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Blended Universes

The comics medium once depicted costumed heroes who would lift getaway cars and fling them at fleeing gangsters. The occasional mad scientist might appear with some blackmail scheme; even more rarely, some early costumed supervillain might test his powers against those of the heroes. The events within a single comic book often involved little more than a personal duel between hero and villain, with stakes that seldom reached beyond the hero's adopted city.

By the Silver Age, superhero stories sometimes posited crises in which the whole world played hostage to a villain's machinations. Somewhere along the line the stakes had upped somewhat, and continued to increase. By 1971, the Kree-Skrull War would involve incidents that determined the fate of entire galaxies; by the mid-seventies, Captain Mar-Vell and Adam Warlock would vie against enemies whose evil reach enclosed multiple galaxies; by X-Men #137, a heroine gone bad would provide a menace that threatened the survival of the entire universe, and her threat did not represent the first of its kind (postdating the "Korvac Saga" in late-seventies Avengers).

By 1985, the fate of the universe seemed inadequate a consequence for a mega-crossover special, and stories began recurrently appearing that involved problems across several universes, particularly threats that might destroy all components of several "universes," describable as a "polyverse" or "multiverse."

In the context of such multi-universal incidents and catastrophes, writers began to consider the consequences of blending "alternate" superhero universes. In one case, this blending represented the goal of the efforts of the good guys; in other examples, it represented either a temporary fix to a larger problem or the symptom of the problem itself.

And, too soon, the "fused multiverse" would become a recurrent feature of superhero comics rather than a unique event.

Comics writers forget, it seems, that the difference in scale between the reader and what he reads can detach him from the story; that the reader has probably seen it before several times; and that a concept like the integrity and impermeability of the multiverse means much more to the guardians of copyrights than to the people who buy comics. If the quarantining of separate superhero stables, the general goal of the good guys in fused universe stories, meant anything to readers, they would seldom even bother with crossover events.

But folly never seems to happen just once....

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Popular culture scholars, if so oddly inclined, could create a new academic discipline called "Crisis on Infinite Earths studies" if they so chose, since one can say so much about it: one could waste endless hours detailing the supposed continuities of the Golden Age DC comics, plus each subsequent revision included in Silver Age stories, plus the consequences of the All-Star Comics of the seventies and All-Star Squadron of the eighties, plus the initial attempts to revise chronology after Crisis on Infinite Earths until DC decided to do it all again with Zero Hour: Crisis in Time.

I don't intend to provide any such encyclopedic record of this event. For one reason, old comics continuity matters much less than the culture of continuity lawyers supposes.

All one need know about Crisis involves the parallel universe model DC used to explain some details of its publishing history. DC needed a reason to explain the disappearance of most of the Golden Age superheroes and the continued youth of Golden Age creations like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, who by the sixties were crossing their twentieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries. I recall the name Gardner Fox as the author of the story in which the Silver Age Flash met his Golden Age prototype; in this work, readers discovered that the Justice Society heroes resided on the Earth-2 of a parallel universe.

DC used this argument to explain a number of acquisitions, such as the Fawcett and Quality heroes, and, from the sixties to the eighties had thoroughly entangled their continuity across several alternate earths (Earths 1, 2, 3, X, S, and occasional others). In 1985, DC decided to perform some overdue housekeeping.

Crisis on Infinite Earths detailed a multiuniversal event that destroyed the many alternate universes of DC continuity, involving a creeping wall of antimatter that obliterated everything it touched and the machinations of godlike cosmic beings such as the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor.

As the wave of antimatter reached the last few surviving universes, the defenders of the surviving worlds sought to bolster surviving reality by forcing these planets to meld into a single Earth. Then, chasing the problem through all of multiply-defined time and space, the army of superheroes fought it out with the minions of destruction. Superheroes who hadn't sold their recent books very well ended up dead, and at this point DC disposed of its Silver Age versions of the Flash and Supergirl.

The resulting carnage did away with a number of things DC had planned to abandon, including the doppelganger superheroes (the Earth-2 Superman, Wonder Woman, Robin, and such Golden Age heroes as had the same secret identities in both Golden and Silver Age incarnations) and also grafted together several surviving worlds that had escaped the destruction of the multiverse. This resulting conglomerate represented a revised history that returned the Justice Society to the same world that produced the Justice League. It also allowed DC the (often missed) opportunity to erase certain elements of storytelling baggage from central characters like Superman, who had bogged down in the sixties from a dozen types of Kryptonite, Superman robots, other Kryptonians, and too many other gimmicks to name.

The Crisis books only touched on the fused universe concept, because during one episode Earth-2 and Earth-1 characters found themselves out of context in a strangely blended conglomerate of both worlds; eventually the heroes saw this as the desired solution to universal or multiversal destruction.

DC, at the time, must have intended this event to occur exactly one time, but it would happen again and again in subsequent years.

Deathmate

As in Crisis, characters in the Image/Valiant crossover series Deathmate noticed the universe-scarfing menace of something that had combined the two superhero universes. However, this event happened with superhero properties about two years old each and one must wonder how many readers actually had enough experience with Valiant and Image to recognize that Solar came from Valiant (once from Gold Key as Dr. Solar) and Supreme (now of Image splinter Awesome Comics) came from Image.

The Deathmate premise assumed that a future version of Solar would encounter Void, who, like Solar, focused great, but incompatible, energies within her person. The pair drew inevitably towards each other, unaware and uncaring that their coupling would release a fusion of destructive energies that ultimately would destroy both universes unless the assembled superbeings of both universes stopped it.

Yes, "we shall tell no story unless it endangereth the multiverse..." had reared its head as a cliche.

True to form, the story ended with the effort seeming to fail and both universes destroyed, but Solar would somehow, with some mystical guidance, recreate both universes after their destruction. Two years later, DC's Zero Hour: Crisis in Time would resolve itself in precisely the same manner. However, since it involved the blending of the DC universe with itself in various revisions and retcons, Zero Hour does not properly belong in this discussion.

DC versus Marvel

We can forgive DC versus Marvel for adding more mileage to this well-trod cliche mainly because the companies needed some kind of pretext to justify their clever Amalgam Comics, which blended not only comics mythos but the characters themselves.

The comics led up to this entertaining digression with a transuniversal catastrophe that threatened to destroy both universes. The form seems to require this. Anyway, in this case, unlike in Crisis, the existence of separate DC and Marvel universes resulted from the existence of two greatly powerful cosmic "brothers." These brothers wished to enjoy a uniqueness requiring the demise of the sibling, and had fought long ago to a standstill, resolving the conflict by separating and creating particular universes away from the undesired "other;" there, they would come to forget their lack of uniqueness. Something, however, woke them up, and they once again attempted to come together, each intent on destroying the other and his universe.

The early stages of this conflict appeared in the "real" world(s) as a shifting of personnel across publishing company boundaries. DC heroes ran into Marvel villains and vice versa; DC and Marvel heroes encountered one another in a confusing blend of the universes that included some amusing moments as the Ben Reilly Spider-Man attempted to make time on Lois Lane with Clark Kent, her fiancee, watching.

Through machinations of Marvel's Tribunal and DC's Spectre, the brothers allowed a contest by proxy, with DC and Marvel heroes battling it out in single duels, the decision going to the universe whose heroes achieved a simple plurality. Victory meant survival, failure meant destruction. Yet the heroes deadlocked in these duels, which call-in votes decided based on the current popularity of the characters (hence explaining improbabilities such as Storm trouncing Wonder Woman or Aquaman beating the Sub-Mariner).

The Living Tribunal, the Spectre, and a cobbled-together-for-the-event character called Access managed to defeat, in the short term, the brothers' renewed attempts to destroy one another in the light of the lack of resolution provided by the duels. Rather than allowing the "winning" universe to survive and the "losing" universe to perish, the Good Guys caused a single universe to survive by fusing the two more thoroughly than their previous imperfect blend. Hence the appearance of the Amalgam universe and its characters.

If the DC versus Marvel books suffered from a somewhat silly pretext for getting Superman to engage in fisticuffs with the Hulk and Batman to joust against Captain America, we at least got to see amusing concepts like the Challengers of the Fantastic, a blending of the Fantastic Four with the Challengers of the Unknown. Other combinations didn't quite work as effectively, such as "Dr. Doomsday" (Fantastic Four nemesis Dr. Doom and Superman nemesis Doomsday), Dark Claw (Batman and Wolverine) or "Super-Soldier" (Superman and Captain America). However, the X-Patrol (X-Men and Doom Patrol) and Spider-Boy (Superboy and Spider-Man) proved more interesting than their component elements; and the stories included interesting, sometimes ironic, takes on elements of character continuity reshaped by the blending process.

The Amalgam solution, however, represented only a temporary reprieve from the duelling of the brothers, and Access had to separate the universes again in order to resolve the problem; and, in the last few pages, just as the end seemed inevitable, the Brothers peered into the minds of Captain America and Batman and saw alienation therein (Captain America, for his displacement in time via suspended animation; Batman owing to his quirkish and obsessive personality). This alienation convinced them of their own uniqueness, divorcing from them the desire to fight, and the Brothers reconciled, recognizing each other as valid beings.

It seems like a lot of background just to justify a series of superhero fistfights and the Amalgam universe concept, doesn't it?

World War III: Heroes Return

Marvel really did a great deal to confuse short-term and returning readers with the beginnings of the Heroes Return books that ended the Heroes Reborn reboot concept. Already entering muddy revisionist waters with Leob/Liefeld and Jim Lee versions of Marvel's senior properties, this event ended with a crossover with a "new comics" company as Doctor Doom and some villain of recent vintage fought to gain power from the forces which had fused the two universes.

Marvel, it seems, found its superhero universe melded with that of Image comics, whose celebrity talent it hired in its unsuccessful attempt to remake the house that Jack and Stan built into the image of the upstart comics that followed it. And, in a rare display of recycling, the teams that handled Captain America, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, and Avengers managed to reuse the blended-universe that concept that Image and Valiant had used in their Deathmate crossover event with many of the principals from said books, including Wildcats and Stormwatch.

I didn't read enough of Image's early stuff to get a good handle on the names, but the same silver-clad woman who nearly destroyed the Image and Valiant universes by tarrying with the likes of a future version of Solar appeared within the Heroes Return books, albeit in somewhat less of a central role.

My own lapses in research notwithstanding, I understood this much: In the mega-crossover event in which most of Marvel's heroes fell fighting Onslaught, Franklin Richards, the godlike spawn of two of the Fantastic Four, saved their lives by creating or travelling to a capsule universe into which he could cast them. Said universe contained considerable Leob/Liefeld and Jim Lee content until administrative problems forced reassignment of the project to other talents such as Walt Simonson. In this new Marvel Universe, the old characters enjoyed a "new comics" makeover that temporarily spiked sales but quickly alienated many readers and forced Marvel, then entering the financial damnation of bankruptcy, to reconsider the project.

More-or-less, this resolution of Marvel's ill-fated transitional reboot involved the discovery that the universe that Marvel's and Image's characters inhabited resulted from the fusion of two universes, artificially held together by two locking devices located (respectively) in Dr. Doom's castle and in the Negative Zone. While the integrated heroes of two publishing houses fought to find both these devices and a number of heroes who had vanished, they also had to confront the presence of Marvel's Skrulls and Wildstorm/Image's Daemonites.

Heroes and villains paired in the formulaic manner typical of crossover events; Doom, for instance, allied with Wildstorm/Image's Defile in the convenient union of mutual distrust one got to see in Superman versus Spider-Man, Byrne's Batman/Captain America team-up, and probably the balance of stories contained in all available volumes of Crossover Classics.

Throughout, however, Marvel used the Wildstorm/Image characters with some restraint; Marvel occupies the key roles and Wildstorm's stable provided mainly support roles, such as the replacement Captain America when the original became Nomad and vanished into the Negative Zone with the Thing. Furthermore, the villains serve mainly as allies and shock troops for Doom's plan; Doom could have performed the same ambitious assault on the massed forces of earth with an army of Skrulls.

Spear-carrier matters notwithstanding, Reed Richards led an assault into the Negative Zone to destroy the fusion locks that joined the two separate realities; the amassed heroes battled Skrulls, Daemonites, and corrupted versions of the Hulk, the Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch; a number of Marvel characters died or turned out imposters who had replaced the slain heroes (such as Sue Richards and Iron Man, both incognito skrulls). The heroic and tragic frontal attack permitted the heroes to approach the device closely enough to attack it; a mortally wounded Captain America (back in costume from his Nomad jag) instructed Rick Jones to take out the locking device with a grenade, and everything went blooey in a universe-destroying explosion as Victor von Doom realized his scheme for self-actualization through the fusion of universes had failed.

Then, we presume, all the Marvel heroes came back to their original universe.

Fails to satisfy, doesn't it? And I can't say that having all of the stories and knowing all the names would help, since the "Heroes Reborn" exists among the company of pariah-books like the "Spider-Clone Saga," which serve as targets for much verbal abuse on newsgroups and the Internet. On the other side, a number of comics fans liked these materials at the time and either fell silent under the avalanche of criticism or reevaluated their original positive reviews in the light of a consensus that panned them.

Thankfully, though, like DC versus Marvel, this blended universe went away when the storyline ended. The participants in Marvel's stable don't seem inclined to mention it much, so perhaps we need not fear future story lines that depend on poorly-remembered plot threads from obscure panels in hard-to-find back issues. Unlike Crisis and Zero Hour, one need not expect this event to play some role in each future mega-crossover with the universe(s) at stake; so, as far as comics stories, it spares the reader the necessity of memorizing its details to comprehend everything that comes afterwards.

Why Repeat This Idea?

The blending multiple-universe recurs for a few reasons. One, the market hasn't killed off so many comics companies that a single monopole dispenses superhero comics (as, soon, DC, a subsidiary of Time-Warner, might); therefore, the market will occasionally support an intercompany crossover event, and such events presume a blended universe, whether as an ongoing condition (as in the early DC/Marvel crossovers) or as a problem to solve (as in Deathmate, DC versus Marvel, and Heroes Return.

Furthermore, the inflationary nature of comics (the tendency to increase power, consequences, and number ad infinitum) keeps pushing the stakes of stories higher, and the worst villains passed the point of mere destruction of the planet long ago. Even neo-retro works celebrating the Golden Age of comics, such as Roy Thomas' Alter Ego and All-Star Squadron involved themselves principally or anecdotally with multi-universe shaking events.

After comics reaches the point of recurrently threatening a series of universes, however, one would think that the entire premise had outlived its usefulness; that superheroes must incessantly repeat their great crusades to repair a plethora of universes or find some bizarre way to play for even higher stakes.

The Stan Lee Hypothesis offers an alternative, however. One could phrase this "It's the characters, stupid," and get some idea. "The Death of Superman" told a much better story that involved stakes limited, in essence, to the survival of the city Metropolis and the survival of the hero Superman. If Roger Stern, or one of the many still-living comics scribes of his caliber, could make that story mean something without unravelling the very fabric of reality itself in order to motivate the heroes, this says something about the dehumanizing absurdity of "end-of-the-universe" stories.

The Amalgam empresarios, however, had a better vision than some of the aforementioned examples, in that they created both the regular Amalgam universe titles and a rather silly short-lived series called Ultimate Access in which the dimension- and publisher-hopping character would intervene in superhero situations by fusing superheroes into amusing combinations, and this without even the tip of a hat to referring these creations to any particular universe of origin. For example, in one issue of Ultimate Access, Darkseid fought against a fusion of the blue electric Superman and Thor (dubbed Thor-El) and ranted in anger "You don't even exist!"

One must hope that if companies must reuse the fused universe concept that they occasionally rotate the premises that underlie such fusion. The non-existence of everything becomes boring when used too often, and comics passed "too often" years ago.