The Return Of Bruce Wayne… And Hypertime
Return Of Bruce Wayne 2 was a bit good, wasn’t it?
Almost a fifth issue of Klarion in look, with Frazer Irving getting to draw lots more grumpy Puritans, albeit this time living above ground and human, rather than the Sheeda we now have an ‘infestation of Hyperfauna’ – Cthuloid monsters attacking from outside normal spacetime.
In fact, they’re attacking from *our* world.
The ‘archivist’ – and what a fascinating design that is, with a body reminiscent of the Green Man (or perhaps of Swamp Thing), but with something of the fractal around the outside, but with a head that’s equal parts upended-Skeets and Batmask – gives us a description of a ‘cube time’ (not to be confused with timecube) which is, I’m certain, Morrison’s original conception for what Waid turned into Hypertime. We have timelines crossing each other and interacting with each other (“Each track a new vibration, a separate universe, a superstring on a mighty fretboard”) , but as RIp Hunter says “As I’ve always expected, perpendicular to plane time must be cube time, from where we look flat”.
This actually makes sense, incidentally. The DC Universe timeline is, from our perspective, a literal line – the line our eyes follow as we go from one panel to the next. What is a timelike dimension for the characters in the comic is one of our spacelike dimensions, and we can view moments from throughout the DCU’s timeline next to each other (right now I’m looking at cavemen *and* at the last few minutes of the universe).
(If our universe is a two-spacelike-plus-one-timelike-dimension hologram, as some suggest, then we can infer some sort of analogy about the DCU – we perceive a nonexistent third spacelike dimension, while for them spacelike and timelike dimensions must be more mixed up, because they’re only perceiving two dimensions.)
Incidentally, I would be very surprised if, given the multiversal stuff plus the idea of storing all the information about the universe’s timeline at the end of the universe, Morrison wasn’t hinting at something like the Omega Point of insane/brilliant physicist Frank Tipler (an idea which in its basics is quite a neat bit of speculative physics, but which just can’t bear the weight Tipler tries to place on it, and which was also the basis for my favourite Faction Paradox novel).
So these monster attacks are incursions from our world – possibly incursions caused by the writer and artist to give more drama, elements that ‘shouldn’t be there’ in the story.
In fact, given Nathaniel Wayne’s claims that the ‘dragon’ comes from Hell, what does that say about our own universe? We’re certainly willing enough to see characters in the DCU go through horrible torments for our own increasingly apathetic amusement…
And we’re clearly, at this point, getting set up for Multiversity, and being reminded that to a large extent Morrison has been telling one huge story in his DCU work for well over twenty years now – Animal Man, JLA, Seven Soldiers, 52, Final Crisis, All-Star Superman and now RoBW all deal with characters attempting to fight back against authorial interference, with the fight against entropy (and again, saving all the information in the universe *at the precise moment of heat death* seems the ultimate rage against the dying of the light) and with the idea both that we can never comprehend any meaning in the universe *and* that it’s possible to impose a meaning onto the universe, even if that meaning is contrary to everything whatever gods there may be intend.
So here we have Bruce Wayne, still amnesiac, travelling to the very end of the universe in order to break the curse that’s been laid on his entire family by the woman he loves (though to be honest the Wayne family don’t seem to have been especially bothered by the curse, what with the whole fabulous wealth and so on). Cursed til the end of time, Bruce Wayne simply *goes* to the end of time, before carrying on with his mission. That’s what I call making your own destiny.
And all of this is just a few pages out of what is otherwise a totally different story, about nature worship coming into conflict with religious authoritarianism, about the power of love, and how people kill based on what appear to them the noblest of motives. It’s pretty standard third-generation-Crucible-photocopy stuff, but done by a writer and artist on top of their game (and Irving is absolutely in his element in the painted artwork of grim-looking Puritans, though less so in the superhero scenes, where his rather emaciated Superman and Rip Hunter look very little like the characters they’re meant to represent).
So how has Darkseid turned Wayne into a Doomsday Weapon? What do the eclipses have to do with all of this? Why the repeated images of Wonder Woman’s logo when she’s not, so far, appeared in even one panel?
I can’t wait for the next few weeks, with three more of Morrison’s Seven Soldiers collaborators providing art for RoBW while Irving moves on to draw Batman & Robin. Morrison has been hampered with bad artists for much of his Batman run, but whenever someone good – or even competent – has come onboard the results have been magnificent. I only hope DC editorial realise from the success of this series that creating a good comic takes more than just a good writer…
Crisis On Multiple Blogs – A Response To Pillock’s Response To Me (Hyperpost 10)
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
Panel from page 1 of Crisis On Infinite Earths 1. Written by Marv Wolfman, drawn by George Perez & Dick Giordano.
Speaking to a troll, Gavin said, in part, “Generally on Andrew’s blog we play the ball, not the man.”
It seems like a very little thing, and I’m sure to everyone else it is, but it confirmed for me that my posts here aren’t just standing on their own, but they’re part of a community – a ‘we’. (Actually, I think my blog’s comments section is the intersection between two or three different communities, which is one of the things I’m happiest about). I like that that community is identifiable enough that you can make generalisations about it, quite casually.
While I blog in great part to get the thoughts in my head out of it, I also do it because I crave discussion, and I get that from the responses people post to my stuff, be it in comments here, or on The Mindless Ones, or Sean at Supervillain or David at Vibrational Match linking my posts, or Debi reposting my NHS post, or James Graham reacting to my posts, or even Charlotte ‘fisking’ me. It makes me feel like my ramblings have some actual importance…
And one of the more important people in the community/ies that this blog belongs to is pillock, who is one of several regular commenters here whose comments inevitably make me feel like I’ve not thought out my original post enough (if you count as a ‘regular commenter’, you’re probably one of these – I get regular small epiphanies from the comments section here – the comments to the postmodernism post being very much a case in point).
So, much like Millennium’s post about my quantum physics post, I think pillock’s post about my Crisis On Infinite Earths post deserves a reply.
His main point, that a reinvigoration of DC Comics was absolutely necessary, and coincided with Crisis coming out, is absolutely true. Immediately pre-Crisis, with a few bright spots like Moore’s Swamp Thing (and if I had infinitely many posts in this series before I exhausted the last reader’s patience, I would devote at least one post to how Moore actually made use of Crisis in ways few others had, and how Morrison references this in Seven Soldiers), DC was full of absolute crap. A while ago I downloaded a torrent of all the Crisis tie-in issues – which is to say every DCU comic from 1985 and 86 – and other than Swamp Thing , and some of Engelhart’s Green Lantern (and even that had horribly dated) there was literally nothing of any value.
On the other hand, the period immediately post-Crisis and for a few years afterwards was probably the most creatively fertile for DC since the late 1930s. Byrne’s revamp of Superman – though widely derided now – was regarded at the time as a necessary move. Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire’s Justice League is still thought of fondly twenty-odd years later. Grant and Breyfogle on Batman introduced more new villains than anyone since the forties, Grant Morrison completely reinvented what could be done with mainstream superhero comics in Animal Man and Doom Patrol, and even the basic filler comics like Booster Gold had a base level of competence that was completely missing from even DC’s top selling comics a couple of years earlier.
We can debate to what extent this would have happened without Crisis – after all, Moore was making great use of the ‘outdated’ Silver Age concepts in his few superhero stories at the time, and my own view is that much of the change was due to the old freelancers who made up most of the DC workforce upping their game in response to the competition from the new blood coming over from the UK (the Giffen/DeMatteis League for example starts out as as blatant an attempt at a Watchmen follow-up as you could get). But I agree that Crisis provided a very good ‘line in the sand’ – we can talk about pre-Crisis and post-Crisis DC in a way we can’t with any other event. There was a change there, and Crisis was, if not the instigator, certainly part of that change.
I’m also perfectly happy to agree that on its own terms Crisis is actually a very good comic. Not a great comic – Wolfman’s purple prose stops that being a possibility – but a solid piece of superhero sturm und drang. Matt Rossi sums up most of my thoughts about the comic, and I can only add my own experience to this.
I first read Crisis when I was eleven or twelve, and the comic itself had come out several years earlier. At the time I had no real access to US comics except through British reprints, living in a tiny town, but for Xmas every year I was allowed to place a mail order for about a hundred quid’s worth with Forbidden Planet. I’d built Crisis up in my mind into some huge, legendary story that was totally unlike everything else ever – and when I read it, it didn’t disappoint me.
(You could actually do an analysis of Crisis as being a psychological journey for Superman – the archetypal superhero – as he rids himself of his demons (Ultraman) before fully integrating his child (Superboy) and father (Superman of Earth 2) aspects into one rounded personality. It’s appropriate that Superman is the only character whose post-Crisis changes really mattered).
But where I do disagree with Pillock is his suggestion that Crisis wasn’t ‘motivated by a nerdish need to enforce continuity’. To which I can only respond with these quotes from Marv Wolfman’s backmatter in Crisis issue one (well before any revisionism could happen):
Writers like to complicate matters and what began as a dream of a story – “Flash of Two Worlds” – had turned into a nightmare. DC continuity was so confusing no new reader could easily understand it while older readers had to keep miles-long lists to keep things straight.
Which simply isn’t true. When I was seven or eight I’d see random issues, out of order, sometimes printed decades apart, many of which were multiple-universe stories, and even then I’d never had any problem keeping track of it. Read Wolfman’s full essay – page 1 and page 2 – and you’ll see that he refers to the very idea of parallel universes as ‘problems’ and ‘complications’ and ‘nightmares’. While I like it as a comic it was very clearly created because Wolfman saw the very existence of these things as problematic.
What I find odd is Pillock defending this story with this reasoning:
All I’m saying is: there are always alternative narratives, and although weighing and judging them to see which ones have the better possibilities in them isn’t doing history either — is no closer to truth! — still as long as “history” isn’t what we’re doing, we might as well feel free to consider our different options. My story of the history of Crisis and continuity here, for all its inevitable lapses and inaccuracies, is at least as true to fact as is the Official Story…and maybe it even has a slight edge over it?
Which is in fact a big part – possibly the most important part – of what I’ve been saying in all these parts, and which is the very thing that Crisis set itself up in opposition to. The whole point of Crisis is a reaction against the very idea of ‘alternative narratives’. It’s a very Reaganite comic in fact – a bright new dawn, but you mustn’t disagree with the consensus. We can build a new future, but there’s only one possible future, and you’re not allowed to prefer the other possibilities.
Just look at that panel at the top of the page – “A multiverse that should have been one became many”.
“Should have been”. Wolfman appears morally affronted by the idea of multiplicity, alternatives, messiness. He wants a nice, orderly universe with everything in its place. And one can argue about whether removing all the ‘clutter’ is a necessary thing or not (just as one could argue about, say, Thatcher’s recreation of the British economy and the consequent destruction of Britain’s industrial base) but I think the impulse behind it is a worrying one, no matter what the result.
Like I said, I enjoy it as a comic, still – it’s one of only a handful of Big Superhero Crossovers that have had anything interesting about them (all the others have been written or co-written by Grant Morrison, without exception) – but it’s a good comic made for bad motives, and for once the early-21st-century consensus is probably the right one, overall…
Can You Rewrite History, Even One Line? Doctor Who, The Web Of Time, And A Response To Millennium (Hyperpost 7)
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
ceci n'est pas un blog post
To start with, let’s look at Millennium Elephant’s response.
Now, I actually agree with the vast majority of what Millennium is saying here – only really disagreeing with the assertion that free will exists, which I think is a debatable proposition (but he’s intelligent enough to say “Though if we are wrong about that it makes no difference because all our actions, including believing we have free will, are all pre-determined anyway!” – acceptance of the possibility that one *could* be wrong is, to my mind, the basis for all rational discussion). I’m also less convinced of the Copenhagen interpretation than he is – but like him, don’t actually see it as incompatible with the many-worlds interpretation, but rather that they’re both metaphors for what’s Actually Going On, which is some not-readily-describable combination of the different interpretations.
(Luckily, for the purposes of this series of essays, I’m more interested in what’s interesting than what’s right – I’m trying to play with a whole bunch of interrelated ideas here, about canon and continuity, time and hypertime).
However, what I *do* disagree with is the assertion that, for Doctor Who at least, the Copenhagen Interpretation makes us more responsible for the consequences of our actions than the variant of the Many Worlds interpretation that I have been referring to (with a hat tip to Messrs. Morrison & Waid) as Hypertime (Doctor Who fans may be familiar with a similar-but-possibly-distinct idea under the name of The Fugue).
I’m going to attempt to show this, in the time-honoured tradition of Doctor Who fans, by referring to a single line from one story – in this case 1985′s Attack Of The Cybermen, where the Doctor refers to ‘the web of time’ in passing.
Now that line has got a lot of attention in various fanfics and spinoffery in the twenty-four years since the episode was transmitted, and there’s a reason for that – the image of time as a web, rather than the more conventional line, says quite a lot.
And this image is compatible both with the ‘hypertime’ view, and with actions carrying a *lot* of weight.
Imagine that time *is* like a web – all the points of all the multiple universes are connected to other points. A normal person’s life follows a line from one point to another to a third, and will always be a consistent timeline, because they’re only travelling forward at a rate of sixty seconds per minute.
Now imagine that every time you make a decision, you strengthen one connection (the one where you make that decision) but break other connections from that point – from a point of view outside time (and such a point of view exists in Doctor Who, though I suspect not in reality, whatever that is) – something like the collapse of the waveform in the Copenhagen Interpretation, but this is breaking off connections between different objectively-existing universes.
This would mean that everyone had a consistent history – once you’ve broken a connection, there are universes you ‘can’t get to from here’, those that directly contradicted the past decision. But it would also mean that the Doctor had an awesome responsibility as a time traveller, and his decisions would matter not only for him but for all the universe.
For the other thing about a web, along with its interconnectedness, is its fragility.
Every time the Doctor makes a decision, he breaks and makes connections between different points of time – those he’s been to before and will be again. He can alter some things – so long as there’s a way for a consistent timeline to route through all the points he’s visited. So he can save a life that wasn’t saved before, because there is a consistent universe where that person was saved, but he can’t kill Hitler in 1933, because there’s no way to make that consistent with the universes he’s visited in the past.
Because the Doctor is very aware of something – as he travels up and down his ‘timeline’ in the web of time, he’s selecting a smaller and smaller number of possible timelines, and condemning more and more to impossibility. That’s bad enough in itself, but we all do that every time we make a decision.
But he could – all too easily – break a segment of his own timeline off altogether. If he makes the wrong decisions at points A and B, then the whole section of his timeline between those points could become completely detached from the rest of the web, inaccessible from either past or future. Which would of course mean condemning all the inhabitants of that fragment of the web of time to nonexistence… the more he interferes – the more he does *anything* – the more likely this becomes, but he can’t use that as an excuse *not* to intervene.
(And of course from there we can get to all sorts of story possibilities like villains trying to make ‘pocket timelines’ to control, people in broken-off fragments trying to rejoin their fragment to reality, the Doctor unable to save entire planets because doing so would break the last connection between universes, and so on).
This would also, of course, help explain why the rest of the Gallifreyans never meddle (with the exception of all the meddlers). It’s just too dangerous – making choices has *too many* consequences.
(I’m not suggesting that this is the case in real-world physics, of course – in fact I think it’s nonsensical for multiple different reasons – but I think it *is* the case in my own Doctor Who ‘canon’…)
leave a comment