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JLA: Omega

Justice League of America (vol. 2) #50

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By Jason Kirk / 14 November 2010 / Features, Recent Comic Book Series / 0 Comments

Issue Credits

Writer
James Robinson
Penciller, Variant Cover Artist
Mark Bagley
Inker
Rob Hunter, Norm Rapmund
Variant Cover Inker
Rob Hunter
Colourist, Cover Colourist
Hifi
Letterer
Rob Leigh
Assitant Editor
Rex Ogle
Associate Editor
Adam Schlagman
Editor
Eddie Berganza
Variant Cover B Penciller
Jim Lee
Variant Cover B Inker
Scott Williams
Variant Cover B Colourist
Alex Sinclair
Cover Artist
Ethan Van Sciver

Quotes

Donna Troy: When we were in the Teen Titans and Titans it was as  much about us fighting our stable of villains — family members a lot of the time who had it in for us — as it was fighting crimes and saving the world. Now it’s bigger. Sure, the JLA’s got its villains, but it’s way more about the world and mankind and the big stuff, and that is the big difference.

Donna Troy: Jason Todd… the Red Hood to you guys…Batman: Yeah, I think I’ve heard of him.

Synopsis “JLA=Omega Part 1: Worlds Collide”

Supergirl and Jesse Quick make light work of their duties around the Justice League Watchtower by racing each other at superspeed. Their discussion on how each of the Leaguers has suffered a personal tragedy is interrupted by the arrival of the Green Lantern from Earth-9 (the Tangent Universe) who pleads “… help me. My world in dead.” Jade, Donna, and Batman are recalled to the Hall of Justice, but Congo Bill is looking for the missing Starman. The Green Lantern describes how a doomsday device left behind by Alexander Luthor is destroying the Crime Syndicate’s Anti-Matter Earth. The Syndicate sought to save their world by siphoning the doomsday energies to Earth-9, but that only slowed the destruction of their own world.

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Justice League of America (vol. 2)

Justice League of America (vol. 2) #43

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By Jason Kirk / 10 April 2010 / Features, Recent Comic Book Series / 0 Comments

Issue Credits

  • Writer: James Robinson
  • Pencils: Mark Bagley
  • Inks: Rob Hunter and Norm Rapmund
  • Colour: Pete Pantazis
  • Letters: Rob Leigh
  • Cover: Mark Bagley and Rob Hunter
  • Variant Cover: Mike Mayhew and Andy Troy
  • Assistant Editor: Rex Ogle
  • Associate Editor: Adam Schlagman
  • Editor: Eddie Berganza

Synopsis “Rise And Fall All Along the Watchtower”

Previously in JLA #41 and JLA #42 – a new Justice League has been pulled together by Donna Troy after the events of Cry For Justice and Blackest Night. Wounds are still raw and the new members have yet to decide on their commitment. Meanwhile, a new threat has emerged. A new group of super villains (Dr Impossible, Hunter, the Chair, Tender Mercy, and Neon Black) have stolen a series of unidentified devices. The devices, each found during the adventures of one or more noted superheroes, appear to be parts of a larger machine, but its true purpose remains unknown.

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A cornucopia of characters

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By Jason Kirk / 25 August 2009 / Articles & Analysis / 5 Comments

With the acquisition/licensing of the Thunder Agents, Milestone, and Red Circle (Archie) characters DC Comics looks like it reverting to a fragmentary format that goes right back to the foundation of the company. The history is a little fuzzy, but there were two brands of the company operating in the early 1940s.

  • National (The World Finest) – The Superman and Batman franchises always were the foundation of the DC Universe. Bit players in their anthologies included Robotman, Aquaman, Green Arrow. Their “house” team was the Seven Soldiers of Victory.
  • All-American – Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Hawkman, etc. At one point DC collaborated with MC Gaines to set up a new line of comics. These were eventually folded back into the main company, but were briefly a separate company. Their “house” team was the Justice Society.

Then DC made a series of acquisitions during the 1950s-80s which hovered up characters from defunct comics publishers. The parallel world structure of the DC Universe made it simple to buy a new set of heroes and then claim that they were from a new Earth.

  • Fawcett Comics – The major competitor to Superman in the 1940s was Captain Marvel. The Fawcett Characters (Captain Marvel and all variants, Shazam, Bullet-Man, Spysmaster, etc) went out of business in the 1950s before being acquired by DC in the 1980s.
  • Quality Comics – Another Golden Age player. Quality published Plastic Man, Blackhawk, and the set of characters that are now known as the Freedom Fighters (Uncle Man, Black Condor, etc). They sold out to DC in the 1950s with a few of their titles were continued over at the new company.
  • Charlton Comics – Was set up in the 1940s, but it is really known for its 1960s Action Hero comics including Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, and the Question. Their characters were acquired by DC and integrated into the DC Universe during the first Crisis. The Charlton characters are most famous for being the prototypes for Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

There have been attempts to draw these characters together into a more cohesive single universe, but only the Charlton characters have achieved any great success in that respect. It may be impossible to modernise the Shazam characters, but many would argue that it shouldn’t be tried. The same goes for Plastic Man. The other minor characters (the Freedom Fighters, Bulletman, etc) have fared better in some respects, but in their end they’re really just Golden Age cannon fodder.

More recently DC has started another round of licensing characters:

  • Milestone – The most modern of the licensed characters. Milestone was a comicbook universe launched at the height of the 1990s comics bubble with the intention of publishing characters with a wider demographic appeal than the normal White, Middle Class characters found at DC and Marvel. They’re breakout character was Static.
  • Archie Comics – Aside from the comedy teen characters Archie had tried several times to launch a line of superhero characters. DC even collaborated with them on the Impact version. These have now been licensed by DC Comics and relaunched as the Red Circle heroes (the Web, Shield, Hangman, etc).
  • Tower Comics – Another 1960s superhero publisher (a la Charlton) which achieved some fame with their THUNDER Agents characters. I’m not sure if the licensing deal covers just the TA characters or the rest of the Tower characters.

DC has prior history with the Milestone and Archie characters as they served as the publisher of those lines during the 1990s. That’s eight different groups of characters that are now part of the DC Universe and I haven’t even included splits like the Legion of Superheroes or the Vertigo characters. They’ve also announced that the Batman Beyond cartoon setting will be back ported into the DC Universe.

A lot has been made about relaunching various acquired titles from these newlines, but personally I think DC is playing a long-term game. It’s fairly clear that DC is slowly and surely building up a large library of material for the book store market. All these characters represent potential archive editions, show case reprints, and classic trade paper backs.

I’m not really sure where these groups are going in terms of new material. DC have been very cautious with the Milestone characters, too cautious for some people, but their exposure in JLA and Teen Titans is arguably far, larger than the Red Circle characters will get with their own self-contained one-shots. Maybe they’re waiting to see what the sales figures are like on the Brave and Bold showcases, maybe they’re not that interested.

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The 52 in 52

The 52 in 52 – Part VI: The Truth

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By Jason Kirk / 30 June 2009 / Articles & Analysis / 0 Comments

In this run down of 52 I’ve been concentrating on the subplot behind the number 52 itself. Rip Hunter and Booster Gold have been fighting an evil version of Booster’s sidekick, Skeets, a library/security robot from the 25th century. It knows that time is broken, that something powerful and new has been left behind in the wake of the INFINITE CRISIS, but it doesn’t know what. The answer to that is to be found in the head of damaged android Red Tornado. The Tornado has spent the past year languishing in Australia until retrieved by its creator’s T.O. Morrow. Just as Morrow realises what inside the Tornado’s memory, he’s drafted by Booster Gold and Rip Hunter to fight the Evil Skeets. He’s bait to lure Skeets out into the open.

Mister Mind revealed (Ugly sucker ain't he?)
Mister Mind revealed (Ugly sucker ain't he?)

Booster still assumes that Skeets’s programming has been corrupted, but it only now that the full horror of his transformation is revealed. For the last 50 weeks the Venusian mindworm, Mister Mind, has been gestating inside of Skeets’s robotic body. Doctor Sivana’s experiments on Mister Mind removed the biological blocks that were keeping it at a larval stage. It needed a chrysalis to gestate in. Mind ate the real Skeets from the inside and kept its shell – a shell uniquely capable of surviving the ravages of time travel – as a chrysalis. Now, after 52 weeks its ready to reveal its full adult form. Mister Mind is a Hyperfly, a monstrous moth-like creature that feeds on dimensions and universes – this is how it was able to absorb the Phantom Zone during his last encounter with Hunter and Booster in the Fortress of Solitude.

Mind sensed that the events of the INFINITE CRISIS had created a powerful new power source for him to feed on, but he didn’t know the truth about it or where to find it. Only Hunter knew and that’s why Mister Mind was hunting him. Hunter and Booster grab the Red Tornado’s head from Morrow’s laboratory and dive into Hunter’s Time Sphere, leaving Morrow to escape on his own. Following on in Week #52, Hunter explains that they’ve travelled back one year into the past and that that they are inside the timestream witnessing a birth. Hunter relates the unseen events of INFINITE CRISIS which he witnessed from within the timesteam.

The Secret of 52 is explained (Week #52)
The Secret of 52 is explained (Week #52)

“It was during one of my strange adventures. I was traveling thought time investigating an anomaly when the time stream was ripped open. A survivor from a parallel Earth long dead had returned to ‘save’ ours from a self-perceived corruption. His name was Alexander Luthor. He split our Earth in thousands of divergent worlds, but the planets he manifested were unstable. Trapped in the time stream, I watched worlds live and die — until Conner Kent sacrificed his life to save our reality. ”

“The broken Earths collapsed back together, combining historical remnant to form one New Earth — one far too small to contain the energy within it. In a cosmic act of self-preservation, as you just saw, it began replicating. Unknown to anyone save myself, a new Multiverse was born in the wake of the crisis. 52 identical Earths in 52 identical cosmos.”

The Red Tornado witnessed the same event, but his vibrationally attuned technology was able to map the new Multiverse. Hunter needed his map so that his Time Sphere could vibrationally attune to the different universes and travel between them. The gestating Mister Mind sensed the change in reality, but wasn’t sure of the cause. How that the secret of the 52 is revealed he is free to feast on the energies of the new Multiverse, absorbing it and destroying it before it is fully explored.

Each of the Universes started out identical to the New Earth Universe, but Mister Mind’s feasting alters their history at a deep level. This isn’t unlike the reality ripples that Superboy Prime’s escape into realspace caused, but this time the effects are far more dramatic. Hunter describes the Multiverse as “52 Universes, moving in harmony like gears in some gigantic, celestial machine. He’s prefiguring the Orrery of World, the Monitor’s own conception of the Multiverse. Mister Mind’s rampage is altering the chronology of each world, creating divergent histories and natures. Like the butterfly from chaos theory, the flaps of his wings are having massive effects on each Universe.

With the help of Supernova (now Daniel Carter, Booster’s ancestor) Rip Hunter restores the Phantom Zone when Mister Mind tries using it as a weapon against them. Daniel had been trapped in a loop of 52 seconds – the 52 missing second Clock King had been complaining about. They then align the pieces they need to trap Mister Mind. Hunter steals a sample of suspendium from Doctor Sivana, but accidentally reveals to him that the Multiverse exists. Meanwhile Booster borrows Dan Garret’s Blue Beetle Scarab from the day after the first Crisis and inadvertently meets Ted Kord for the first time.

Hunter uses the suspendium to lure Mister Mind out of the Multiverse before he spawns and into realspace. They then trap Mister Mind back inside Skeets shell and hurl him backwards through the timestream. He devolves back into a worm as he travels backwards in time. Then one year ago, Sivana finds the worm in the wilderness just in time to start his experiments all over again. The perfect closed time loop.

The fate of Mister Mind

There you have it, the secret of 52. When the New Earth Universe reformed at the end of Infinite Crisis 51 other Earths in their own Universes were also formed. These 52 cosmoses were momentarily identical until Mister Mind’s flight altered their causality and chronology at a fundamental level.

Personally I was quite surprised by the compact nature of the new Multiverse. By having a set number of universes DC could either be seen as limiting themselves or as forcing themselves to make every parallel Earth count. There is a throw away line from Rip Hunter about something called the Megaverse so I would not be too surprised to learn that there is a large multiversal structure outside of the 52 itself.

Oh and don’t worry about Skeets. Rip Hunter and Will Magnus were able to salvage a backup of his AI from before Mister Mind starting on him.

Next in this series I want to take a look at how the 52 played out in other comics, but I’m going to reserve COUNTDOWN and FINAL CRISIS itself for a later date.

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Capsule History of the Multiverse

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By Jason Kirk / 14 June 2009 / Articles & Analysis, Features / 4 Comments

The Multiverse is one of DC Comics’s big fundamental settings, but its something the company has wrestled to exploit or even understand. I’ve been planning to write about the new Multiverse, but it strikes we that we first need to understand how we reached the current situation. There have been to my mind four different Multiverses at DC – the 1960-80s Classic Multiverse, Hypertime, the brief recreation of a Classic Multiverse during the Infinite Crisis, and the post-Infinite Crisis 52.

Earth-One/Earth-Two: The DC Comics Multiverse was created, or at least first acknowledged, in 1961 with Gardner Fox’s seminal “Flash of Two-Worlds” in The Flash (vol. 1) #123 (September 1961). It was revealed that alongside the usual shared universe, which was home to the heroes of DC’s ongoing comics, there was a second universe, which was home to versions of those heroes as they had been published decades before. The distinctive split between the characters came about in the late-1950s when DC decided to relaunch their virtually defunct superhero line of comic books. The main Earth, Earth-One, was home to the new heroes (Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, etc) and their team the Justice League of America. The second Earth, Earth-Two, was home to the older heroes (Jay Garrick, Alan Scott) and their team the Justice Society of America.

The Classic Multiverse: Multiple Earths were a brilliantly elegant concept that was eventually elaborated upon. More Earths were added here and there through the 1960s and 1970s. The continuum of parallel worlds even gained an origin with John Broome’s “The Secret Origin of the Guardians” in Green Lantern #40 (October 1965). It was revealed that one of the Guardians of the Universe called Krona had caused what should have been a single universe to split into an infinite number of parallel positive matter universes called the Multiverse (all permutations of the original inherently good universe) and a single Anti-Matter Universe (a place of evil). Two beings, the Monitors, were also created in that instant. The Monitor watched and guarded the Multiverse while the Anti-Monitor watched and dominated the Anti-Matter Universe.

The Crisis: The unseen war between the Monitors reached a climax in the mid-1980s with Marv Wolfman’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. In the “Crisis” the Anti-Monitor killed the Monitor and succeeded in destroying the Multiverse. However, the heroes from five worlds managed to snatch victory by partially undoing Krona’s crime. They saved reality, but at the cost of collapsing the infinite Multiverse back down into a single universe. In this new universe with its rewritten history, the Justice League and Justice Society co-existed as different generations of heroes on the same Earth. Duplicates of heroes, like the Flash, who didn’t share a secret identity were preserved, but duplicates of the same person (e.g. Bruce Wayne, Diana Prince, Clark Kent) were merged into a single new incarnation.

Zero-Hour: There were a number of continuity problems with the merged reality that eventually led to a house cleaning series called Zero Hour (1995) written by Dan Jurgens. That series was meant to give the readers a nice consistent single universe. Fans started using the term Earth-Zero for the post-Crisis, post-Zero Hour Earth based on the name of the name of Jurgens’s series. Debate has raged over the necessity of erasing the Multiverse – some thought it a barrier to new readers, others enjoyed the story telling possibilities it created. Nevertheless, it is hard to keep a good idea down for long and in the 1990s DC started producing a series of annuals, mini-series, and specials under the Elseworlds Imprint. These were blatantly parallel universe versions of the DC Heroes, just without the acknowledgement of the Multiverse framework.

Grant Morrison/Hypertime: British writer Grant Morrison seems to have become the greatest champion of the Multiverse. Shortly after the original Crisis he mined its implications for his acclaimed meta-textual run on Animal Man. He also authored the Earth-2 graphic novel which revisited the fundamental concept of the mirror Anti-Matter Universe.  Hypertime is a revised and slightly more complex version of a Multiverse that briefly appeared in some post-Zero Hour DC Comics. Karl Kesel’s “Hypertension” story arc in Superboy #60-66 (1999) and several Mark Waid stories made use of Hypertime, but it doesn’t seem to have been pursued too enthusiastically by the company. Notably Morrison, who is credited with the Hypertime concept, never actually wrote a story explicitly using it.

New Earth/52: The Classic Multiverse was revisited in Geoff Johns Infinite Crisis (2005) when Superboy-Prime and Alexander Luthor, a pair of refugees from the original, tried to destroy the single Earth by splitting it back into its constituent parts. They were defeated, but there were repercussions. There were subtle differences between the old and new universes, so much so that DC started referring to their post-Infinite Crisis setting as “New Earth.” Spinning out of Infinite Crisis was a year-long, weekly comic book series called 52 written by Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Mark Waid and Greg Rucka. The buried mystery behind 52 was the significance of the number itself. The answer was revealed in the final issue when it was shown that New Earth wasn’t actually the only Earth to survive the second Crisis. There were 51 other Earths (52 in total) which had come into existence at the same time. They had originally been identical to the New Earth, but the flight of Mister Mind altered them as primal level causing differences in tone and identity to develop between them.

So we’ve gone from a single Earth, to an infinite number of Earths, back to a single Earth, and then to 52 Earths. No wonder people sometimes complain about the complexity :)

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