He did not write NEW X-MEN as potential for another writer’s sequel. In order for a successive writer to have a Magneto or certain other characters as stuff to be used, stuff had to be undone. Whether it was undone correctly is something to be debated… take that up with Chuck Austen.

Remember that from 1983 to 1987 Hawkman, Katar Hol, was in a storyline/event/arc called the Shadow War. The story essentially was that the Silver Age Thanagar, which more-or-less had been non-imperialistic for the entirety of DC publication history since the 1960s, and has basically just used its interstellar technology for taxi services since that was what it was good for… had decided to conquer earth and their method was infiltration. Hawkman’s mission/goal was not just to prevent earth’s downfall but to discover and reverse what had caused the cultural change to his home planet.

(I mention the story’s plot only because it is ironic that when Hawkman’s base-continuity changed retroactively through HAWKWORLD, the post-1987 Thanagar had the status that pre-1987 Hawkman was trying to resist, and post-1987 Katar Hol was just fine with it).

The point is that in 1984 or 1985, Superman appeared in the last couple issues of THE SHADOW WAR OF HAWKMAN limited series.

Superman also appeared in that same story arc, later in that exact arc, in the regular Hawkman series written and published after 1986. But the CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS and MAN OF STEEL came out through 1985 and 1986 so it was a different version entirely of the Superman character that appeared. So two different versions of Superman with completely different (yet similar) histories (especially regarding Krypton) appeared in one Hawkman story, with one more-or-less intact Hawkman history. Hypertime (or whatever) allows for two differente Supermen with their own respective histories to each leave repercussions in Hawkman continuity.

More importantly the 1960s/SHADOW WAR/Tony Isabella era Hawkman had a significant impact on the John Byrne/Marve Wolfman/MAN OF STEEL era Superman as Hawkman was the one who showed Superman the locale/remains of Krypton.

Naturally HAWKWORLD messes up the SHADOW WAR arc story, yet typically writers would/should just gloss over it. Hypertime allows us to gloss over it, or simultaneously allow for narrative repercussions despite the…. seeming discontinuity.

By sheer random chance I bumped into this today.

For the idea of an outlier hypertemporal line. Where there are tightly-clustered lines there must also be lines less tightly-clustered, eh? And at the fringes of the less-clustered regions there must be marginal lines…parabolic lines…

And then, one assumes, potentially…even hyperbolic lines…

…Bringing in a little astrophysics there, apologies, just trying to seem clever I guess. Anyway, so how about this for Hypertime: the central regions of it are populated by the lines belonging to myth, folktale, fairy-tale, tall tale…the Allusive Core, infinitely dense. (This is going to look a lot like the ancient Welsh cosmogony, by the way) Outside it, the Literature Ring, public-domain material still distinguishable from the mass of “here’s a story, who knows who told it first”…with Homer the most indwelling of these as far as the Western world goes…

And then outside that, a shell of owned properties that interact with themselves and one another when they are pierced by some line of association that is actually going fully from the “outside” of Hypertime to its core — and that would be us, writing scholarly essays, and having scholarly thoughts, about the Body, or Volume, of Literature. Thus hypertemporal pathways that link stories are made in the act of us considering them…

…Hmm. The model collapses of its own weight after a time, though, doesn’t it?

All in all, I much prefer a Periodic Table of Literature, to an Atomic Model of Literature. Though they speak of the same things. Will think on this idea further, though…I’m missing something…

OH! Duh. If the model is the Sun, there’s more interactions between the substances of the outer layer, than there are interactions between the substances of the outer layer and the substances of the various inner layers…even though it’s the inner layers that drive the thing, and support it. Hmm, that’s a pretty good description of how the cortex functions in relation to the rest of the brain, too…

On second thought, I agree: I cherish fanwank. Maybe we have too much of it sometimes, or some of it is silly and pointless…but man, I want to participate in my serial storytelling, for God’s sake!

And if I can’t do it by fanwanking, how else am I going to do it?

I can’t really wrap my head around it completely, but it may just be my problem. Again, it sounds like amusing fanwank, but I have no idea how it might be used in a story.

It’s like … the old-style Guardian being a regular in Superman now doesn’t make me think that Manhattan Guardian doesn’t count, but it is irksome because Morrison specifically intended for the Seven Soldiers characters to be picked up by other writers and played with, and no one seems to want to.

Or perhaps not.

One thing I think Hypertime *does* discourage isn’t on the story level at all, but on the fan level — it makes fanwank somewhat irrelevant, doesn’t it? I’m using “fanwank” in the most positive sense one can: I rather enjoy mental exercise to try and figure out how something incongrous might fit into the continuity you pretend is airtight. It’s a fun game as long as you don’t become tiresome about it, a pure fan interaction with material; it makes for great blog posts put terrible stories.