Bye , bye Earth 3...

[volksjager.insanejournal.com]

Comments

[cmdr_zoom.insanejournal.com]

Fans of the Silver Age waited and wanted and hoped for the multiverse to come back, even though the whole point of the original Crisis was to get rid of it (and all that confusing history). Instead, all that DC managed to accomplish was making its single new continuity even MORE confusing, in part because no one seemed to be able to agree what the new story was going to be. (Part of the old multiverse's job was to allow for such variance between artistic vision.)

There were a number of attempts to bring it back, partly inspired by rosy nostalgia but also by the awareness that as a matter of practicality, you can't have "all stories are true" in a setting with so many creators and so much scope... but like the various incarnations of Supergirl, people kept tripping over each other trying to do it "right" according to their ideas. Thus you got stuff like Hypertime, 52, etc. By now it's gone through so many reinterpretations that it's hard to say just what the structure of the DCU cosmos is supposed to be. It's the same problem bumped up to the next level of meta - everyone wants to tell THE DEFINITIVE STORY of how all stories are possible.

Moral of the story? "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and/or "be careful what you wish for," I'd say.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Thing that DC found is that the (mainstream) comics they put out afterward alienated everyone but their oldest fans, who LIKED all that confusing history.

Mainstream fans like that stuff. Otherwise Marvel would no longer exist, as if you recall they've never thrown out said history, and theirs is a lot more twisty and vast, whereas what was confusing about DC is that often they ignored it. They were trying to be more like Marvel in adhering to only one.

[liliaeth.insanejournal.com]

The silly part is that now, Marvel is trying to be like DC, by ignoring vast bits of its continuity while pretending it all makes sense.

[volksjager.insanejournal.com]

One more day...

[foxhack.insanejournal.com]

"Otherwise Marvel would no longer exist, as if you recall they've never thrown out said history, and theirs is a lot more twisty and vast, whereas what was confusing about DC is that often they ignored it."

... Did you ever look at Brand New Day? :\

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Until recently, I should have said. And yes, I did, and GOD was it lame. Pretty art though.

[ebailey140.insanejournal.com]

I don't see where it's confusing. Nobody promised to undo CoIE, and reset everything like it was.

Hypertime was just a device to allow for re-setting continuity at any point. What happened in Infinite Crisis/52/Countdown was something different, recreating the Multiverse, but not the same one we had, before.

All this is is allowing any story with these characters in any medium and Age to have happened, somewhere. The main DCU is Earth-0. Whatever else has been done that doesn't fit in main DCU continuity happened on one of these other Earths. The Golden Age comics that don't fit current continuity happened on Earth-2. Whatever in the Batman animated series from the '90s and it's spin-offs has it's own Earth. There's an Earth for The Dark Knight Returns and it's tie-ins (It has a number, but I prefer the name someone at the old Scans Daily gave it: The Goddamn Earth). Towards the end of Countdown, one of the Earths became Kamandi's, which is where the New Gods wound up at the end of Final Crisis.

So, presumably, Earth-1 would be the Silver/Bronze Age Earth. Don't know what shape it would be in, though, after Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow.

What we likely won't get are the annual crossovers, or entire series set on one of these other worlds. Too bad, because I liked the DCAU. :)

[volksjager.insanejournal.com]

Towards the end of Countdown, one of the Earths became Kamandi's, which is where the New Gods wound up at the end of Final Crisis.


There is a body of work to suggest that Kirby wanted to link Kamandi to the fourth world, "The great didaster" having been caused by a rouge Boomtube accident.

Maybe we shall hear more.