So I’ve been thinking about how DC could use its multiverse to transition from its current setup into a more flexible arrangement, and after I saw the Colorforms spread done up as a double-page ad for Countdown in this week’s books, I think it may actually be doing just that.

The old Multiverse pretty much had one heroic cycle per Earth. The Earth-1 cycle was necessarily open-ended.  Some stopped and started, as on Earth-S, where the characters spent some time in limbo (actually, “Suspendium”) before being revived to interact with the other Earths.  Depending on how you looked at it, the cycle on Earth-2 either ended in 1951, when the Justice Society was forced underground, or it just slacked off because Superman, Batman and Robin, and Wonder Woman were still active. Either way, things got going again in 1962 when the Flash was revived by his Earth-1 counterpart and the Justice Society re-emerged soon after.

By and large, all the Earths except Earth-1 could take their timelines from real-world publishing histories. Earth-1 might have proceeded in real time at first, but it had definitely committed to a more flexible approach when Dick Grayson left Wayne Manor for Hudson University in 1969. By establishing Dick as being of a certain age, that event both put him beyond the sort of indeterminate-teen he had been for the past 29 years, and indicated that before too long, he might be too old for sidekick status. Having Dick develop into Nightwing in the early ’80s put him into another indeterminate-twenties phase, and let Jason Todd take over the indeterminate-teen role.

The key word there is, of course, “indeterminate.” It worked fine for Earth-1 from the Silver Age through Crisis On Infinite Earths, because Earth-1 followed much the same timeline approach as its Marvel counterpart, and Marvel’s apparently managed its timeline pretty well. Marvel-Earth only has one cycle to take care of.  It proceeded in real time long enough to get Peter Parker and Johnny Storm into college, and now just has to keep them in their indeterminate twenties (or is it thirties by now?) while maintainng Franklin and Valeria Richards as indeterminate preschoolers.

The COIE merge produced a two-cycle DC-Earth, where (without a Big Three to keep going through the ’50s) a Golden Age definitely ended in 1951, and a second cycle began some “12-13 years ago.” As on Earth-2, the Golden Age stories were placed in the timeline largely in accordance with their publication, and the second cycle continued to take a flexible approach for thirty years’ worth of stories from the mid-1950s to the then-current mid-’80s. Of course, Marvel-Earth had its own Golden Age cycle, but the difference was that its Golden Age was pretty much the source of backstory for Captain America, Nick Fury, and Namor. By contrast, DC had been getting a lot more out of its Golden Age since 1962, and those connections would just get stronger.

It’s not unreasonable to speculate that the Crisis-facilitated revamps of 1986-87 were actually the beginning of a third cycle. Although COIE had little immediate effect on many titles, those revamps introduced new versions of Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Batman, Robin, and the Justice League. At the time it didn’t feel like much of a difference, but in hindsight it might well have been, especially with some of the sendoffs the Earth-1 versions had gotten. To a lesser degree, Infinite Crisis produced a similar transition last year.

The problem is that although DC keeps putting itself through these line-wide housecleanings, it hasn’t done much for the structure itself. To torture the metaphor further, more people keep moving in, but the house never gets any bigger, and nobody wants to throw away any of the elderly relatives’ stuff. To be sure, when it cleaned house with COIE, DC supplied endings for many of the characters it later revamped. Some of these were imaginary (”Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?”), some were symbolic (Batman #400), and some were technicalities (Wonder Woman’s reversion to clay at the end of Crisis #12), but they all offered real closure. For a genre built on an eternal now, that’s a big deal, and it’s understandable if DC doesn’t want to go through it all that often.

Still, not going through it that often, in favor of sustaining the eternal now, has produced a cycle that (arguably) started over fifty years ago and now includes three generations of its own characters, with a fourth incorporated from the Golden Age.  It’s not really a matter of complicated continuity — it’s more that even under a flexible timeline, characters are getting close to the ceilings of their intermediate ages.  I’ve mentioned before that Tim Drake and the other Teen Titans should probably be college-age soon, if not already, and the surviving Golden Age characters aren’t too far (relatively speaking) from their hundredth birthdays.  Those are the youngest and oldest generations, obviously, but the issues with their ages also affect the middle generations.  If the Dick Grayson generation is in its mid-to-late twenties, the Bruce Wayne generation should be in its late 30s and early 40s.  That matches up eerily well with the current direct-market demographic, but after a while it starts to affect the kinds of stories DC can tell about these characters.  If Tim Drake and Cassie Sandsmark continue to age, no matter how slowly, at some point readers might well expect them to face the same kinds of issues their predecessors did.  Does Tim become a new Nightwing, or give up Robin so he can train to be the next Batman?  Does Cassie change her name to Fury?  Do either of them simply retire so that DC can tell stories about a new group of fifth-generation characters demonstrably in their teens?  The creative teams on the Batman books and New Teen Titans faced these issues with Dick Grayson in the early ’80s, but eventually DC will have to go through it all again on a much larger scale.

Again, allowing the cycle to end — really end, as the Golden Age did — frees creative teams to make those kinds of decisions that take the characters in new, but appropriate, directions.  I hadn’t thought that DC would do such a thing with its current titles, but now I’m not so sure.  It seems like DC’s ready for some major changes, with the new weekly Countdown being the last transitory step before it all hits. Countdown will end in May 2008, sixty-nine years and eleven months after the most famous cover date in DC history. It might not be a perfectly accurate anniversary, but I’d be very surprised if DC didn’t use June 2008 both to celebrate Superman’s 70th anniversary, and to introduce its newest cycle.  The multiverse would be a natural vehicle for a new Earth, because the focus would just shift from the one we’re all watching now to a pristine new Big Rock Candy Mountain of a place that the lifers will love and those long-awaited new readers will devour.  More importantly, it would let those of us who were so inclined, finally say goodbye (or “until we meet again”) to the old DC-Earth — no soft reboots, no One Year Laters, and real closure. 

Back before Identity Crisis started, when the Internet was full of similar chatter about Big Changes, I didn’t buy it, because not long afterwards the return of Hal Jordan was announced and I didn’t think Hal would come back just in time to be rebooted again.  Now, however, it feels like all the shakeups, comebacks, and unpleasantness of the past three years have been gearing up for whatever waits after Countdown #0.  I know that sounds like too much Kool-Aid in my system, and I have had a lot of sugar today, but this makes a crazy kind of sense where the others didn’t.  It’s like bringing back Hal and Donna Troy and Jason Todd has gotten us used to them, because they’re part of (forgive me for abusing the Kirby phrase) The World That’s Coming, and we shouldn’t be surprised when they’re there too.  I’d like to think all the blood and death is actually to make us a little glad to leave the current DC-Earth behind, but sadly I think it’s just something DC hasn’t minded doing.  Obviously I’d hope DC leaves a lot of that behind if it retires the current cycle.

Hmm … it all sounds very Ultimate-like, doesn’t it?  DC probably wouldn’t do such a thing in light of its All-Star books and animated continuities, which serve much the same purpose. 

Oh well.  I’m probably wrong about this too, and Countdown will lead into Legends of the Infinite Millennium Giants’ Genesis, and that’ll last seven issues over nine months and lead into Weekly Multiverse News – but I can see the present DC-Earth, battered and patched and tweaked over twenty-plus years of Zero Hours and Kingdoms and Crises, fading in the distance as a strangely familiar Scarlet Speedster gets us all used to a shiny new vibratory frequency….

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under DC Comics, Grumpy Old Fan, Version 1.0 Blog@. 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.