52 New Thoughts on The Multiversity Pt 1
“New Thoughts,” but some of them are recycled. You get what you pay for and this is free.
The Multiversity is composed of eight interrelated, serialized comics, in nine issues, each with a cover title and at least one separate story title, and each with mirroring, spectral, currying, spectric eight-measure interrelation.
The Multiversity is a comic often republished with ephemera, in which many superheroes meet other superheroes, mad scientists cooperate with other mad scientists, worlds are invaded by worlds, and comic books are read.
Prepare for italics. Loads of italics. And, parentheticals. And, nonstandard use of italics and bold text.
The Multiversity is narrative as map and map as narrative, evocation as story and story as evocation. In which the first and last “issues” are a single comic, an 80-Page Giant bisected to bracket a set of stories which do not necessarily occur during the break.
“New Thoughts,” but some of them are recycled. You get what you pay for and this is free.
1 If the cover to Mastermen is not a satire on slabbing collectible comics, making them unreadable but preserved for collectibility, it ought to be.
2 The Multiversity is the set of books, ephemera and effluvia around them. It is a place for learning. We, reading or reflecting, learn, and characters do, too. It is a multiverse for growth, even when the universe seems stodgy or the multiverse too (de)limited.
Imagination in imagination, rumination in art, memory in confluence. The Multiversity is a sea on which we learn the ropes, a stack of comic books or a range of pricey collections thereof. It is a misstep to think we are not always at study, always learning.
3 Grant Morrison has pointed out that I miscounted how many times Mary Marvel gets a punch in. She and Captain Marvel Jr both get in one punch. I know people who get mad when someone corrects them, but a) Grant is right, b) I knew it before it ran but we failed to fix it, and c) I hope it got people to go check anyway.
As imbalanced as their world is, and it is a staid, regressive myth-of-ye-olden-days whitewashed world, there is a balance, a sense of “fair play.” It can never be reconciled as all-good or all-bad, and as Morrison observed, it is someone’s idea of paradise, but like tradlife fetish on the internet, anything can be someone’s.
4 The superdeformed/chibi/-babies version of superheroes turn out to be naive puppets for duplicitous purpose around the same time Yale Stewart used his unlicensed chibi Justice League, JL8, to promote stopping critical approach to the Ferguson protests with two space police drawn as children (and making a buck off it). In real life, this spun out to revelations of Stewart sending unsolicited dick pics and possibly letters of cease and desist, during which time Stewart’s mother received threatening phone calls, and he said he would pledge $1000 to RAINN.
5 Fun thing about Cameron Stewart! Not too long after The Multiversity released, in which Stewart does some of the best work of his career with Thunderworld Adventures, he got outed for sexual impropriety with teenagers.
There are not really, functionally, objectively “broken” worlds and “right” ones. Or, post-apocalypse and pre-. Every time we have seen, intuited, or invented a world it has been a world of flaws and bright spots, tolerable or less tolerable, but tolerable and less tolerable by individual or cultural standards. That includes our comics, if they are soured by real world events and still give us joy.
6 Occasionally a little war breaks out on a discussion platform, whether or not there actually is a way out of Earth 4. The secret code to reality is just descriptive, it does not seem to actually be a way to reshape or escape the loop, much in the way the comic featuring that world emphasizes Aleister Crowley’s hunchback and soldier dynamic. But, a Allen Adam gets out, elsewhere. Right?
Earth 4, made up of a canceled comic book universe. Earth 4, a world pastiching a closed circuit, single-book world. Earth 4, Ultimate Marvelizing everything! Earth 4, home to 38 pages and a cover of sorting out what Percy Shelley worked out in that early arc of The Invisibles, right or wrong.
7 If Ultra Comics is a purely fictional character, can he still show up in other worlds in some form? Is that the Empty Hand? Are they both us, because we can put ourselves into the identity those shapes/calculations form?
How much of any us that is described outside of us, or assigned to us, is us? Is real? Is really us? Are we who we are told to be?
8 Part of the question as to whether Ultra Comics can go to other, real, universes, as anything other than a comic book (which we see happen), might be answered by the Justa Lotta Animals fighting the Zoo Crew. Or, it might not. They’re both cartoon worlds, after all, one is just a cartoon in a cartoon. What is Naturalism in a cartoon?
9 “– on pages twelve and thirteen, I caught sight of a massless time-symmetrical boson. A möbius loop curving through eight dimensions. I heart something knocking on the door t get in –” is a wonderful structural cue coming over one hundred pages into The Multiversity, as a whole, and four issues into the serialized run. That’ll get you to go back and count pages! (Even if it does not “matter.”)
The Multiversity #1: The first fully-visualized, collective appearance of the Gentry those visualizations of pulp culture fears like mechanization making us obsolete, pretentious assholes, and people who are terrible but also embarrassingly sexy to us.
Society of Super-Heroes #1: The US, post a world war, invaded by blank-faced robots, uniformed zombies, crack troops, and terrible aircraft knocking over buildings. The lower panel going askew as one world much like the other but whose face are ethnicized caricature “Lady Shiva,” “Felix Faust,” “Vandal Savage” to a good Earth wherein white men claim the prizes of Middle Eastern conflicts and the Black hero always covers his skin.
Nothing happening in this “möbius loop curving through” is any different that what the United States does to other nations every day.
The Just #1: The son of Batman and the son of Superman dancing around boredom, shame, impatience and knowing they will never measure to their dads or each other.
When your team ups with the god-tier king of dreams are just that. Dreams. And, you’ve woken up.
Pax Americana #1: Directly ahead of the scene the quote comes from (or, just after it, chronologically), the singsong contrapuntal of preceding, investigation and murder as three or more timelines are mixed together in visual music and textual contretemps (Contras-temps).
Unless the cover is part of the story. And, then, what? Not an open spread, but a break which also breaks the spread? A break in fundament? A fundamental break highlighting the flaw in thinking hunchbacks becoming soldiers will see you out?
Thunderworld Adventures #1: Sivanas of dozens of realities turn the Rock of Eternity into generic office space and lock the Wizard, Shazam, in a big birdcage of grid and bolts.
The Multiversity Guidebook #1: The tomb of the shattered Darkseid, its doors broken open from the inside. Unless, we count the table of contents as a page, in which case, it’s arriving at the island, excited, to find the tomb and its being open from the inside.
(The best of maps are still just maps.)
Mastermen #1: The nightmare of Overman, featuring Lord Broken, a collapsing, yonic-phallic house of madness. Dream-Overman posted to reflect a scene of trauma that some readers may feel nostalgic towards. As, Overman may be nostalgic for the traumas.
Lena tells Overman that his nightmare is not so strange, and is this because she is similarly haunted?
Maybe, the trick is that they are always knocking on the door?
Ultra Comics #1: Ultra Comics online and active with your conscious merging and submerging into the emergent and regurgitant life form called, Ultra Comics.
The launch right before the real (fiction within fiction) story begins
The Multiversity #2: Heroes collected from Earths 19 and 11 arrive amidst the heroes of dozens of Earths, in the House of Heroes out in the sea of imagination. Unseen, and unnoticed in that moment, the Hellmachine monster is actively putting the bite on the entire House from outside.
(Like Overman, we and the heroes do not always to understand, this is not always (immediately or ultimately) about us.)
If these pages do not mean what they are implied to mean, or what we believe is implied in meaning, we are studying! We are learning! And, we are seeing how a structural conceit can be deployed across multiple genre, multiple tones and types of story.
And, then we remember Pax Americana runs in reverse. A staccato reverse, but let’s play. Pages twelve and thirteen and knock knock.