However, I’m more of a Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein fan….

I think “there aren’t a lot of B-list Titans left to kill” was actually the name of a rejected summer crossover from a few years back…

I think that the grafting of pre-existing worlds works better when those worlds are more fleshed-out–the Bruce Timm animated DCU, for instance. Now that would make for some entertaining crossovers.

By that logic, the original Multiverse was “creative laziness” also. The old multiverse was created in the exact same way as the new one. They had the rights to the Quality characters, so putting those established characters in a story had more impact than making up new ones nobody has heard of. They had the rights to the Fawcett characters, so having Captain Marvel fight Superman is more exciting than making up a new guy to fight Superman. It’s the exact same thought process as Countdown: Arena.

As for the time differences, I don’t see the problem. The chronicles of Narnia had time differences between Earth and Narnia. I’ve read a bunch of other sci-fi novels that said parallel worlds don’t always match up in time lines. I’ve also read sci-fi novels where technological progress was slowed, making the 20th century in one universe look like the 18th century of another universe. And you know what? Pre-Crisis, Bruce Wayne on Earth 1 was decades after Bruce Wayne was born on Earth 2, so timeline fudging was in the original also.

The original Multiverse was made by taking pre-existing worlds and joining them together for the sake of telling stories. That’s exactly what’s happening with the current multiverse.

The only real issue is that they’ve said there is a limit of 52 universes. The fact that DC is using the same process of using established universes isn’t the issue, the inherently limited idea of only having 52 is the problem. Since the final issue of 52 had Rip Hunter mentioning a greater “megaverse”, I’m thinking that’s a temporary problem.

With Countdown, not only is the stitching showing, the stitching is all there is.

I guess that’s a way to look at it, Cole. But it really doesn’t seem that different from what DC did with the original multiverse. They added the Quality comics characters to the multiverse because they wanted another big event with the JLA and the JSA. That was a pre-existing universe retrofitted for the sake of one story. DC had to make several changes to their world to do it, just like DC has said that the world’s in the new multiverse aren’t exactly the same as what we saw in those original Elseworlds comics.

And the only thing that says these worlds can only sustain one story is that only one story has been told about them. Someone recently made a bunch of custom toys with the JLA characters done in the Gotham by Gaslight style. I looked at the Green Lantern toy and really wanted to see a story about that guy.

Does anyone really care one iota about Monarch or the Monitors? For all the sound and fury, there’s absolutely nothing recognizable at stake in any of the book’s plots. Any event with the potential to elicit human response is treated glibly–Ray Palmer’s snarkiness after watching all of his friends and wife die a couple weeks back was the nadir. If the characters themselves don’t care about anything that happens, why should we? The “spine” of the DCU is a book that defies you to give a shit about it–and by extension, the whole line.

Cole: Yep. I hope FC leads to a more familiar, infinite Multiverse.

And that’s a big part of why Countdown seems like such a waste. A handful of writers actually want to create new toys and set them loose in the shared universe, but editorial only knows how to create hype by junking stuff. Reading the DCU the past year has been like watching as a neighborhood destroys itself in a riot.