The
Return of Crisis In Hypertime Zero:
Tracking the Continuity Shattering Events
of DC, part 2
Part 1
note:
These articles are dedicated to frequent forum reader GreyNite1,
who loves comics but came late to the party and thus knows
very little about them. Yet we suspect that there's a lot
of GreyNites out there, so we provide this as a public service
to our readers.
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Thanks
to Extant, The Atom
exploded into puberty...again.
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In the
wake of Zero Hour, the Linear Men became harsh time
cops, renewing their dedication to the one true (new) continuity.
For a brief time, Ray Palmer (The Atom) became a teen-ager
again, but retaining the memories of the screw-ups he'd
committed as an adult (Screw-ups that would come back to
haunt him again in Identity Crisis).
As a
result of his youthening, Ray became a mentor to a new crop
of Teen Titans, most of which would slip into obscurity
until such time as a crossover might need cannon fodder.
Several members of the JSA died, aged by Extant. Some found
new youth and vigor.
(Original Green
Lantern Alan Scott discovered separately that his own willpower
could make him young again, though he seems to have settled
for a vague late middle-age so people wouldn't stare when
he and his wife went a-walkin'.)
The Legion of
Super-Heroes got a reboot (not for the first or last time),
which included an origin for long-time enemy the Time Trapper,
who had also done some mucking around to fix continuity
in the wake of the original Crisis On Infinite Earths.
After assuming his mantle, he merged all the different versions
of his friends and hoped for the best.
Continuity was
fixed. Everything made sense. Except soon enough it didn't.
The big problem
was that despite both Crisis On Infinite Earths and
Zero Hour firmly establishing that only one Earth
and one timeline existed, we still kept getting these intrusions
from alternate realities.
We could sort
of accept the Pocket Universe of the Time Trapper. But the
anti-matter universe that housed Green Lantern and Justice
League enemies the Qwardians had explicitly ceased to exist,
yet we still had Qwardians, and liked the idea that
they came from an anti-matter universe. (It's an idea so
central to fandom that CrossGen ended up basing almost all
of its line-up on it, just before being sucked into the
anti-matter universe of publisher Mark Alessi's overreaching
ambition.)
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Proving
they live on Earth, too...
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Fans also liked
the Crime Syndicate of Amerika, long-time Justice League
foes who inhabited Earth-3 and were clearly killed in Crisis
On Infinite Earths. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
liked them, too, and revived them in a graphic novel, JLA:
Earth 2 ,
that tied in to regular continuity, brought back fan favorites
and yet left an important question unanswered: how could
there be an alternate Earth when there are no alternate
Earths?
Then there's
also the question of alternate timelines.
Shortly after
Zero Hour we got Alex Ross and Mark Waid's brilliant
Kingdom Come, a look into the future of the DC Universe
that criticized where superhero comics were going and reaffirmed
that DC heroes had a nobility that no amount of cynicism
could crush.
That series
introduced a next generation of heroes while alluding to
a series of tragic events in our familiar but older heroes'
pasts. Then characters from the classic mini-series started
popping up in regular DC books, leading more obsessive fans
to believe that Kingdom Come would be made mainstream
continuity.
Contradictions
arose. The narrator of the series, Norman McCay, had been
guided around by a Spectre clearly bound to Jim Corrigan,
a character that had not only laid down the mantle of vengeance
but had also been one of the rare DC characters to literally
refuse the chance to come back to life.
The Spectre
wasn't the only Golden Age hero McCay knew; as a pastor
he had also counseled a dying Wesley Dodds, the original
Sandman. (Dodds would die differently in the pages of JSA
-- but it's about to be explained)
Technically,
it shouldn't matter, but again, we love our continuity and
love to have stories linked together. Though it occasionally
gets out of hand, that's one reason that comics companies
do these major events. People buy them.
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83,300
years from now, Batman's still a bad-ass...
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Re-enter
Grant Morrison and Kingdom Come's co-creator, Mark
Waid. Morrison, having successfully helped relaunch the
Justice League of America as JLA, initiated the ridiculously
fun DC
One Million event.
Positing
where the DC Universe would be when the company got around
to publishing the millionth issue of Action, Morrison
tied together the 853rd Century with modern day, as a sentient
computer from the future seeks revenge on Superman, about
to emerge from thousands of years of exile in the heart
of the sun. That computer puts icing on the cake by trying
to spread a technological virus in the twentieth century.
You know, there's
just no way to explain a Grant Morrison plot in a simple
sentence. Nor two.
Descendants
of the Justice League, Justice Legion A, travel back in
time to meet their inspirations. Every single title then
published had a special millionth issue, allowing writers
to go wild imagining what the 853rd century versions of
their characters would be like.
That crossover
also introduced a new Hourman, an android carrying the genetics
of Rex Tyler, the original Hourman who had died in Zero
Hour. Thanks to DC One Million, Geoff Johns found
a loophole to get Rex Tyler back in the pages of JSA,
not so much messing up continuity as neatly sidestepping
it.
Sidestepping
continuity became a cause for Morrison and Waid, who together
conceived Hypertime.
Next:
Explaining
Hypertime and Why We Need an Infinite Crisis...or do we?
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