![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Multi-Faceted Multiverse
Jul. 26th, 2007 11:31 pmI've read comic books for over twenty years now. Primarily they've been DC books, and the book i've followed for the longest time is the Flash.
I hadn't really collected comics when I was a kid. It's surprising, really, I loved reading and I watched the Batman, Wonder Woman, Shazam! and old 50's Superman series when I was a kid. I'd wake up on Saturdays to watch Superfriends in the 70's. I knew most of the characters before I started to really read them.
The first trickle of comic books I received were a few issues of Teen Titans from the late 70's or early eighties (I'm not terribly sure) that were given to me when I was laid up sick. Besides Robin, I didn't really know the characters, especially the ones who weren't the sidekicks of better known characters. I remember fining it interesting, but the books weren't self-contained, so I couldn't follow the whole story.
Some time after that I checked out the 50th anniversary collections for both Batman and Superman, and there were the old style takes that would be completed in one issue. They often had acts, as there were more pages in comic books back then, but you could read it all. You started to see by the end of those best ofs that they had started to develop the multiple versions of characters that made DC books hard to read in the 70's and early 80's.
If you don't know, DC Comics had a problem. After so many years it was hard to say that Superman was 29 years old, but also fought Hitler in World War II. While Superman was still around, many of the World War II superheroes had been shelved and new characters with the same name had taken their place - most famously The Flash, and the Green Lantern. Some time in the 60's DC decided to have the new Flash go to another world, a parallel Earth and meet the old Flash, and so started the Mulitverse. Our heroes were new, but there existed an older Earth where the older versions fought Hitler.
It seemed like a good solution until it got out of hand, and suddenly any writer for DC could come up with the most incredible story with heroes dying and different versions of events - and shunt it all off into yet another Earth. They weren't simply imaginary stories (usually when Superman or Lois Lane die, but it was all a character's dream, much like Bobby Ewing), these were actually new worlds, and they were growing.
This is where I get on board. In my first year of college, a fellow dormmate Kip, he has a stack of comic books, and tells me to get reading. Kip was hot, so i'd probably do anything he told me to do. He handed me the run of Crisis on Infinite Earths the twelve-issue mini-series that ran through every book DC has at the time, from the Westerns to the Legion of Superheroes in the 30 century.
DC had to clear house it did so in Crisis. They killed off every other Earth except one, and combined the heroes of about five different worlds (Shazam's Captain Marvel was brought into the DC universe via this consolidation). Suddenly there was one Earth and one story line, thought that caused as many problems as it solved.
Well, this was the best jumping on point ever. I started grabbing up books from both DC and Marvel, taking in all of the changes and the familiar characters. Suddenly the new world no longer had a Superman who fought in WWII, but one who's book was restarted with a whole new origin. Batman didn't fight in WWII, but unlike Supes, didn't reboot either, so he seemed much older for a while. that was just the start of the confusion.
Well, one of the books I really gravetated to was the Flash. Here was a new start as the previous Flash had died in during the Crisis (Barry Allen is still talked about, but has remained one of the very few characters to actually stay dead). Here was Wally West taking on the mantle of the Flash, being one of the first sidekicks to take over for his mentor.
The Flash is fun anyway. Here's a guy who can run at near the Speed of Light. Really, that's it. there's no X Ray Vision or Cold Breath. He does one thing. The fun thing is how they try to scientifically come up with excuses on how he can run through walls (by super-fast vibration of his molecules) and run up walls and create tornadoes with his speed, all why not burning up due to the friction (Speed Aura - look it up!).
With that I have read every issue of the Flash since 1986. Wally's died, lost his powers and memory, gotten married and fought several of the same villains over and over again. It's bliss. He even took on a protege, Bart who is the grandchild of the late Barry Allen via the future. It's hard to keep up.
Except for a short time a few years ago I have kept up with my comics, enjoying a few new characters along with the old standbys. In some more dire financial straights i dropped the four Superman and Four Batman books, and I haven't gone back to them. Superman is too powerful, and it takes enormous (or magic based) villains to challenge him, and it gets boring. Batman waffles between dark and really dark. Again, it gets boring. I hate to say it, but the wild and wacky stories of the 50's and 60's were much cooler. More detective than avenger, you could always be amused by the giant typewriters and other oddities that seemed to populate Gotham City. The dark stuff is more real, and as we've seen works better in the movies, but there always should be a crazy bird sanctuary for the Penguin, or a huge crossword puzzle billboard as a clue for Batman.
I think that's why I like the Flash, he's powerful and resourceful, but he can't do everything. He can't fly, for instance. His villains are as colorful as the Batman's, but they don't come with quite as much iconic baggage. The Flash also seems much more hopeful than other heroes are.
I read Wonder Woman, and that's a book that waffles a lot. Depends on the writer, but it's very inconsistent as writers never seem to know what to do with such a powerful, nearly perfect woman. I've never been a big Hal Jordan fan, so I dropped Green Lantern when he returned (from the dead!). I still love Green Arrow and read JLA and the Justice Society of America where some of those who fought Hitler still fight to this day - 65 years later. Sure, it doesn't make sense, it's comics.
I tried some Marvel books, but they never really interested me. I'm not sure if it's the angst or what. They have made some good movies with there characters - well, the big ones. I wish DC would make movies with the Flash (loved the short-lived TV Series), Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, but none of them need to star Jack Black, thks.
Now, since I've dropped in a minor history lesson in this post, I have to tell you that DC made another big change. For years they had problems with continuity. things that just didn't fit when they slammed all of those worlds into one. The biggest was the fact that the teenaged Wonder Girl was now older, and older still than Wonder Woman who had been restarted after Crisis. How does a character get inspired by someone who wasn't even a hero at the time. They tried four different retcons to try to fix it.
So what did DC do? They recently finished up several world-spanning mini-series to end up with 52 parallel Earths. The whole thing back, but now all the characters are shuffled. The older characters didn't all end up back on Earth Two, or the Shazam! characters back on Earth S, here they are still on one earth, but with some of the continuity errors still out there. For someone who hasn't been reading for 20 plus years, suddenly it's very difficult to figure out what's going on.
It seems strange to undo something that initially got me interested in following comics. It does provide some interesting ideas, and opens up story writing, but when an industry still needs to attract new readers, this may keep many away. Of course, the Multiverse never has to stay that way.
Some of the storytelling with bringing back the Multiverse has been good, with more room for writers to play, and different takes on characters - certainly some desigened to throw us off of the bigger picture, but even I'm getting confused, and I'm a pretty big continuity freak!
I've spent thousands of dollars on this habit, and thanks to the folks over at Zeus Toys and Comics, I'll probably end up spending thousands more in the future, especially to get my Flash fix. There's just something about the DC characters that I love and I love to keep reading, even if great series like Starman end. There will always be another book to keep me going.
I hadn't really collected comics when I was a kid. It's surprising, really, I loved reading and I watched the Batman, Wonder Woman, Shazam! and old 50's Superman series when I was a kid. I'd wake up on Saturdays to watch Superfriends in the 70's. I knew most of the characters before I started to really read them.
The first trickle of comic books I received were a few issues of Teen Titans from the late 70's or early eighties (I'm not terribly sure) that were given to me when I was laid up sick. Besides Robin, I didn't really know the characters, especially the ones who weren't the sidekicks of better known characters. I remember fining it interesting, but the books weren't self-contained, so I couldn't follow the whole story.
Some time after that I checked out the 50th anniversary collections for both Batman and Superman, and there were the old style takes that would be completed in one issue. They often had acts, as there were more pages in comic books back then, but you could read it all. You started to see by the end of those best ofs that they had started to develop the multiple versions of characters that made DC books hard to read in the 70's and early 80's.
If you don't know, DC Comics had a problem. After so many years it was hard to say that Superman was 29 years old, but also fought Hitler in World War II. While Superman was still around, many of the World War II superheroes had been shelved and new characters with the same name had taken their place - most famously The Flash, and the Green Lantern. Some time in the 60's DC decided to have the new Flash go to another world, a parallel Earth and meet the old Flash, and so started the Mulitverse. Our heroes were new, but there existed an older Earth where the older versions fought Hitler.
It seemed like a good solution until it got out of hand, and suddenly any writer for DC could come up with the most incredible story with heroes dying and different versions of events - and shunt it all off into yet another Earth. They weren't simply imaginary stories (usually when Superman or Lois Lane die, but it was all a character's dream, much like Bobby Ewing), these were actually new worlds, and they were growing.
This is where I get on board. In my first year of college, a fellow dormmate Kip, he has a stack of comic books, and tells me to get reading. Kip was hot, so i'd probably do anything he told me to do. He handed me the run of Crisis on Infinite Earths the twelve-issue mini-series that ran through every book DC has at the time, from the Westerns to the Legion of Superheroes in the 30 century.
DC had to clear house it did so in Crisis. They killed off every other Earth except one, and combined the heroes of about five different worlds (Shazam's Captain Marvel was brought into the DC universe via this consolidation). Suddenly there was one Earth and one story line, thought that caused as many problems as it solved.
Well, this was the best jumping on point ever. I started grabbing up books from both DC and Marvel, taking in all of the changes and the familiar characters. Suddenly the new world no longer had a Superman who fought in WWII, but one who's book was restarted with a whole new origin. Batman didn't fight in WWII, but unlike Supes, didn't reboot either, so he seemed much older for a while. that was just the start of the confusion.
Well, one of the books I really gravetated to was the Flash. Here was a new start as the previous Flash had died in during the Crisis (Barry Allen is still talked about, but has remained one of the very few characters to actually stay dead). Here was Wally West taking on the mantle of the Flash, being one of the first sidekicks to take over for his mentor.
The Flash is fun anyway. Here's a guy who can run at near the Speed of Light. Really, that's it. there's no X Ray Vision or Cold Breath. He does one thing. The fun thing is how they try to scientifically come up with excuses on how he can run through walls (by super-fast vibration of his molecules) and run up walls and create tornadoes with his speed, all why not burning up due to the friction (Speed Aura - look it up!).
With that I have read every issue of the Flash since 1986. Wally's died, lost his powers and memory, gotten married and fought several of the same villains over and over again. It's bliss. He even took on a protege, Bart who is the grandchild of the late Barry Allen via the future. It's hard to keep up.
Except for a short time a few years ago I have kept up with my comics, enjoying a few new characters along with the old standbys. In some more dire financial straights i dropped the four Superman and Four Batman books, and I haven't gone back to them. Superman is too powerful, and it takes enormous (or magic based) villains to challenge him, and it gets boring. Batman waffles between dark and really dark. Again, it gets boring. I hate to say it, but the wild and wacky stories of the 50's and 60's were much cooler. More detective than avenger, you could always be amused by the giant typewriters and other oddities that seemed to populate Gotham City. The dark stuff is more real, and as we've seen works better in the movies, but there always should be a crazy bird sanctuary for the Penguin, or a huge crossword puzzle billboard as a clue for Batman.
I think that's why I like the Flash, he's powerful and resourceful, but he can't do everything. He can't fly, for instance. His villains are as colorful as the Batman's, but they don't come with quite as much iconic baggage. The Flash also seems much more hopeful than other heroes are.
I read Wonder Woman, and that's a book that waffles a lot. Depends on the writer, but it's very inconsistent as writers never seem to know what to do with such a powerful, nearly perfect woman. I've never been a big Hal Jordan fan, so I dropped Green Lantern when he returned (from the dead!). I still love Green Arrow and read JLA and the Justice Society of America where some of those who fought Hitler still fight to this day - 65 years later. Sure, it doesn't make sense, it's comics.
I tried some Marvel books, but they never really interested me. I'm not sure if it's the angst or what. They have made some good movies with there characters - well, the big ones. I wish DC would make movies with the Flash (loved the short-lived TV Series), Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, but none of them need to star Jack Black, thks.
Now, since I've dropped in a minor history lesson in this post, I have to tell you that DC made another big change. For years they had problems with continuity. things that just didn't fit when they slammed all of those worlds into one. The biggest was the fact that the teenaged Wonder Girl was now older, and older still than Wonder Woman who had been restarted after Crisis. How does a character get inspired by someone who wasn't even a hero at the time. They tried four different retcons to try to fix it.
So what did DC do? They recently finished up several world-spanning mini-series to end up with 52 parallel Earths. The whole thing back, but now all the characters are shuffled. The older characters didn't all end up back on Earth Two, or the Shazam! characters back on Earth S, here they are still on one earth, but with some of the continuity errors still out there. For someone who hasn't been reading for 20 plus years, suddenly it's very difficult to figure out what's going on.
It seems strange to undo something that initially got me interested in following comics. It does provide some interesting ideas, and opens up story writing, but when an industry still needs to attract new readers, this may keep many away. Of course, the Multiverse never has to stay that way.
Some of the storytelling with bringing back the Multiverse has been good, with more room for writers to play, and different takes on characters - certainly some desigened to throw us off of the bigger picture, but even I'm getting confused, and I'm a pretty big continuity freak!
I've spent thousands of dollars on this habit, and thanks to the folks over at Zeus Toys and Comics, I'll probably end up spending thousands more in the future, especially to get my Flash fix. There's just something about the DC characters that I love and I love to keep reading, even if great series like Starman end. There will always be another book to keep me going.
