The Book of Hsssh

So last time I wrote about Swamp Thing's River Run story arc in general and its meta story. Tldr; it is not worth reading. But some one-shots featuring different worlds are interesting and I'll be going over them in this post.  Lets start with #152, it is usually called "Vertigo issue". Basic idea is that Swamp Thing travels to a world which is like ours, but supernatural elements are very normal there. Police fighting vampires is your regular Monday there and they even manage to trap Swamp Thing in some magical bottle. Writing itself is as edgy as any other Millar's tale, but it works in this darker world. What makes this issue stand out is the fact that it shares DNA with Doom Patrol #53 and what would later become E-13 in the Multiversity. No, you won't find any direct links, but it is not hard to imagine all these stories happening on the same world. And this is about as good time as any to mention Books of Magic Annual #3. It has a short story set in the...

Back in the day when Mark Millar was just starting his career Morrison provided some ideas and help in general. Sometimes they shared writing credit, often they didn't, but we can notice in early Millar's work some ideas that Morrison would return to at later date. One such collaboration was Swamp Thing. On first four issues they shared credit and later only Millar is credited. But towards the end of his run there is a big story arc called River Run and it has some familiar ideas. It starts in Swamp Thing #171 where Swamp Thing encounter woman that seamed to die and return to life. As it turns out she is a writer and wants his help with a collection of short stories. #172-176 are one and done issues where Swamp Thing visits one of her stories that resemble pre-Crisis multiverse. Then last two issues (#177-178) explain what was this all about and wraps things up. You probably noticed that structure looks familiar? Kinda like Morrison's The Multiversity? One of the strengths ...

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 I...

Another mini-series that maybe should have had Multiversity label during Infinite Frontier era was Crime Syndicate. I enjoyed Forever Evil event and CSA characters in it, but unfortunately Johns ended up killing most of them because... Watchmen forced him to I guess. Anyway, since then DC had multiple soft reboots/retcons so I guess someone decided that CSA should get some focus again. First obvious change is the name, America was dropped. In recent years DC has preferred Justice League name over the classic Justice League of America so I guess it makes sense to drop it for Earth-3 version of the team as well. There were many other changes and sadly this was the only one that I was fine with. Without going too much into pointless details biggest changes are new Flash and Superwoman. I was not really a fan of Busiek introducing black Power Ring, but at least I could understand the logic behind it. This time Superwoman is... Donna Troy. She pretty much acts same as Lois Lane did so what ...

Multiverse was back after Infinite Crisis and 52 weekly. Supposedly the idea was to follow it up with various multiverse based books by the writers of 52 weekly. For one reason or another this never materialized and instead multiverse was heavily used in Countdown to Final Crisis weekly. Countdown, at this point, is regarded as one of the worst things that DC has ever published, but maybe multiverse related bits in it were decent? Lets find out. When I first started thinking about this post I figured I'd cover all the different Earths showcased and what was cool or bad about them, but at some point I realized that it would just be a waste of words. Instead I'll just cover things that aren't terrible or are somehow related to Morrison's work. If something is not mentioned in this post then assume that it is real bad. Thank god that Flashpoint erased all of it since with Morrison being Morrison it is probably safe guess that most of the bad and stupid stuff that happened ...

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 Palm...

Second of the new series to have Multiversity branding focused on Harley. Not the character that would come to mind when thinking about multiverse, but thinking outside of the box sometimes leads to interesting results. So, what about this one? The story goes that sometime during New 52 Dan DiDio looked at how well Deadpool was selling at Marvel and decided to replicate that success with Harley. The job was given to Conner/Palmiotti duo and they ran away with it. They revamped the character, made her a bit more similar to Deadpool than she was before and you could argue that they removed some complexity from her as well. Some fans have even argued that they destroyed the character, but since it was a massive sales hit... DC probably doesn't care about that at all. Once Conner/Palmiotti ended their run other writers tried to leave their own mark on the character and while the difference is not obvious I'd say that she is not the same as she was during Conner/Palmiotti run. Anywa...

Ultimate Spider-Man, and by extension Ultimate Universe, is probably the main reason why I got into monthly comics. But with time my tastes changed and Bendis went from the writer that I really liked to one of my least liked writers. So I wasn't thrilled when he got the control of Superman's line and new Wonder Comics line was launched. But I really like Dial's concept so I decided to try new Dial H for Hero series. After all, how bad could it get? I didn't really have much experience with Humphries. I read his Nightwing arc before and wasn't too impressed. And this was probably first time I was reading something drawn by Quinones. Well, no, I had read Wednesday Comics, but that was ages ago. Either way creative team didn't inspire much confidence. But this turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. Anyway, first collection (or first 6 issues) mostly introduces the characters and sets up things. Writing is okay, it has its charm and does what it needs to do, but...

Over the years Tomasi has used many characters and concepts created, or revamped, by Morrison so no surprise that he had a crack at Multiversity as well. And what better opportunity to do it if not when he was the main writer of Superman? For me Tomasi has something like 50/50 hit ratio when it comes to using Morisson's toys and sadly this has to be one of the biggest duds that he has written. On paper this sounds like a good story. Some villain is kidnaping and draining Supermen from various Earths. We got our main guy and Justice Incarnate (now Justice League Incarnate I guess) involved and some other characters. So how does it fail? It reads like a filler. Villain is generic and bland, we don't get much of him in general. We never really learn why or how any of this is working asides of some vague hints about coming new threats. At the end he is captured by another villain hinting at other plots that are yet to come, but never really do. And maybe it is good thing that many ...

When Multiversity: Teen Justice book was announced some people were a bit confused why it is using Multiversity label. At that time I was more surprised that this label is being used only now, after all we had other series and story arcs that tried to deal with Morrison's Multiversity and related concepts.  We start this series of posts with Freedom Fighters by Venditti and Barrows. DC has struggled over the years to find a good place for many of their characters and it has been even bigger problem for characters that were acquired by DC from other companies. Freedom Fighters are no exception here.  They were introduced to DC by Wein in his JLA run as heroes of a world where Nazis won. Later they were moved to main Earth. Their lineup was changed many times. They went from WW2 to modern team (at some point I'll probably cover Palmiotti/Gray version in a separate post) and there were probably some other variations that I'm forgetting now. What they all had in common? None of...