Asides

Re: Issues of Continuity

Crisis wasn’t focused to much on fixing inconsistencies as it was on reducing complexity by reducing the myriad dimensions of the multiverse to a single universe. I suspect they planned to fix problems at the same time, but they’re still cleaning up the inconsistencies *created* by the Crisis.

Let’s look at the Titans (since I’ve been reading them since 1984). Since Wonder Woman hadn’t appeared yet in the post-Crisis universe, Wonder Girl couldn’t be her adopted sister, so she needed a new origin. A few months before the Crisis, they had finally revealed the origin of an early Titans character, Lilith, in a story involving the mythical Greek Titans. The new origin they came up with for Wonder Girl *contradicted* the origin they had just written for Lilith! Not only that, but the Lilith origin had introduced a group of villains called the Children of the Sun, so *they* needed a new origin too! And this is just one writer (Marv Wolfman co-wrote Crisis and wrote Titans from about 1980-1994).

Probably the most infamous contradictions were the result of erasing Superboy despite his key position in Legion of Superheroes history. They were trying to fix that one for years with one patch after another until they started over with Zero Hour.

Now Zero Hour, despite being (in my opinion) the far inferior story of the two, was definitely intended to clean up inconsistencies. It didn’t (at least, not much). Except for the Legion, I don’t think much of anything *really* changed as a result of Zero Hour.

I guess that’s part of why Waid and Morrison came up with the overlapping part of Hypertime: to acknowledge that inconsistencies exist.

And I hate to say this, because I really like the way Geoff Johns has been handling the Flash, but glaring inconsistencies keep popping up (Goldface shouldn’t be that old, and since he’s a cop killer he shouldn’t be out yet and the cops should hate his guts, Iris couldn’t have been around when Julie was pregnant unless she was time travelling more than we know, Chillblaine wasn’t “found” dead, Polaris flat-out killed him, etc. – although that last bit I need to check up on to see if I remember it correctly).

Anyway, there’s an interesting story on how long it took for the changes made in the Crisis to really stick in the introduction to “Legend of the Green Flame,” Neil Gaiman’s Superman/Green Lantern story which didn’t get printed for a decade. Apparently there was major disagreement among the editors as to just what had changed or was going to change. As whoever was writing the intro put it: (and I’m paraphrasing here) “on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Green Lantern knew Superman was Clark Kent. Neil’s story was written on a Wednesday, but turned in on a Thursday.” Since it hinged on there being a friendship between Supes and GL, they axed the story.

Re: JSA news/spoiler for Starman #72

To be blunt, as long as the Golden Age is tied to World War II, most of the original JSA members are guaranteed to die within the next couple of decades. In twenty years, it’ll be hard to accept a 100-year-old running around fighting crime. The only ways to keep them around are to make them immortal or to change continuity and given them a 60-year timeline the way the Silver Age has been given a 12-year timeline.

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And we all know how popular *that* would be!

Re: Hawk and Dove

Captain Arsala of the Washington, DC Special Crimes Unit. Went after Dove, Dawn was trying to work out the whole secret identity thing and get him to date her as Dawn instead, eventually he figured out they were the same person. He and Dawn were camping when Monarch found them, blasted Sal into oblivion, and grabbed Dove.

Funny thing about Armageddon 2001 #2 is that you can see that they got halfway through the story before they decided to change Monarch’s identity. It’s supposed to look like a major red herring, but it’s way too choppy, plus if you take into account things like the following Justice League Europe issue in which Catherine Cobert has a nightmare about an evil Captain Atom, it strongly implies that CA was originally supposed to be Monarch.

Linda’s Race

Hector Guerra asks when Linda changed from being white with green eyes to Asian

Better question: Why did she ever have green eyes?

Linda’s been asian since her first appearance back in #28, when William Messner-Loebs was writing the series, identified as Korean within a few issues (either right after that appearance or during the Celestial Enlightenment storyline, either way before issue #40).

Somewhere during the time Wieringo was doing the art, the colorists seem to have forgotten that asians tend to have brown eyes, and they went green for a while (maybe spillover from constantly correcting Wally’s eye color?), though they do fairly consistently color Linda’s skin a shade darker than Wally’s. Looking back at Terminal Velocity, I can see a definite change when Salvador Larocca started (though at the time, since I knew she was asian, I just interpreted any differences as variations in style, like comparing Wieringo’s Wally to Jackson Guice’s or George Perez’ Wally – although it’s not really fair to compare anyone to George Perez (except perhaps for Phil Jimenez)).

As far as the shape of her face goes, I’d chalk it up to varying art styles, but once you throw in the eye color, it makes me wonder if some bonehead editor wanted to downplay the interracial aspect of their relationship.

Re: Flash Paradox

Actually, it’s not a paradox *yet,* just a loop. Confusing, but internally consistent. The main thing about a paradox is that it *isn’t* consistent – the old thing about going back in time to kill your grandfather, so you’d never be born to go back in time and kill him, so he’d still be alive, and so would you, and you’d go back in time…

Now a *real* paradox would be if, for some reason, John Fox *hadn’t* saved Iris… then Wally never would have gone to Central City and met the Flash, and you have either the Flash line ending with Barry or being picked up by someone else… who might have found a different solution to Mota (50th Anniversary Special) that wouldn’t have left him slowly turning into Radioactive Man over 700 years to reappear in John Fox’s time and lead to his gaining super-speed.

Hmmm… if that happened, then he wouldn’t even have the *chance* to help rescue Iris, and that future would remain intact. So I guess it technically wouldn’t be a paradox either. Aargh!

No wonder Wally gets a headache whenever he deals with time travel!

Re: Flash#164 jay garrick

In my opinion, to be considered a “Hypertime story,” it would have to make use of some facet of Hypertime that cannot already be explained by traditional understanding of time travel. Even if what’s really going when you change the past is the splitting off of a new hypertimeline, you can still interpret it as an alteration of a single timeline. After all, under most circumstances the time traveler has no way of breaking out of the timeline he creates – as far as he can tell, there *is* only one timeline.

One of my favorite quotes about scientific paradigms is “You can’t build a bridge with Relativity.” Gravity is a relativistic effect (or a quantum effect), but if you try to use relativity or quantum mechanical equations to design a bridge, you’ll never accomplish anything. You build a bridge with Newtonian physics, even though the underlying causes of the stresses that you’re trying to distribute are relativistic or quantum in origin. You can argue that a bridge is not a quantum object, because it doesn’t matter whether the electrons in its molecules are in clouds, orbitals, or tiny cardboard boxes.

So if a story confines itself to the main DCU timeline and could be told without knowledge or existence of Hypertime (just as we’ve been building bridges for centuries without knowledge of relativity, quantum physics, or whatever the next paradigm is that will come along), I think it can safely be considered “not a Hypertime story” in the same way that a bridge doesn’t involve relativity.

It’s possible to interpret any time travel story within the realm of Hypertime – I went to a great deal of trouble to figure out how Chronos, Team Titans, Armageddon 2001, Zero Hour, Bart Saves the Universe, Crisis and other stories could fit within Hypertime – but I would argue that none of these stories were Hypertime stories, because they could all be told within a traditional time-travel or multiverse framework. (I even had someone complain of this when I originally posted the Hypertime article on my site, which was why it was quickly retitled “Time and Hypertime.”).

If “Wonderland” turns out to use classical time travel without
branching, crossing, or mingling timelines, then it doesn’t use anything that is uniquely Hypertime. If it does, we can call the writer on it. Otherwise, it’s like calling “The Fugitive” a story about DNA. Yes, both pursuer and pursued have it, but it’s irrelevant to the actual story, which could just as easily be told about humanoid silicon-based lifeforms or sentient robots with only a few changes in dialog and none to the plot or setting.

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That’s the whole point. As an engineer, you don’t need to know all the hardcore physics details. When you build a bridge, it’s an engineering process, and all you need to deal with are things like gravity, wind, strength and elasticity of the material, etc. All that other stuff, even though it’s going on at subatomic level, is irrelevant to the bridge. In the same way, I see the underlying structure of Hypertime as being irrelevant to a plain time travel story, unless it involves something that can only be explained with Hypertime.

Re: The Flash #163: or about how can REALLY anyone beat The Flash

I like the idea of Wally’s attention span – even at super-speed (I think someone once said he isn’t actually impatient, it’s just that things happen more slowly for us than they do for him) – as a limiting factor. As Ex-Speed McGee (or was it Mason?) once said, super-speed doesn’t help if you don’t see it coming.

Re: Hypertime again or not?

The way I look at the overlapping aspect is to think of hypertime as a network of rivers. They all flow in the same direction, but sometimes they diverge and reconnect (such as when there’s an island in the middle of the river). A particular timeline is the path each water molecule takes as it goes from one part of the river to another. Many of these paths will cross each other and overlap, and the molecules themselves will knock into each other, influencing the paths they take.

It’s the idea of the “timestream” taken a step further.

Why I don’t want to see Savitar again…

I noticed a lot of you seem to want Savitar to come back. I don’t. Not because he wasn’t a great villain, but because he *was* – and because bringing him back from the dead would cheapen that death and the sacrifice Wally almost made. Likewise, bringing back Barry or Zoom permanently would cheapen Barry’s sacrifice and the tragedy of Zoom’s death (and all the grief Barry went through during his trial). I don’t know how many of you read The Titans currently, but I remember an issue where Starfire is showing Damage and Argent around their HQ and shows them the gallery of fallen Titans – Jericho, Kole, Golden Eagle, etc. “They all came back, right?” one of them (prob. Argent) asks. “I mean they *were* Titans…” And Starfire says, “You *do* know that when people die, they usually don’t come back, right?”

When someone comes back within one story, it makes sense. Terminal Velocity was like that. As someone said on another board, you start with the warning that “no one has ever gone into the Cave of Death and come back alive!” and you know instantly the story has to be about the one person who does come back. It ends up being like Orpheus’ descent into the underworld and his return. Or to pick a more modern example, Sheridan’s death on Z’ha’dum in Babylon 5. But Orpheus only went to the Underworld once, and Sheridan never returned to Z’ha’dum. Wally’s been “lost in the speed force” 3 times so far, and he’s come back every time. He even dove into it to rescue Linda during the Black Flash story. The threat’s gone. I didn’t even take it seriously this last time, at the end of Chain Lightning.

To go back to the Titans for a bit, they were formed to battle Trigon the Terrible, the demonic conqueror of another dimension who had set his sights on ours and who was Raven’s father. They barely defeated him once, and then in the second storyline he was “destroyed forever” by the spirits of the Azarathians. Great story, great conclusion, and we move on. 80 issues later, they do the Dark Raven storyline, and by the end of the series, Trigon is back just long enough to be “destroyed forever” AGAIN. How many times can you destroy someone forever? It makes the original victory hollow.

Resurrection only works for a limited pool of characters (Resurrection Man, Ras al Ghul, maybe a few others), and even then it has to have serious consequences (such as the death of Morpheus the Sandman and his replacement with Daniel – another facet of Dream, but a different persona from the one we’d come to know.)

Re: Why do you like THE FLASH?

The first comic I really collected was the New Teen Titans, and the first storyline I read was the second Trigon story (at the beginning of the deluxe series). So I’d read about Wally as Kid Flash (he had a prominent role in that story) there and in Crisis, so I thought I’d pick up the Flash. What I liked the most, especially early on, is that you have here an ordinary guy who’s a super-hero. He’s not billionaire Bruce Wayne, he’s not from another planet, he’s this regular guy who has powers, but has to deal with everyday problems like his parents, his girlfriend(s), his rent, etc. After that it was watching him slowly come out of Barry’s shadow, and in the last few years the core of the book has been his relationship with Linda – again, not a storybook one, but a real one, where they disagree, they argue, and they have to deal with how they differ just as much as with how they’re similar. The other key this series has is its focus on the Flash legacy. There are very few series where the hero’s predecessors are as important as Jay, Barry, and even Max and Johnny are with Flash – there’s the two present holders (Wally and Jesse) and the future in Bart and, to some degree, in Iris West II (whether she’s part of the “main” timeline or not)

That said, I do miss a lot of the older supporting characters. Mason, Tina and Jerry, even Chunk and Argus.

Re: Impulse Cancellation

I’m not sure if it applies here as well, but in campaigns to keep TV shows on the air they always have some recommendations:

  • letters on paper are always given more weight than email. 100 emails could come from one person with a mail bot, but chances are that 100 letters were sent by 100 different people (since you’d have to spend $33 on stamps – and never mind international postage)
  • If you can write legibly, it’s better to write it by hand in blue pen. That way they know for sure it’s not a photocopied form letter.
  • Keep it short and to the point. Maybe two paragraphs, and start out by telling them that you like Impulse and don’t want to see it cancelled. You can go on to say why you like the series, but don’t go on for pages extolling its philosophical implications. They probably won’t read anything that long.
  • Don’t send it to the Impulse lettercol – if it was their decision, the series wouldn’t be in danger. You want to send your “please don’t cancel the series” to the higher-ups at DC. The lettercol is the place for your philosophical treatise.

Anyone want to organize a letter-writing campaign? I don’t have the time to run it myself, but if someone else wants to run it, I’d be happy to put up a link to the info if you want to put it on your own site, or you can send me a page and I’ll put it on my own server. I get enough hits on my site that it’ll be a good gateway to get people to notice it.

Names

Found these on BehindTheName.com

WALLACE (m) “Welsh” or “foreigner” (French). Sir William Wallace was the Scottish hero who briefly expelled the rule of England from Scotland in the 13th century.

WALTER (m) “rule people” or “rule army” (Teutonic). Composed of the elements wald “rule” combined with either heri “army” or harja “people”. Sir Walter Scott was an novelist from Scotland, the author of ‘Ivanhoe’.

WALLY (m,f) Short form of WALTER or WALLACE (masculine), or VALESKA (feminine).

LINDA (f) “beautiful” (Spanish) or short form of BELINDA or MELINDA. It can also mean “snake” or “serpent” from Teutonic linde. The serpent signified wisdom in Teutonic legend.

ANGELA (f) “messenger” from the Greek word angelos.

I especially like the contrast between Wallace (who felt like an outcast in his own family) and Walter (who is the more ruthless of the two). “Linda” representing wisdom fits with what Wally said about her teaching him everything he knows about being an adult. Angela as a messenger, though… that’s an interesting idea.

Super-Speed Perceptions

Replying to Minyon’s post:

has anyone ever wondered how he staves off the boredom. I mean at the speed he processes information, a normal conversation would seem to take forever. I actually remeber a story in one of the annuals where the whole thing took place from Wally’s POV, and the entire story was resolved in the time it took for an elevator to fall 2 floors. Normal life must be a real DRAG for the man.

Wally’s perceptions have changed from time to time. In the first issue, he runs several miles past Vandal Savage before the image even registers on his retina – which doesn’t make sense, because if that were true, how could he possibly run around things and dodge obstacles? Then in #30, there’s another story from Wally’s super-speed perspective. He and Connie go to a movie, and everything is taking place in normal speed, when suddenly the picture stops on one frame, and everyone in the theater (including Connie) freezes. He can’t figure out what’s going on, until he notices a pressure at the back of his neck. he turns around, and there’s a bullet hanging in mid-air. Suddenly he realizes his speed has reflexively switched on, and he goes around the theater looking for other bullets and stopping them before they actually hit anyone. He notices after a while that the picture’s moved to another frame (though realistically, the screen should’ve gone dark between frames), and decides he’d better hurry up. Once he’s confident he’s caught all the bullets, he goes over to the gunman and switches his perceptions back to normal speed (at which point a bullet he missed hits the exit sign). So at as far as William Messner-Loebs was concerned, Wally could switch from normal to hyper-speed perspective at will.

That elevator story– does anyone remember which annual it was in?

Re: DC shutting down web pages

I’ve been out of town all weekend, and haven’t had a chance to catch up with the whole discussion, but I have *some* info on this. About a year ago, DC shut down a Superboy website (I forget the title, but I think it was fly.to/superboy ) that had lots of unpublished stuff and images and such. They didn’t actually shut it down so much as say “you can’t have anything on this list,” and he decided that there wouldn’t be anything left of his site but an article or two (like my Les Mis page now consists of one article and a FAQ), and pulled it down completely. Last I heard he’d opened a new site based on the developing relationship between Superboy and Wonder Girl, avoiding the stuff they were complaining about.

Around the same time at least one other site, a Secret (as in Young Justice) website, got a similar letter. Actually it was an identical letter; someone had sent it to her, apparently as a mean-spirited prank, so she took her site down until she discovered that it hadn’t actually been sent by DC, then put it up again.

There may have been one other site, which I think may have been Hawkman-related, around the same time, but I don’t recall the circumstances of that one at all.

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Another poster asks if my site will be okay

I think so. The only thing I’d be worried about would be the images. The articles certainly, and probably the bios, should fall under the research/reference/review category, though I’ll have to qualify this with IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer).

Re: You Don’t Know Jack! (Flash spoilers)

So who or what is this Jack reference about? Is this some other (no not again!)hypertime version of Wally?

Hope not… things are complicated enough as it is. However, perception is built into the Hypertime concept – i.e. you can find yourself remembering an alternate timeline that you didn’t live (this would explain things like finding your shoes next to the couch when you’re absolutely certain you left them under the bed – one of your hypertime duplicates did in an alternate timeline, but you remember it anyway). Since Wally’s crossed zillions of possible timelines, it’s easy for his memory to have picked up bits from another one, just as in the past his eyes have appeared blue (like Walter’s) in other series.

Somehow, I have this feeling that they won’t be willing to keep it that simple.

On rec.arts.comics.dc.universe

Triangles

As many people have said before, the presence of a triangle does not necessarily indicate interconnection (someone mentioned LSH/Legionnaires), and interconnection does not necessarily indicate serialization (see Superman in the early days of triangles).

As an example of nonserial interconnectedness, look at the DC One Million issues of Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Resurrection Man, and one of the Superman titles (I forget which one). Plots in these four issues are quite connected, and if you want you can follow from GL through MM, Supes, and Resurrection man. But the only comic that requires you to read anything else is GL – it ends on a cliffhanger. So he’s falling to Mars at the start of MM. You don’t need to see how he got there any more than you need to see how Captain Cold got to the Central City bank. So Resurrection Man heads off to Mars at the end of Supes – you only have to read it if you want to, otherwise, you can follow Superman into DC One Million #4, which tells you anything important that you would’ve missed in Resurrection Man. Or if you want to start with RM – you don’t need to know anything from the Superman issue to follow it. The only backstory needed is in the core DC1M books and maybe the JLA issue.

In the back of each issue is a list of all the DC1M issues, *in order* (with details on that week). It’s not on the cover, but it tells you what order to read the issues you picked up. If you like reading stories about green people, and you bought everything at the end of the month (and by some miracle managed to *get* the first week of DC1M that late), you now know to read Green Lantern before you read Martian Manhunter.

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Continuity

how important is continuity?

what if someone was to write a sequel to a famous book and in the process retconned a certain aspect of the original for the sake of the sequel?

In Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 (the book), the monolith is found orbiting Saturn. In the sequel 2010, it’s around Jupiter. By the fourth book, the original mission from 2001 is said to have taken place around 2030 or so.

In Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Malcom dies at the end. He proved such a popular character in the movie that he showed up again in The Lost World (the book), alive and well.

Larry Niven completely changed the supposed background of the Ringworld in the second book of the series – instead of being built by on character’s humanoid race with cheap matter transmutation, it was actually built by Pak Protectors with a hell of a lot of resources (though this doesn’t really count – it was background, not story, and the person was lying.)

what if in Return of the Jedi (I know – it’s a movie, but bear with me) we learn that Vader wasn’t Luke’s father, he lost his hand in a farm accident while helping his uncle many years ago and all appearances of Han Solo were actually appearances of a bounty hunter named Deckerd?

This already happened. In Star Wars, it’s explained that Luke’s father was killed by Darth Vader. In The Empire Strikes Back, Vader tells Luke he *is* his father. Until Ben confirms it in Jedi, you can assume Vader’s lying – I mean, who are you gonna believe, Darth Vader or Ben Kenobi?

(Heck, while we’re at it in movies, there’s practially zero continuity from one James Bond film (or at least actor) to the next. I don’t see that hurting the series.)

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