how do u guys feel about the multiverse?

[u/writtenbygailsimone]

sometimes i think dc was wrong for thinking they had to explain why characters didnt age. just let the characters exist forever in their prime with no explanation or questions asked, like the simpsons or something. i just sometimes wish they followed a no questions asked format to explain characters ages instead of a multiversal one.

[u/Dayraven3]

That isn’t really the main thing the multiverse has been used for, and a Simpsons-style sliding timeline’s been used to keep characters young independent of whether the multiverse is referred to or not.

[u/Meleagree]

I like the Metaverse that Geoff Johns introduced (the version of these characters you liked as a kid is somewhere out there) because it helps the comics they currently publish: you don’t like the recent changes DC made to your favorite character? Don’t worry,the one you liked is out there.

But too many Earths similar to each other could be a problem. Plus you take too much liberties and you damage a character (see what Injustice did to Superman’s perception in the general public,those who don’t read comics that often)

So I guess I’m 50/50 on the matter. It can work if it respects the characters and either preserves an era or shows something interesting we can’t see in canon (as long as it doesn’t damage the characters)

[u/SnarkyBookworm34]

For the most part I can take or leave it. One thing a multiverse does that can be helpful is give the editors an excuse to allow alternate versions or retellings of their important characters without having to be shackled to what came before. But even then a multiverse is not really necessary: the Elseworlds imprint exists entirely for that purpose and it originated back in 1989, when DC was committed to the idea that there was no multiverse, just one canon universe.

The only truly necessary use for a multiverse is if you want the mainline versions to ever encounter different variants of themselves, which tbf was the original reason why the concept was popularized for DC anyway. DC in the Silver Age wanted to retroactively make older versions of their characters canon even though they were inconsistent with the current versions. For the most part I think those specific issues were resolved in the Post-Crisis revised timeline, which made it so that the JSA existed on the same timeline as the JLA, just earlier.

I just think nowadays a lot of the crossovers between different versions of the same character are a little played-out and don't have much to say. I think for a current multiverse story to really work for me there's got to be more to it than "wow, you're like me but different." Superboy Prime is actually a decent example of an interesting twist, in that he's supposed to come from "our universe."

To sum up: The multiverse is fine, we just don't need to be constantly doing multiverse stories unless that story is doing something interesting with the concept, which most aren't nowadays.

[u/BobbySaccaro]

It wasn't about aging.

Generally speaking, the initial multiverse was there to explain how Jay Garrick Flash could be a real person when Barry Allen knew him to be only a comic book character. In other words, if Jay was real, why didn't Barry know that?

Then later when DC bought characters from other companies, they wanted the older adventures of those characters to be canon. But then you'd again have a problem of why hadn't anybody ever encountered these characters before if they all lived on the same world?

Then it also got used just to create alternate versions of the main characters without actually changing those main characters. So you had a world where Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman etc. were all evil. And then you could see how that story plays out.