Multiversity: Infinite Frontier Mess

From Infinite Frontier till Absolute Power we did get many cameos from other Earths and some storylines that focused on those specific Earths or "big picture Multiverse" stories. I remember being very excited when these projects were announced, but at this point I don't even have enough interest left to cover each of them properly. So I'm wrapping up this "era" in one article.

Asides of various cameos we got bigger focus on Multiverse in Suicide Squad series. It had potential, but premise was a bit weird - if you could hunt the entire Multiverse for Suicide Squad members would you really go out of your way to recruit Earth-3's version of Black Canary? But bigger problem was that the series was building up towards War for Earth-3 crossover and as I already covered... it was terrible. So it all feels like a waste without giving us really anything good in return.

Williamson tried to do a big picture Multiverse story with Infinite Frontier, Justice League Incarnate and Dark Crisis series. And it was arguably even worse than War for Earth-3. On technical level War is definitely worse, but it happened in the corner and it was easy to ignore it. Dark Crisis, and the build up, on the other hand was the main thing happening in DC universe at the time.

It would take too much time to single out stupid things that Williamson (and Culver helped him) did, but fundamental problem with his work was that it took Morrison's ideas and dumped them down to Countdown Arena levels. To give a few examples characters talk about Multiverse like it is a plot device and not a place they all live in. Empty Hand's hand is empty not because he has no ideas to contribute, but because he lacks a weapon to beat up Darkseid. And every big bad ever is connected to another big bad because who cares.

At some point Justice Incarnate became Justice League Incarnate. To be fair it happened, if I'm not mistaken, during Tomasi's Multiplicity nonsense, but Williamson continued the trend. Anyway, I haven't seen Morrison talk about it, but my impression was that Morrison saw a progression: Justice Society -> Justice League -> Justice Incarnate. You know, like it is next evolutionary step of the same base idea. But who needs it, lets just make it a version of JL. JL Incarnate mini ending with President Superman saying that they have to call Justice League of the main Earth for help just cemented the fact that they are now D-list version of Justice League that doesn't really matter.

Anyway, none of this sold well so DC decided to drop Multiversity/Multiverse branding and bring back Elseworlds. Which is the same thing. And those stories didn't sell any better from what I can see. You know what sold better? Absolute universe.

Asides of Absolute Manhunter I'm not a big fan of Absolute universe. I think that the core premise about the universe being powered by Darkseid energies or whatever is stupid and makes little sense. But you know what it has that previous Multiverse stories lacked? Characters that people care about, creative teams that know what they are doing and lots of marketing.

Anyway, at the end of Dark Crisis DC released Big Bang one-shot by Waid that revealed new and updated Multiverse. Some of the popular out of continuity stories like DCeased and DC vs Vampires were grandfathered into the Morrison's Multiversity map and then Waid added bunch of other stuff that went beyond 52 number.

Morrison made several Earths "hidden" for some potential future storyline and DC basically threw that away. I could understand if they wanted to still fit into 52 Earths, but if you are doing Earth-93 why do you have to change those hidden Earths? It is not like you lack space. So why? Because nobody really cares.

DC's Multiverse continues to live on with some Elseworlds minis and Absolute universe, but I feel like we are so far removed from what Morrison did with Multiversity that there is little point in covering these series. But you never know, maybe something will change at some point.

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