, they breach the walls of hypertime, and defeat
the bad guy.
OK, here it is my attempt to explain Hypertime. Think of a time
stream, a big one, that big one is the normal DCU. Now, the stream
branches off into billions of possibilities, and sometimes these branch
offs come back into the main stream, causing all kinds of problems.
Anyway, everything that DC has ever published has taken place somewhere
in hypertime. Hypertime is almost impossible to get to, though it's
not like just breaching time, or space. It's breaching the very walls of
existence. So hypertime stories will take actual thought, so it won't just
be a convenient excuse for a story. For instance, the first book that will
really explore hypertime will be Superboy.
I've only read the first part of the Hyper-Tension story (that's all
that's out yet), in Superboy #60 and on page 4, Superboy dies on
the JLA meeting table. Well, the weird part is on the next page, when
Superboy walks into the room. The dead Superboy came out of hypertime.
Since this dead SB warned of a "Darkness, coming for this earth next,"
Supes, Bats, and WW want to know what's going on. And the only
one who can find out is SB! The dead SB was wearing a jacket that allowed
him to breach hypertime, and only SB can use it because it's DNA coded.
To breach hypertime, you need a lot of power, so they strap SB
to a Nuke and BLOW HIM UP! Cool huh? So hypertime will be explored in
Superboy and I'll try and keep you updated.
Now on to a personal rant of mine. I have enjoyed Superman: The
Animated Series for the most part, but because of an upcoming show, I
don't know. They have taken real liberties mixing pre and post Crisis
Superman into the show, and that's not all bad. I just think how they are
going to do Green Lantern in the upcoming "In the Brightest Day" episode,
being shown February 6th, is bad. They are going to call this
Green Lantern Kyle Rayner (the current GL in the comics' name) and he will be an
artist at the Daily Planet (ok Kyle's an artist in the comics, but for the Daily Planet?!?).
He will be pulled to a dying alien's side and be given a ring and become a member
of the GL Corps (THAT'S HAL JORDAN'S ORIGIN!) and have to team up with
Supes to defeat Sinestro (that's Hal's arch villain!). Green Lantern has always
been DC's third best selling character behind Batman and Superman, it has been
called the comic with the most loyal fan base in all comicdom. When Ron Marz
and Kevin Dooley revamped GL, getting rid of Hal and bringing in Kyle,
they both said they got death threats, and they got more when they
killed Hal. Well, the fans got over it and accepted it. Now, 5 years later,
after getting rid of the old character and developing a new GL, these animaters are
mutilating the new character into an almost unrecognizable character. I
haven't even gotten into what he looks like yet: he looks like Hal Jordan
with the brown hair, but his costume looks like the John Stewart's GL costume.
It's just really messed up. The show broadcasts on the WB Feb 6th. All I'm saying
is I hope it's darn good, and if they somehow pull it off next month, I will apologize.
That's it for this month. The whole character spotlight thing wasn't what
I wanted it to be, so I don't think I will be doing them anymore. Come back next month when I talk
about something else.
