Multiversal Studios: DC Revamps Its Dysfunctional Universe

Photo by Pat Loika, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The “darkest timeline” was a meme that popped up shortly after the 2016 election, when much of the online world was living in terror of a Trump presidency and trying to imagine any possible way out of it. To explain events as part of life’s usual ups and downs seemed inadequate—it was easier to make sense of them as part of a universe being gravitationally pulled towards chaos, set off-course by a single event. Maybe election day, maybe FBI Director James Comey’s infamous letter, maybe when Donald Trump himself entered the race.

And somewhere out there in the space between spaces, the normal world we understood carried on.

After all, people raised on screens—which is to say, almost everyone—can’t help themselves from thinking that reality itself can be frozen, rewound, rebooted, or have its channel changed.

In this universe? Not yet. But at the movies, it’s happening.

More than a month after it premiered, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” is still leading the box office, having already easily become the highest-grossing movie of 2021. The third Spidey movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it expanded the “multiverse” concept, or parallel universes stacked on top of each other, in Disney’s superhero blockbusters.

As almost everyone knows by now, it includes appearances by several characters from hitherto unrelated Spider-Man movies, which are now established as coming from timelines and universes that are different (but connected) from the MCU. This includes Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as prior versions of Peter Parker, as well as many of their villains such as Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin and Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock. It even connects with rival Sony Pictures’ Venom movies, part of a complicated but lucrative legal arrangement.

The multiverse will be seen again in the upcoming “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” and who knows where it’ll go from there. And this live-action Spider-Man multiverse precedes the animated “Into The Spider-verse,” what many consider one of the best superhero films ever made, which featured several Spidey variants teaming up. Including the spider-pig hybrid Spider-Ham.

Not to be outdone—but, as usual, arriving a bit late—the DC Comics cinematic universe will also be introducing its own parallel universes later this year with “The Flash.” Again, its multiverse will comprise earlier movies, including Tim Burton’s 1989 “Batman.” Michael Keaton will reappear as the Dark Knight, 30 years after he last donned the cowl in “Batman Returns.” Along with Ben Affleck’s Batman, and God knows who else. (The DC multiverse was previously well-established in the “Arrowverse,” the acclaimed series of shows on the CW Network, although a brief 2020 cameo established that the cinematic and TV multiverses were connected.)

For both studios, this turn to the multiverse seems inevitable–for DC, because it needs a way to revamp its dysfunctional universe without jettisoning the popular parts, and for Marvel because the universal blowout in “The Avengers: Infinity War” and “Endgame” left them with nowhere else to go.

It also signals an intriguing new chapter for the IP-based epics which dominate movie theaters. While the 1989 Batman and 2002 Spider-Man movies were the summer blockbusters of their day, now fans fondly recall them as relics from a simpler time. They could never fit in with the brawny, expansive tonal consistency demanded by today’s cinematic universes–except now they do.

They’re not even the first movies to use this trick. In 2009, J.J. Abrams rebooted Star Trek with a time-traveling black hole that created an alternate timeline, to justify the revamp he wanted to give to the hibernating franchise.

But comics have been using alternate universes for decades now. Not only do the publishers use them to tidy up plot continuity and experiment outside the “canon,” but the multiverse itself has proved to be a great source for new stories.

It traces back to a single comic published in 1961, “The Flash of Two Worlds.” One issue from some of the smartest comics creators of the time, during one of the goofier eras in the medium, changed the superhero genre forever.

DC used the multiverse as a way to connect the first and second burst of superhero interest—what fans have dubbed the Golden and Silver Ages of comics. The genre took off like a speeding bullet in the 1940s, but fell just as fast towards the end of the decade. Fans seemed to be losing interest in heroics and humorous comics took their place.

The emergence of mainstream sci-fi in the 50s—like superheroes, a once-disreputable genre born from pulp magazines—gave DC another chance with caped protagonists. But this time they’d be different—wide-eyed, space-oriented, and without the darker, pulpy edges of Depression noir.

For Batman, this meant less time in dark alleyways and more time fighting aliens. But heroes who had been discontinued came back as altogether different characters. The Flash, for instance, changed from Jay Garrick to Barry Allen, and saw a complete overhaul of his costume–less like a Greek god and more like an astronaut. Green Lantern would also transform from a mystical wizard to an officer of an elite space police force.

Once these characters were established, it was probably inevitable that they would meet their earlier versions. That’s where “The Flash of Two Worlds” came in. Writer Gardner Fox, who co-created the original Flash, concocted a parallel “Earth” to achieve the cross-over. (Later named, somewhat confusingly, as Earth-Two.) Barry Allen, who can travel at great speeds after a lightning strike, vibrates so quickly while climbing a rope at a children’s magic show that he crosses over into the universe occupied by the earlier Flash. The duo stop a gang of criminals before Allen crosses back.

And thus the multiverse was born–and The Flash would always be closely connected to it, as the character who can most easily pierce through the universe’s thin membranes.

Strangely enough, at around the same time, some physicists were beginning to wonder whether our own universe inhabits a multiverse. Princeton student Hugh Everett published a paper in 1957 which posited other universes to explain some of the apparent contradictions in quantum mechanics. (Schrödinger’s Cat can be both alive and dead if they exist in different plains of reality.)

It’s possible that the well-read, science-minded Fox was inspired by Everett’s work, although it would not achieve wide recognition as the “many-world interpretation” until decades later. Who knows, maybe DC’s multiverse helped push it along.

More cross-universe collisions occurred in the years shortly after, including when the superhero team Justice League met the Golden Age version, the Justice Society. (Both were created by Fox, 20 years apart.) Soon after they added Earth-Three, where corrupt versions of the DC heroes form the Crime Syndicate of America. The multiverse became integral to the DC Universe–not only to manage continuity but as a way to throw out more imaginative stories that disregard the official canon.

Multiverses have their pluses and minuses, in any medium. They open up possibilities, but also decrease the dramatic stakes with each new addition. These days it can be hard to even keep track of which world Batman and Superman are supposed to be saving. And the complexity can become overwhelming–for DC Comics, twenty-some years of timeline criss-crossing lead them to blow it up entirely in 1985.

Using an apocalyptic battle between celestial caretakers, the Monitor and Anti-Monitor, the series “Crisis on Infinite Earths” collapsed DC back into a single (new) universe. Most famously, Frank Miller used the reboot to further darken the Dark Knight, forever changing his public conception with “The Dark Knight Returns” and “Batman: Year One.” But the series itself proved to be popular, in part because it required the writers to connect all of DC’s titles to a single blow-out. Stories about storylines, it turns out, make pretty good stories themselves.

DC followed up with Infinite Crisis in 2005, restoring the multiverse, along with Final Crisis in 2008. More recently, DC threw out years of continuity with 2011’s Flashpoint, only to bring much of it back in 2016’s Rebirth. Deliberately avoiding the “Crisis” label, then-Batman writer Scott Snyder’s 2017 and 2020 Dark Nights: Metal events saw the prime universe invaded by evil Caped Crusader hybrids from the “Dark Multiverse,” a further collection of dimensions made from the fears of the normal multiverse denizens. (The dark multiverse grew because Barbatos–a demon-god once summoned below Gotham by Thomas Jefferson–neglected to destroy these malfunctioning creations as they rose from the World Forge. I swear I’m not making any of this up.)

Today DC isn’t a multiverse but an “Omniverse“, combining all of the potential storylines and possibilities–maybe the ideal domain for the age of meta-nostalgia. Though that will surely change again soon–DC fans have come to count on multiversal reboots every few years, although the most recent one, Future State, was abandoned halfway through and reworked into only a “possible” future storyline.

Marvel introduced its multiverse in 1971, and it has similarly exploded in complexity since. (Just ask a Marvel fan to explain the Amazing, Ultimate and Superior Spider-Man lines.) Its multiverse also inhabits an omniverse, containing not just the Marvel titles but Marvel’s movies and TV shows, along with the DC multiverse. (It’s a long story.)

There’s one universe I haven’t mentioned yet—ours.

The actual, superhero-less (we think) Earth exists within the DC multiverse too, believe it or not. Julius Schwartz, the editor during the Silver Age revival, named it Earth-Prime, although that Earth eventually off-turned into fantasy. But the idea of a real Earth is still an implicit aspect of today’s DC Multiverse–helping the writers engage in occasional fourth-wall-breaking and grounding the action in a certain interdimensional way.

The advent of the multiverse occurred as DC and Marvel both began to form more of a two-way relationship with their fans. Schwartz and Fox were early pulp and comic fans themselves, and their decisions were aided by mega-fans such as Jerry Bails, the so-called Father of Comic Book Fandom, who corresponded with DC regularly and pushed for a return of the Justice Society. DC printed not only letters from fans but their addresses, helping them form clubs and create fan publications. The comics themselves began to acknowledge the fandom behind the heroes—the beginning of a meta-narrative that would balloon as comics matured and engulfed pop culture.

In fact, one of the most ingenious twists with The Flash’s Silver Age reboot was that Barry Allen, the ’50s/’60s character, was himself a Flash fan. The earlier incarnation existed as a comics character in this version of the comics, which is why Allen chose than name and pursued superherodom. When Gardner Fox created the universal cross-over and recreated the old Flash as flesh and blood in 1961, he explained this by stating that The Flash’s author—that is, himself—had been writing from dreams that were actually tuned into the parallel universe.

The comics (and now the movies) use the multiverse to form a certain cosmic bond with their fans. From the fans’ point of view, they can imagine that these fantastic stories are indeed really happening somewhere, somehow, out there in the ether. And who knows, maybe if they wish hard enough, they can cross the invisible divide and live it for themselves.