Multiversity: Teen Justice and E-11

This mini was main motivation for me to start these Multiversity posts, yet I'm getting to it only now, why? Well the main reason is that I'm not very familiar with Titans and Young Justice franchises (I guess they are one franchise by this point?) and I never found them very interesting. So I figured that I might talk a bit about E-11 in general as well.

I'm sure that there are some old stories where gender flips where first used (after all, what is Supergirl if not a gender flipped Superman?), but it is generally considered that the roots of E-11 are in Loeb's Superman/Batman run, issues #23-24 to be more precise. Loeb doesn't do much really with it there, just shows us few gender flipped characters and writes some things that don't really make much sense if you spend 5 minutes thinking about it. But to be fair Loeb never intended for it to matter, it was just a silly idea to fill some pages.

After that we got an expansion on this idea with Search for Ray Palmer special during Countdown to Final Crisis event. We get a male version of Wonder Woman - Wonder Man who is basically a villain of the story and does his own version of Amazons Attack! event that the regular universe had at roughly the same time. Nothing really good or interesting there.

One of the benefits of New 52 reboot was that Morrison could easily ignore what happened before and rebuild the Multiverse into something a bit more interesting. So what we get in Multiversity is Aquawoman as the leader of Justice Guild. Yes, not Justice League, but Justice Guild. She also ends up joining multiversal Justice Incarnate team. So Morrison at the very start showed that E-11 can be a bit more than just a gender flipped version of the main Earth. Oh, and instead of villainous Wonder Man we get heroic Wonderous Man.

After that in The Green Lantern Season Two #9 Morrison briefly introduces Wonder Woman. I think this is very important since what gender flipped Earth really means is that the main heroes are women and not men like in regular universe. So it is a bit tone deaf to then remove main female hero from this Earth and make her male counterpart a bad guy. Then there was some cool stuff done with Green Lantern Corps to make them a bit more interesting than just bunch of female GLs. 

After Morrison finished TGL I was rather hyped for what next DC will do with this Earth. Unfortunately, as is usually the case with Morrison's ideas, I was really disappointed with what happened next.

Wonder Woman visiting E-11 makes perfect sense, yet what we get in #776-777 is closer to pre-Flashpoint version and is more of a sequel to Search for Ray Palmer one-shot than anything Morrison did with E-11. But was it good? This Wonder Woman run ended up being rather mediocre, but I think most people agree that this story arc with WW traveling various realms was the high point of the run. Not a very high point, but not terrible either.

And now we finally get to Teen Justice. This team started in DC's Very Merry Multiverse and DC Pride 2022 anthology one-shots before it finally got its own miniseries - Multiversity: Teen Justice. First of all name is a bit weird. Obviously it is a combination of Teen Titans and Young Justice, but then we already have a composite Earth where Justice Titans exist. But name aside, how was the series? 

It wasn't bad, but what I found most upsetting was how little it did with the concept. Sad part is that this was the most pages E-11 ever got and creative team just did a simple gender flipped version of what regular Teen Titans book might be and it doesn't stand out at all in a sea of mediocre Titans stories. It even somehow managed to screw up very clear and distinct version of GL corps that Morrison introduced. Anyway, it is rather frustrating that something like Harley screws up DC ends up leaving more room for growth than this series. I think that this is worth reading only if you are a big fan of Titans franchise and want to see how a gender flipped version might look.

So thats that. At some point I might do another E-11 focused post since there are few characters who did make a decent number of appearances in regular titles.

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