I’m planning a series of posts on what a few of us are calling ‘the Prismatic Age’ of comics, and specifically about the idea of Hypertime, a Grant Morrison concept that to my mind is one of the most innovative ever to be brought into mainstream comics.
Hypertime was introduced in a miniseries called The Kingdom, by Mark Waid and various artists. The Kingdom has a horrible reputation among comic fans, and it doesn’t really deserve it. The main reason for this terrible reputation is that it was promoted as a sequel to Kingdom Come. Kingdom Come was a graphic novel by Waid and Alex Ross that was regarded at the time of its publication in the mid-90s as being something new and exciting and good, but it hasn’t aged at all well. It’s overblown, stodgy, and full of self-importance – it cries out “Look, superheroes are Serious Important Business! Look, I can quote from the Book Of Revelation! Doesn’t Superman look dignified with sideburns?” The best thing about it is that it managed to get in a reference to a Dukes Of Stratosphear song (Brainiac’s Daughter)
The Kingdom, on the other hand, is unabashed fun. In fact, it looks in retrospect very much like a proto-Seven Soldiers – or at least a halfway house between DC’s ‘annual events’ and Morrison’s mega-event – there’s a pair of bookends (plus a #0 story) and five one-shots, each focusing on a different new character (including a ‘son of the Bat’ who bears more than a passing resemblance to Damien Wayne) which don’t really connect up in any way but are all needed in the end. It’s far more about introducing new ideas than it is about rehashing the old. The one-shots are set in the world of Kingdom Come, and so are fairly downbeat in tone, as is the framing story (about someone going back in time and killing Superman over and over again, every day), but the story’s told with a lightness of touch that was missing from the original story. It’s aged a hell of a lot better, but anyone who wanted a second Kingdom Come definitely didn’t get it, while anyone who didn’t want that probably wasn’t reading it in the first place.
But some of the criticism of The Kingdom is fairer, at least in retrospect, because it was not primarily a story as much as it was a way of introducing a single concept into the DC Universe, but that concept has gone almost completely unused ever since.
At the time, DC was very proud for some reason of having a fixed, immutable, timeline with no multiple realities, in which the continuity was invariant – as if this was in some way a good idea for a supposedly fantastical universe. There was even a team of superheroes called the Linear Men (and can you imagine a duller name than that? They were created by Dan Jurgens, as I’m sure no-one is shocked to know) who were dedicated to preserving the timeline and preventing interesting stories from happening by ensuring there was no deviation.
The Kingdom introduced Hypertime, which was an attempt to do away with all that nonsense and also to explain away any inconvenient continuity errors. But it was much more than that. An idea from Grant Morrison, named by Mark Waid, Rip Hunter explains Hypertime in The Kingdom as follows:
Hypertime. The vast, interconnected web of parallel time-lines which comprise all reality… The possibilities of hypertime are infinite and humble the power of any man… The problem with the linear men is that they’re too linear. They’re vested in enforcing an inflexible view of reality… they think orderly, catalogued continuity is preferable to a kingdom of wonder.
Events of importance often cause divergent ‘tributaries’ to branch off the main timestream… on occasion, those tributaries return — sometimes feeding back into the central timeline, other times overlapping it briefly before charting an entirely new course
Now one thing I dislike about this description is that it still refers to one central timeline – it still gives one view of reality primacy – which is not something I’ve got from the Morrison interviews where he talks about this. In fact, without the idea of a central timeline Hypertime can be quite a neat way of reconciling two of the different interpretations of quantum physics – the Copenhagen interpretation (which suggests that there is no objective reality, just the reality that we measure) and the Everett-Wheeler-Graham many-worlds interpretation (in which there are an infinite, infinitely-replicating, number of nearly-identical parallel universes). If you assume that each individual’s perception is a separate hypertimeline, which is in turn a parallel universe in the EWG model, you get a universe where measuring reality becomes the act of splitting or merging hypertimelines. This actually is as consistent with the data as either of those two – Wigner’s Friend exists in a separate hypertimeline from Wigner, but the two timelines overlap whenever the two are in contact.
(Of course we know now that in the DCU the hidden variable interpretation is true, but that could probably be brought in too with a bit of fudging…)
I’m not explaining this very well, but I’m planning to do several more posts on this, and how this idea has fed into 52, Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis. I think Hypertime has been misunderstood to a great extent by most comic fans, who see it as ‘confusing’ or an excuse for continuity errors. I think though it is the most perfect representation of a set of ideas Grant Morrison has been working with at least since Animal Man I’ve got a lot more to say about this, and shall probably continue tomorrow…
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! 
I’ve been thinking about this in relation to Morrison’s recent work on BATMAN where he’s continuing his project to somehow make every story we’ve ever read to have actually happened. But, something about this latest effort seems different from something like Hypertime, which was a very open concept. Nothing in Hypertime was forced to conform to the rules of one specific story or reality, while what he’s doing with BATMAN seems more akin to the compression of the multiverse into one reality post-CRISIS. Post-CRISIS was much more about revamping and reimaging than providing new context for old stories, but it almost seems that since people latched onto that type of idea and didn’t seem to like (understand?) Hypertime, Morrison switched tactics… it’s still all about making sure everything we’ve ever read actually happened, but in a stricter, more controlled manner.
I remember hypertime when it was introduced, and that it was presented very briefly as being a very big deal before being forgotten.
It may be that I’m still missing the point, but then and now I’ve never understood what exactly they were trying to sell by Hypertime.
To me, I didn’t see what the difference between Hypertime is, and just a plain old multiverse. Not that the re-introduction of the multiverse isn’t a big deal, but I was offput by the way Hypertime was hyped up as a new concept, a big original idea that will change everything.
Am I still missing the hook of hypertime? Love a good multiverse, but what’s the difference here than the ‘infinite realities exisiting side by side in the endless streams of time’ that Marvel and DC had already done for decades?
Agree totally with your overview of Kingdom Come and the Kingdom. I loved both of them at the time but I think the latter has better stood the test of time.
I think the difference between Hypertime and the multiverse is contained within the Rip Hunter speech that you quoted.
‘Events of importance often cause divergent ‘tributaries’ to branch off the main timestream… on occasion, those tributaries return — sometimes feeding back into the central timeline, other times overlapping it briefly before charting an entirely new course’
Now although you say you dislike the idea of a central timeline, and to a certain extent I agree, this concept of diverging and, most importantly, intersecting time lines is unique. it can be used to explain anomolous factors like the many origins of Hawkman or Power Girl or the convoluted future histories of the various Legions of Super Heroes for example. Most importantly I seem to remember in ‘The Kingdom’ it was suggested that whatever you can imagine not only could but must exist in Hypertime. This is a crazy concept but totally fitting for the DCU or even the Marvelverse 9which it must contain). It recalls Alan Moore’s comment in ‘Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow’ i.e. ‘This is an imaginary story…arenet they all?’ and connects strongly, I believe, to Grant Morrison’s killer piece of dialogue in the current Batman where Batman questions Batmite as to whether he is really ‘a hyper-imp from the fifth dimension or a figment of my imagination’ to which ‘Mite replies ‘the Fifth dimension is the imagination!’. You could just as easilly apply this to Hypertime.
I would love to know what killed Hypertime, though.
“Fans” almost seem to universally hate it because they thought it was just a excuse for crappy continuity. But an uncaring audience couldn’t have killed it, because the concept was buried as quickly as it was presented. Other than a few cameos in Flash and that Hypertension story in Superboy, hypertime was pretty much swept under the rug.
Yeah, it was a little surprising just how quickly a Hypertime multiverse was abandoned.
Grant Morrison didn’t stop trying though, later re-introducing the Crime Syndicate through a ‘counter earth’. Totally not an alternate reality, just a counter earth in a pocket dimension with an identical but thematically reversed timeline, and counterparts of all the citizens. Not an alternate earth though, those got destroyed.
Hmmm, and then if Hypertime is defined as “infinite alternate realities caused by divergent timelines”, I suppose Morrison’s big Rock of Ages story line was a big example of that.
Along that definition, Marvel is really the place for a Hypertime system. With the Watcher’s classic ‘What If’ explanation of alternate realities all being caused by branching time streams, it sounds pretty close to Rip Hunter’s description. Add to that the way Marvel likes to do alternate reality stories resulting in time travel gone wrong, then leave those realities in place for future storytelling long after they’ve been resolved (House of M, Age of Apocalypse, Mutant X…)