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MOTW 4/29/15: Everything Dies.

TexiKenTexiKen Dammit!That fish really got me!Registered User regular
New Avengers #33, Doom decides to go toe-to-toe with the only things capable of matching his ego:
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Something doesn't go right, and the next page following a wash of white is Reed and T'Challa noticing there's only 2 dozen universes left. Whoops.


Avengers #44, heroes slap fight while Earth burns.

Tony chooses the red option:

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While everyone is trying to figure out the final hours of this Earth and who to save on Val's Ark, Steve and Tony finally have that fight alluded to in Avengers #1

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Posts

  • Golden YakGolden Yak Burnished Bovine The sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered User regular
    I liked Avengers and New Avengers as well, leading into Secret Wars as they do, but Multiversity #2 is my MOTW, acting as the final chapter for this interesting little Multiversity nine-part pseudo-series.
    It took a long time and a lot of re-reading to understand what the heck was going on in this series, but the results are well worth it and I really like a lot of the over-arcing themes and ideas this series presented, even beyond the individual issue concepts.

    As far as the one-shots go, I like the Society Of Superheroes, Thunderworld, and Ultra Comics ideas - wouldn't mind seeing full series for them.

    But the overall theme of living stories and idea-based lifeforms is my favorite part of it. It adds another level to the DC Universe - there's the street level of guys like Batman, the superhero/sci-fi level of the Justice League, the cosmic level of things like New Genesis, Darkseid, and the Green Lanterns, and the multiverse level of cross-overs and convergences.

    And now there's this Multiversity level, the level of story and narratives and ideas - the DC Universe is a fictional universe, and is under attack by story-based monsters. The Gentry are all avatars of super-villain archetypes, drawn in by bad ideas and stories - they thrive in stories where the heroes fail, where the bad guys win, where good loses and evil triumphs. They've infected the fictional DC Universe to get at us, the readers, the people in the real world - infecting our stories to bring about negativity, cynicsm, apathy, and ill-will, tearing down our fictional inspirations and heroes to take away hope. They manipulate heroes and villains across the 52 - they do things like having Darkseid returned to the New 52 narrative after his death at the end of Final Crisis, so there can be more stories where evil triumphs. They want all heroes to be grim and gritty and murderous - the light-hearted feel-good classic superhero universe of Earth-5, the Captain Marvel earth, is immune to their assault. They hint at something they are working to build called the Oblivion Machine - 'THE OBLIVION MACHINE EATS YUR PRECIOUS MORTAL HOURS, GROWS FAT ON YUR WASTED TIME. ABSORBED IN ITS PICTURE SHOWS, YU GROW OLD' - possibly a reference to television and/or computers, electronic screens robbing life from the comics medium, bombarding people with shallow stories full of violence and tawdry imagry, sapping creativity and promoting apathy (just a thought).

    Multiversity #2 also introduces the concept of Multiple Multiverses into the canon DC Universe narrative - the New 52 is just one Multiverse, while the Gentry and their Empty-Handed Lord are thriving off the fall of Multiverse-2 (presumably the pre-New52 Multiverse that was re-written by Flashpoint). This means that every retcon and re-origining of the DC Universe can be thought of as another Multiverse that still exists in some sense - a cosmic superstructure of Multiverses just as the Multiverse is a superstructure of Earths.

    It's pretty heavy stuff, but my favorite take-away is the concept of entities that attack using stories, themes, and narratives, what Ultra Comics refers to as 'Hostile Independant Thought-Forms' - story demons that feast on bad ideas. In a fictional universe, a monster that attacks through stories can potentially be more powerful and more dangerous than any number of cosmic-powered Spectres or New Gods.

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  • DelduwathDelduwath Registered User regular
    I really struggled with Multiversity #2; I suspect that I'm going to have to re-read all of Multiversity, preferably in one sitting, before I fully "get" what it's about.

    That being said, I think that I can already that the series was successful in at least one way: Morrison likes to play with the idea of entities from a fictional world interacting with entities in a non-fictional world, often trying to get the reader involved as a character in the story, and I think that the Ultra Comics issue of Multiversity was the most successful iteration of this type of storytelling. I've never felt so complicit in the events of a story as I did with that issue. When one of the characters commented on how we use lock and firewalls to keep bad things out of our belongings, but we just let bad ideas waltz into our heads unimpeded, it sent me reeling. It was a Big Idea, one of the biggest I've gotten from a comic. For that alone, A+.

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