52 New Thoughts on The Multiversity Pt 2
52 New Thoughts on The Multiversity Pt 2
Here we go! (See here for the previous.)
1 Why does Allen Adam say this? “The last book my dad wrote and drew…” That is a comic authored by President Vince Harley’s father. Is he reading Harley’s thought balloons? Has he switched with Harley? Is he Harley?
2 A review of The Multiversity which upset more fans than any, was Kelly Kanayama’s They Make Us Like Them: On Identity and Gentrification, which began, “I am a foreigner and an ethnic minority.”
The comic went to lengths to show worlds with familiar white male faces and specifically (to each world) how nonwhite faces, how queer, how non-male faces can be buried, obscured, erased, hidden over, yet also still be made integral part of the machine of society or story. This is why Judomaster complains of their racist government-assigned costume or the Batman of Nazi-ruled Earth 10, Leatherwing, not only feels he and his aristocratic family have nothing to feel bad about re minorities or the disenfranchised, his grandfather is DC Comics “good German” Hans Von Hammer, the Enemy Ace who, in many other comics, on our Earth, has heroically served the German Air Force from roughly 1914 to 1945 (ignoring instances of time travel).
Mastermen, set in Germany and then a United States ruled by Nazis for nearly a century, and the only full-length story in The Multiversity penciled by a nonwhite artist, was referred to by some as, “fluff,” or having nothing relevant to say about contemporary society.
The two-part wraparound story spends its eighty pages highlighting characters who are Black, Aborigine, gay, women, as well as aliens and talking cartoon rabbits given amusing realistic overhauls. Because it took until the second part for the heroes to have many big hero moments, this was criticized as an exercise in showing these characters as weak and defatigable.
Some people were bothered by the racial politics of Society of Super-Heroes before or after realizing Doc Fate is Black. Some argued that, simply judging by the color of his skin in panels in which his skin is shown to us is not enough for us to say that Fate is Black.
3 The denizens of Apokalips and New Genesis are, perhaps foremost, ideas. Whether they are New Gods, “Gods,” or simply indigenous life to those worlds, they are idea-complexes. Memes. Mercury and Savitar as emanations of Fastbak, a new god, but so are the DC Comics supervillain Savitar (otherwise, largely unrelated), and me when I am being impatient or headstrong.
The New Genesis gods have a direct line to Earth 51, and emanations in all the Earths, while Darkseid appears to have a direct line into Earth 6, the “Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating…” universe, with its principle (and principal) villain, Reverend Darrk of the Church of Empowerment.
Are the emanations a form of, or are they forming moral relativity? Or, is it a mistake to moralize differences which might be closer to how each issue of The Multiversity can have multiple titles; The Multiversity/The Society of Super-Heroes/Conquerors of the Counter-World/The Just/#earthme; Pax Americana/In Which We Burn; Thunderworld Adventures/Captain Marvel and the Day That Never Was;Guidebook/Maps and Legends;Mastermen/splendour falls;Ultra Comics/Ultra Comics Lives!/…Out of His Box!.
Moralizing the fiery heads, the flaming seraphim haunting the liminal space of the Sphere of the Gods with no evidence, when most even astute readers fail to notice or do not remember they are there.
4 One of my favorite Superman comics is Gene Colan and Steve Gerber’s Phantom Zone (and its coda, drawn by Rick Veitch), in which the ethics of imprisoning people in this “ghost zone” of eternal un-aging, timeless time and blank space is questioned, and we are introduced to some key facts.
The Phantom Zone is right at the edge of existence before it becomes, first, oneness, and then nothingness. This is done by a demon/daemon/just-a-bat-looking-alien, called Aethyr or the Oversoul.
Aethyr refers to not necessary as a god, but, “As the red sun was to the priests of Rao. As the burning bush was to Moses.” And, when you are in the territory of Aethyr, it is Aethyr you become. A Choronzon you catch like a yawn. Not only your body or soul or mind, but your very definition is subsumed and sublimed.
This is the place that Superman’s father, Jor-El, decided to start locking people away because they were too dangerous or too offensive to society, and when Krypton blew up, these prisoners were left imprisoned and most remain there to this day.
On the map of the multiverse which is included in The Multiversity, this Phantom Zone is identified as The Land of No Return from World’s Finest #140 (home of the Gnorl!), the Underworld, in fact, all underworlds that are not explicitly the Christian Hell. Wild, huh?
Underworld’s short-term repetitions and flickering confusion, from Ereshkigal’s family dementia to the Goblin Markets, cupped by the transversable knot, a lazy chain, Limbo, cuing us to look at New Genesis, Hell, Heaven, et al, as similarly non-causal.
Not only does the map tell us Jor-El condemned people to a living post-death sentence, and show us an emblem in which, intriguingly, the chains holding closed the gates form the outline of the crest of El, the famous Superman S, but the map also makes it explicit how Christian the mechanics of the DC Universe is. Not relying on the implication of always having to invoke a “one above the other gods,” “one true god whose name cannot be said,” or having all the heroes, of any faith or politic gather in a Christian church in emergency or for any funeral, but right there on the map with their own special Hell and Heaven.
5 Apokalips & New Genesis can’t breach the Source Wall, but all the rest of the Realm of the Gods can.
This is less metaphysical or political and most of my observations here, I just find it terminally funny. The main reason, it seems, that they traditionally cannot, is that it is tradition. It’s their role. Their definition. And, remember, if you go past a point, into that void that is not a void, which holds us all, you lose your definition.
Archetrope.
6 Reading the comic will not tell us who the blonde woman is. Her design is new, but resembles somewhat Avia and somewhat Marvel Comics’ Susan Storm Richards, the Invisible Woman (née Girl). She could be Avia, who traditionally has been dead since before we begin to read any New Gods stories.
Avia might be dead in the way that Persephone is dead or Orion, or gods such as Zagreus, Osiris, Baldr, or Yeshua ben Josef.
Or, this could be Bekka or Atinai (the new Gods of Firm Ties and Building/Architecture, respectively). I like that, too. I also like not knowing. Maybe it is Susan Richards.
If it is Avia, it begs us to ask a question never satisfactorily answered: What is the idea of Avia? What is Avia about? What does she represent?
7 Avia being dead/not dead (if it is Avia), like Darkseid being dead and not dead, like the dear dog and his duplicate, potential Overgirl clones, legacy heroes and descendants and alternate reality versions, Harbinger, Nix Uotan, Ultra Comics, Janus, etc, reflect like spectra on the House of Heroes and its Valhalla-like other name, Valla-Hal.
An etymology of Valhalla, traditionally considered Hall of Slain Heroes, might well be, “Murder Rock.” The Immortal Man, “Anthro,” just like his “bad” alternate reality double, made a weapon to kill out of a magic fallen stone from the sky. Did Peacemaker kill a copy of President Harley, akin to the doubled dead dog?
With Avia, we can check backmatter in some collected editions and yes, she is Avia.
With Harley, we have no clues, only cues. We have very few knowns, at most expectations and suppositions based more on rhyme than reason.
Speculation with Harley comes from the blank face of the Question, the blank slate of Adam Allen (and his blue pyjamas).
Speculation with Avia is because there are simply very few slots given over to women, and minorities always represent based on that minor status.
8 I think because the map is flat, we forget it is a flat projection of a five-dimensional orrery. There are orbits described on the map. Even if we reduce to three dimensions, or add in time - progress and history - there are arcs which the elements commit to and there is wobble, waft, and wandering, too. They do not all more parallel, but crossways to other elements. There are formed rings and crossings and ellipses.
At the center of the map, in the heart of the orrery, things are also eternal and eternally changeable. “Guts of a cyborg interiors,” these constantly-changing arrangements are called. The Rock of Ages seems dragged from its place at the center to its place at the center. These are not measures (only) of distance, resting in liquid imagination in (perhaps) every relation to the House of Heroes, and forming, on the map, a semblance of compass rose or a needle and dial.
9 The implication of the Gnorl coming from the Underworld is that the place all the humans stolen over history and taken to its home are in the Land of the Dead and choose to stay there, but also that the two meteors which land early on Earths 20 and 40 to war are potentially akin to the meteors which encouraged the two cultures of that land to feud.
“For I desired loyal love, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God [daath Elohim] more than burnt offerings.”
Daath Elohim. Whose number is eleven.
In Jewish numerology, eight spreads evenly over the surface (like the eight pattern of the comics of The Multiversity). Nine implies fruitfulness, the womb, the readiness, and that there is something divine beyond. Ten, which we can derive adding up the numerals in U-235, which transformed a “normal” man into Captain Atom, which we can derive adding up the numerals of the year 2008, so pertinent to Pax Americana, is the number of divine order, completed cycle and measure. Eight, the number of the strings in each corner of a prayer shawl, of Christ and Athena, Atman and enigma.
“The gospel of John records eleven very special promises.” In which one stands with one.
Treated as a purely structural conceit, read as cold, satirical, callous observations, I find myself deeply emotional revisiting any of the issues. If not an emotional realism, an emotional truth, especially in the parts some other smart readers considered the most distanced; The artists and children of The Just or the frauds and hypocrites of Mastermen.
10 Every comic making up The Multiversity has a few things which simultaneously seem to haunt and embolden us. The Eye. The Atom. The Eye of Giaour. The Mighty Atom. Nuclear war in 1963. Eldritch rent collectors looking into the wallet of your soul.
By the time we hit The Just, we ought to know to look closer. Not necessarily deeper or more critically. Just closer.
The atom is a system (in systems), but if we look only at valences and orbits, we miss the splendor and the threat of atomic power, the corruption and blessing of atomic weight in permitting our love stories and family legacies.
Any fictional world must be taken on its own rules, its own physics and functions, and also as a reflection or commentary on our world’s as we understand them.
If the world of The Multiversity is not one universe or one Earth but a multitude and beyond, around, under and through, we must respect that. If it is deliberately arranged by a TONALity, we must respect that.
How worlds are arranged top to bottom on the map, their orbits, their respective assigned number, their arc or asterism, where they fall on the left or right of the scale which represent a cartoonish dark and light, the range betwixt Pit and Pinnacle.
Rian Hughes is an undersold hero of DC Comics creation, and the Multiversity map has encouraged stories via its backside, or when it’s coffee-stained from active use. Even with routine adjustment and intense negotiation, it remains an elegant product (that DC still does not place Tellos on, where it belongs, at the bottom opposite Wonder World).
Coming in from the top right, there is a straight line from the Heaven siphon touching Earths 5, 20, 30 and 49, all of which can be “someone’s idea of Heaven.” Earth Child-Labour Largesse. Earth Cold War is Won by Genius Businessmen. Earth Pulp Positivism. And, a mystery Earth, with 49.
But, because of the orbits, those Earths can and do rotate out, meaning the siphon of instigation onto imagination comes across potentially all the orbits as they make their way.
It is not that these are concrete rules of ethics or moralizing, but that it makes interesting prompts. It is interesting to think about.
11 It is a brilliant observation by Morrison that the original Captain Marvel franchise comics were intended to be of a higher artistic calibre than their contemporaries. Thunderworld Adventures, especially with its Adventures title, harkens, too, to 1990s for-kids cartoon tie-ins, re-presenting comics superheroes as they had been filtered through animation while other comics (ostensibly) took them in more commercially adult territory.
12 In a kind of opposition to Mastermen and its poorly-reproduced cover kept under glass in a gaudy (Nazi) frame, Thunderworld Adventures comes, like that special issue of RAW, pre-ruined just for you! The cover, wonderfully, crisply printed, has faux smudges, trompe l'oeil creasing. Early proposals were for a chrome cover, reflective of the 1990s explosion of novelty covers which might be metalic, embossed, fitted with holograms or holofoil, et ceta, but implying the comic is well-loved and well-read does just as much of the trick. And, if you catch yourself trying to smooth it out or clean it off, not just better; best!
13 The use of pre-suasion and other hypnosis and push techniques go back in comics well past Stan Lee, but oh boy could Stan Lee talk a game, and in prose, convince you he was talking a game to you. What can be forgotten, though, is that Silver Age Flash and Green Lantern comics also directly spoke to, and lulled the reader, using chummy language or friendly guiding hands, which The Multiversity will adopt.
It is a misstep to confuse chumminess with intimacy, but you also don’t want to lay your head on someone’s chest and hear the blood and the pump and the breathing and the person and think only of the mechanics or, “Oh, they are alive.”
14 Ultra Comics is not just a pastiche comic, it is a pastiche of pastiche comics. That we sometimes cannot keep in our thoughts that Ultra Comics is only a comic in our hands and we, reading it, are the story, is the same fate (and same fata morgana) as proxy and copy characters like Knight Watchman, Wandjina, the Inedible Bulk, Octopus and Supreme. Octopus is his own guy. Knight Watchman is a person. Supreme is like a hundred guys (and three women, and a mouse). Ultra Comics keeps being his own person and us and us keep being our own people, and becoming. The worlds shown in Ultra Comics, too.
15 The whole is so Roy Thomas, but it is also very akin to a set of books you could pick up off the shelf in the late 1970s or early 80s, when it was still mostly superhero comics in the US, but there would be a war comic, a western, a WW2 period team book, a kiddie comic, a handbook…
Thomas, too, has been a fan of the foreword or afterword; the informative essay. The backmatter and the front become as integral as the Gladstone note that Carl Barks is as important as Donald Duck and his uncle Scrooge.
These are longhair hippie comics from the flouncy-punk bald realm. Grant Morrison filtering a particular era of their own youth through contemporary concerns and conceits the same way the talent of that era of DC (and Marvel, et cetera) did for themselves and for audiences then.
16 Almost every reality in the Guidebook being riffs on standard DC Comics superheroes - just Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, et al with different paint jobs or themes - is often treated as a flaw in the narrative and not indicative of critique.
17 Howard Chaykin mused on having an Earth for his work in a Grant Morrison comic, but for awhile he was going to have two! Depending on how you count, Mark Millar has one, two, five!
In dreams begin responsibilities and other stories. We, like Delmore Schwartz, are maybe stewards.
A shared universe that is corporate-owned, with multiple writers, pencilers, inkers, editors, publishers, regimes and agendas over decades means that not every aspect comes from a friend or someone still a friend; not everything that counts is something you like. Not everything you like comes via somebody you like.
18 The Crisis (and what a Crisis is) is my favorite aspect which makes the DC Universe unique (though other universes and companies can have them). The layer of Crises atop and the weaving of Crises through Crises makes The Multiversity very special to me.
19 Ironically, while The Multiversity deals heavily with everyone wanting more, wanting the next payment, the next comic, next big thing, The Multiversity is not great if your measure for quality or enjoyment is what this changes about the broader DC Comics Universe or whether it has a lot of spin-offs to read after. It’s incredibly self-contained as far as serial comics shared universe stuff, and very not in many other ways. What is locked in? What is “self-contained”?
Is Captain Atom not Allen Adam? Is Captain Atom, Vince Harley? Is Allen Adam, Vince Harley?
Is Vince Harley a second Question, who knows the secret code to the world they live in and is trying to prod others to also understanding it?
Is the President of the United States assassinated in Pax Americana’s opening pages, or is that a copy, like the second dog after the first was killed to make an obsolete point?
The Multiversity is not as self-constrained as it might seem, though, and there were ample opportunities afforded to follow up the single issue stories, the wraparound agenda of Justice Incarnate; a myriad of potential tales set in any of the many worlds. The Guidebook takes specific care to tilt worlds towards story angles, to present frisson which could manifest in complex narrative hooks, some of which DC saw fit to erase when reproducing the material elsewhere, taking out a “terrorist” here or a thorny implication there.
20 One of the emergent structures made of emergent structures I like is the sense of typified human maturation. Dawning awareness of self/not-self, pre-pubescent sexuality, teen angst, cynical adulthood, followed by everything that’s being older than twenty-two. Except, like polymorphous perversity or psychosexual stages, they can and will be replicated, repeated, reiterated, re-weirded throughout our lives.
The Sphere of the Gods is not an absolute or even sensible in an articulate way. Dream and Nightmare are the same territory, why are they diametric opposites? Why does Dream(/Nightmare) hold the archetypes of Death, of Desire and Delirium? Why are we moralizing Dream or Destruction or Death?
So within, so out. Up to down, down to up, round to round and sparks. This town ain’t big enough for the both of us? When do I get to sing My Way? The number one song in Heaven? The Multiversity grows with us, or through us, as we as audience manipulate the material at least as much as any material can direct us.
Daath is not knowing a calculation, if it is knowing a feeling.
Those colorful calculations the Question puts faith in, in In Which We Burn?, a comic with a title paraphrasing Delmore Schwartz, who was born on an eighth and died on an eleventh, might function best as feels. Not even feelings, but feels. If we took an eight-story collection of Schwartz’s and laid it over or parallel to The Multiversity, would we find In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories to be revelatory?
Do we find a progress in In Which We Burn or #earthme from instinct to contemplation, in the animistic magic of Conquerors to the egocentrism and exploitation of earth, the integrative visualization-meditation engaged in during Out? Is it better to die yellow or be dyed cyan and magenta and yellow? Or, did I miscount?
What counts in feels?
“I'm in distress, I need a caress
”What do I get?”