tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22073066.post4241658586060164078..comments2023-06-03T06:16:38.027-04:00Comments on Estoreal: New universes will be born from oursRichardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01714171897239398438noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22073066.post-28977836120816670462007-05-10T06:04:00.000-04:002007-05-10T06:04:00.000-04:00Ah, see, I loved the immediate post-Crisis univers...Ah, see, I <I>loved</I> the immediate post-Crisis universe just because of that very thing...the haphazard re-emergence of old DC elements, characters, storylines, etc., that were sometimes mostly in their old familiar form, but sometimes totally different. To take a half-QM, half-yellow-alien point of view on it, it was as if the change wrought by the multiverse being condensed into one world didn't take place until it took place detail-by-detail...didn't take place, in other words, until it was observed working itself out in the comics themselves. A similar thing can be found in U.S. law, weirdly enough: there's just one Amendment to the Constitution (the Sixteenth? I really can't remember) that permits the National law to displace State laws that are at variance with it, so constitutionality poured out only fairly slowly through that "aperture" from the national government, and into general legality. Case by case. It's very interesting, the American Constitution is a really amazing little program! In Canada we've gotten to see our (relatively new) Charter of Rights and Freedoms pour out in a similar way, although for some reason in our case I always think of it <I>worming</I> its way through the body of the law...since you've got such a head start on us, there's very little in your law which hasn't already been flavoured with constitutionality, but up here there are still lots of old systems which haven't yet been introduced to the concept at all, that putter along happily thinking it's still 1981, that don't know one day a litmus test will be applied to them. But, what'll happen to each of them when it <I>is</I> applied, nobody yet knows. And, sorry for the digression, but that's a bit like how I saw the post-Crisis time, too: Crisis as a worm that moved through the corpus of DC continuities, changing all the details, but only on a case-by-case basis as it encountered them. And: God bless Chaos! At least that's what I thought at the time. I was sure that a very weird and kind of exciting order could've silted out of it all eventually, right before my eyes, as larger and larger connections were made, and different ways the new DCU worked proved incommensurate with each other, and had to be cleverly fixed-up...again, case by case.<BR/><BR/>But then, of course, that didn't happen.<BR/><BR/>Weird, huh? I thought all that long before Mr. Mind came on the scene...<BR/><BR/>But one thing I never thought of is Clark Kent and Louise Lasser! Those would have been <I>wild</I> Superman movies...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22073066.post-15561616182707494812007-05-10T01:11:00.000-04:002007-05-10T01:11:00.000-04:00plok: yeah, Marvel and DC traditionally approached...plok: yeah, Marvel and DC traditionally approached the concept of parallel universes in slightly different ways. And as a result, just listing Marvel's alternate histories took up an entire issue of the <I>Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe</I>...many years after Alan Moore was prompted to designate the official Marvel setting as Earth-616. In fairness, <I>What If?</I> was simply Roy Thomas doing what DC had been calling "imaginary stories" for many years, and things at DC would have gotten unwieldy if Mort Weisinger had suddenly decreed "the world in which Superman married Lori Lemaris is Earth-176, and the world in which Clark Kent married Louise Lasser because he was confused by her initials is Earth-981..." <BR/><BR/>But generally, maybe it would be fair to say that Marvel's focus in its parallel Earths was "the same people in different circumstances after a clearly defined historical divergence" while DC went for "different people who have the same conceptual qualities" and/or "a way to use other companies' characters without them cluttering up our rack space." <BR/><BR/>(Hmm, would that make the Ultimate Marvel line a sort of Earth-1/Earth-2 bifurcation? I can't be the first person to draw that parallel...)<BR/><BR/>rob!: Modesty's all well and good, but the evidence says you were a bright kid. (I am admittedly biased in my estimation by my fanboy love for <A HREF="http://namtab.com/" REL="nofollow">your artwork</A>.) Still, I figure if <I>I</I> wasn't confused by that Flash comic when I was six, how confusing can the idea be?<BR/><BR/>What I <I>did</I> find confusing was how the Crisis was followed immediately by the Byrne revamp of Superman with no attempt to reconcile the two -- even though we'd been expressly told greater coherence was the whole point of the universe-shattering. (I knew people who were in DC editorial at the time, and they were confused too...) If it hadn't been for that, the Hawkman and Aquaman stuff wouldn't have happened that way either.Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01714171897239398438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22073066.post-51199066211816585812007-05-09T18:54:00.000-04:002007-05-09T18:54:00.000-04:00i know Crisis was meant to make things simpler, bu...i know Crisis was meant to make things simpler, but as a wee lad i had NO problem following the whole Earth 1, Earth 2 thing, and i dont think i was that bright a kid.<BR/><BR/>whatever good intentions Crisis was done under was completely upended when DC started letting every creative team reboot a character to suit their whims. Hawkworld? Aquaman is the son of Neptune?? WTF?rob!https://www.blogger.com/profile/17556471244882205031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22073066.post-18891462052901787662007-05-09T01:54:00.000-04:002007-05-09T01:54:00.000-04:00I've always liked alternate universes, too -- but ...I've always liked alternate universes, too -- but I've always mistrusted the many-worlds intepretation of QM, and found it oddly inelegant. Or, should that be "and oddly, found it inelegant"?<BR/><BR/>And never more so than in the fantasy setting of comic books. Like time-travel, alternate universes began as a <I>literary</I> conceit, and not a physical theory...in my opinion, obviously, but anyway I think that's what makes the meeting-with-analogues thing so great, not that they're "usses" that might have been, but that they're mirrors for our qualities.<BR/><BR/>Not that I don't think those two things go well together, because they do...<BR/><BR/>But in any case, that's something I like about DC's multiverse that I don't like about Marvel's: it's not simply built on "for every action, a different universe."<BR/><BR/>Well, of course Marvel's multiverse isn't always that way, either...you've got your Arkon, you've got your Dragon Lords...and <I>they</I> aren't just the quantum permutations resulting from Sue Storm calling Ben Grimm a coward...<BR/><BR/>Nice post, RAB! Makes me want to go write one of my own...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22073066.post-14746464433972846332007-05-09T01:32:00.000-04:002007-05-09T01:32:00.000-04:00Thanks for the kind words! And you mentioning Hei...Thanks for the kind words! And you mentioning Heinlein reminds me that I failed to mention any of the prose SF that used encounters between parallel Earths in interesting ways, my favorite being <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_of_the_Quantum_Cats" REL="nofollow">The Coming of the Quantum Cats</A> by Frederik Pohl. <BR/><BR/>But Heinlein worked that area too, in that very strange trio of novels he wrote at the end of his career -- starting with <I>The Number of the Beast</I> -- in which characters from alternate histories from several of his previous novels met and cavorted with one another. In a way, having folks from <I>Stranger in a Strange Land</I> meeting folks from the Future History wasn't a million miles removed from the idea of having the JLA meet the JSA for the first time, just in the sense of preexisting characters and realities being brought together in a subsequent work. <BR/><BR/>(And by the gods of the internet, let's see if just this once we can mention Heinlein without anyone using the words "incest" or "fascist," okay?)Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01714171897239398438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22073066.post-15998256064174003802007-05-08T23:36:00.000-04:002007-05-08T23:36:00.000-04:00Your well-written essay has hit so many of the poi...Your well-written essay has hit so many of the points I have thought about regarding the whole multiple-earths business. I can remember, way back when, Heinlein complaining about how strict adherence to his then-novel "future history" was getting in the way of his writing good stories. Let's just focus on the stories, and not obsess over the chart.<BR/><BR/>I am a great big fanboy for alternate histories myself, even more so than parallel world stories, which I why I loved the Elseworlds stuff before it was cheapened by overuse and lack of standards into something akin to most of Marvel's "What If" junk.Walakahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01320268370872417847noreply@blogger.com