So, not much going on with DC these days, huh? Nothing like (oh, I don’t know…) the possible return of Earth-2?!?

Last week I wrote about the Justice Society having lost its proper place after Crisis on Infinite Earths smooshed everything together. Dividing characters between parallel Earths would certainly restore the JSA to some kind of number-one status, or at least the status it had before the end of Crisis #10.

However, once you start with the parallel Earths, it’s hard to stop. Earth-3 has already made its post-Crisis comeback, thanks to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, and Earth-4 (home of the Charlton heroes) never really had a chance to get going, Alan Moore’s plans for it notwithstanding. The fourth universe merged was the home of Earth-X, where the Nazis won World War II and ruled for decades, until they were overthrown by the Justice League, Justice Society, and another group of ex-Earth-2 heroes (originally published by Quality Comics) who called themselves the Freedom Fighters. Now, I like to see superheroes beating up on Nazis as much as the next guy, but I don’t know that I need a whole planet devoted to it, so I don’t have to have Earth-X back.

That leaves Earth-S, home of the Marvel Family and the other ex-Fawcett Comics characters. This is a world I wouldn’t mind seeing again, considering that DC hasn’t really known what to do with Captain Marvel for the past twenty years. Originally, when DC revived Cap and his friends in the early ‘70s, the multiverse made things simple: everything happened on Earth-S, so it didn’t have to jibe with Earth-1 or Earth-2 history. Billy Batson still met Shazam in 1940 and still had adventures into the 1950s. In the first issue of the DC revival, Billy and company had made it to the 1970s, but their lack of aging was explained by having them trapped in “Suspendium,” a substance that put them into stasis for twenty-odd years. Simple, eh? Besides, the tone of the Marvel Familiy books lent itself to (shall we say) more whimsy than your average DC or Marvel title. In other words, DC could get away with saying simply that “things were different” on Earth-S.

Indeed, Captain Marvel may well be a character whose differences favor separating him from the rest of DC’s characters. Maybe I’ve been influenced too much by Miracleman (and Superfolks and Kingdom Come), but imposing real-world concerns — chief among them aging and, especially, adolescence — on a wish-fulfillment character tends to be no good for the character. It’s like asking Charlie Brown to mature alongside Jason Todd and Tim Drake. DC is obviously trying to have things both ways with the always-upcoming Jeff Smith miniseries and the “serious Judd Winick redefinition,” so maybe sales will determine ultimately whether whimsy beats realism.

And speaking of the business side of things, just to get this out of my system I’m going to take a page from another You Play DC-God event. [Disclaimer: I haven’t read all of the discussion, so if it looks like I took your idea, I probably didn’t, but sorry anyway.]

Changing the creative team on the Flash book seems to be pretty popular, and I’d do that too, with James Robinson writing and Karl Kerschl drawing. I’d bring Dan Slott and Rick Burchett over from She-Hulk to Nightwing, and once 52 is finished, I’d have Grant Morrison and Mark Waid alternate storylines on Superman/Batman, with their old JLA artist Howard Porter drawing.

Not sure if I’d add new titles as much as I would change the focus of existing ones. These are all anthologies anyway, so changing creative teams is a given. I’d make JLA Classified and JSA Classified retro-only books, with each barred from using any lineup that was less than ten years old. Each would also be free to do multiversal stories (whether or not Earth-2 returns “officially”), and the Annuals would be perfect opportunities for JLA/JSA crossovers. I’d do the same thing with Legends of the Dark Knight, with no stories that could have been published in the past ten years, at least one issue a year set in the ‘50s sci-fi period, and another set in the “New Look” of the ‘60s. Clearly, I am all about the retro.

Actually, I guess I would add one new series — that Shazam! title, set on Earth-S as described above – and it would only cost DC the cancellation of Outsiders.

Having grown up with the multiverse, and having returned to comics just in time to see it retired, I’m not really moved one way or the other by the thought that at least part of it might be returning.  I liked the idea of Hypertime, because it reopened the storytelling possibilities that I thought COIE closed off, while appearing to fit within the structure COIE created.  Besides, along the way DC kept finding ways to squeeze parallel Earths through loopholes and back doors, mostly for crossovers with Milestone, WildStorm, and Marvel.  Undoing one of the major reorganizations of Crisis on Infinite Earths is definitely a bigger step, but DC could do worse by the Golden Age characters than giving them their old home back.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Comic Books, DC Comics, Grumpy Old Fan, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.