Page 1 of The Brave and the Bold #197 © 1983 and characters TM/® DC
Comics. Script: Alan Brennert. Pencils: Joe Staton. Inks: George
Freeman. Letters: John Costanza. Colors: Adrienne Roy.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
Showing posts with label parallel realities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parallel realities. Show all posts
Batmen Beyond
Page 1 of The Brave and the Bold #197 © 1983 and characters TM/® DC
Comics. Script: Alan Brennert. Pencils: Joe Staton. Inks: George
Freeman. Letters: John Costanza. Colors: Adrienne Roy.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
One Flash, Two Flash,
Red and Blue Flash
Teddy Sears as Jay Garrick in The Flash Ep. 2.01 “Flash of Two Worlds” © 2015
CW Network. Photo: Cate Cameron. Character TM/® DC Comics.
I didn’t see Tuesday’s Flash episode until after midnight — so it ended up a birthday present. And it was a gift to all the fans who’ve loved DC’s multiverse for decades. I’m honestly not able to put my reaction into words, because it basically involved giving
the astral projection of my 6-year-old self a high-five.
Worlds Enough and Time
At this week’s TV “upfronts” we got trailers for CBS’ new Supergirl, to air Mondays at
8 p.m. ET come November, and the CW Arrow/Flash spinoff DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, which bows at midseason. [bad links]
Ra's al Ghul is practically a millennial next to the immortal Vandal Savage, who’s mentioned in the latter. I’d love to find out that he or some continuity-altering character from the comics (say, Glorith or the Time Trapper) has prevented Kal-El from becoming Superman on the current “Earth-CW”. Perhaps once Rip Hunter’s motley crew properly resets history the Arrow/Flash universe could merge with that of Supergirl or otherwise establish Superman and Batman as existing in that universe — and Man of Steel as but a glimpse into a sad, twisted parallel reality.
Promo image © 2015 Warner Bros. Entertainment.
Related: Kind of Blue • When Barry Met Ollie • Live-Action Comics
Yellow Submarine
With its fifth and final season, Fringe has entered a new dimension. Or is that descriptor inadvisable, lest the senses of the word be confused? The series has, of course, built much of its mythology on travel to a parallel Earth: Over There, a.k.a. the Other Side, home to doppelgangers of our heroes and villains. Instead, Fringe’s future lies in the actual — well, the fictional actual — future, as viewers had already been made aware through advance promotion and was seen on Friday night in the Season Five opener...
I’ll get back to the future shortly. First I want to welcome any new readers by way of giving these writeups (and their names) some context.
Come Together
I find this post’s title most apt given the options, but Fringe’s Season Four premiere didn’t actually bring us back to the point at which the rewritten timeline we’re viewing diverged from the familiar one decades ago.
... picked up shortly after the Season Three finale, with Peter erased from reality due
to actions he undertook to save his native and adopted universes. Over Here and Over There both still exist; in fact, they coexist in the room that houses the First People’s machine — where members of each side’s Fringe Division meet to compare notes, as we see Olivia and her counterpart Fauxlivia do grudgingly.
Yeah, I’ve decided to write up some musings on the episode, despite the near certainty that I won’t be doing so weekly. Partly it’s an imperfect salve for the fact that I didn’t get to finish out the brief run that I began at the end of last season — not that there aren’t plenty of other unpublished or just plain unwritten posts in Blam’s Blog history whose absence irritates me — and partly it’s because if I do get to resume Fringe reviews I’ll likely appreciate having this as a foundation. In case you’re new to these posts, I should explain that having named my Lost analyses for Beatles tunes I decided to name my ‘Fringe’ Thinking installments for John Lennon songs (Beatles or solo); unfortunately, a few titles perfect for this post were already used for ‘Lost’ in Thought.
Here’s what got me cogitating:
52 Geek-Out: Multiverse
[continued from yesterday]
I’m taking a break from listing the 37 main DC Universe titles in my DC reboot,
due in part to issues recovering files after the latest round of computer woes, to share the 15 series of the overall 52 that are part of the non- or alternate-continuity DC Multiverse line-within-a-line. (As with the actual DC relaunch, my 52 titles only cover the core DC continuity dominated by superhero adventure, not the Vertigo imprint, licensed-property titles, titles aimed primarily at younger readers, and so forth.)
The first trio consists of series divorced from continuity with rotating features and creative hands. While everything after that — save for the last title — stands on its own, a couple of series are linked by virtue of being set in the same fictional reality. You can of course rest assured that all the old stories you love still “exist” somewhere out there as well...
My rationale for superhumans and even supertech in this new multiverse paradigm
is that when Kal-El’s rocket arrived from Krypton its wormhole brought with it massive energy that over time accounts for the development or at least the gone-into-overdrive mutation of a metagene whose effects vary from enhanced intelligence to hardiness and longevity to staggering powers in a small but significant minority of the population. That’s something I recall discussing with other fans way back when Crisis on Infinite Earths brought about the first intentional overhaul of DC cosmology 25 years ago; I don’t remember at this point whether we came up with it ourselves or it was suggested by a likely culprit such as John Byrne, Marv Wolfman, or Len Wein in the comics press. The parallel realities in my multiverse differ in when or if a Kryptonian craft landed on Earth, with the debut of Superman or his analogue occurring in ways both strange and familiar yet always marking a kind of singularity in each reality’s development of supernormal phenomena.
All-Star Comics
Batman Beyond
The Brave and the Bold
Writers / Artists: various
All-Star Comics is an anthology that allows contributors from within and without the comics industry to present their takes on characters and concepts spanning DC’s rich and varied history — from Superman to the Sea Devils to Space Cabbie. Of course, almost everyone gravitates towards a certain Dark Knight when invited to dabble in the DC realm, so there’s also Batman Beyond for that very purpose. The Brave and the Bold lives up to its title by inviting creators to conjure up sequels to and/or “remixed” versions of classic tales.
Good Morning Good Morning
And the end of Fringe Season Three, including what may be the final showdown in
the series’ Two-Worlds War, begins.
I’m not sure how much there is to say about the events of...
... that won’t be rendered moot by next Friday. So while I can’t help but ask a few burning questions, I won’t really try to answer them, either, instead sticking to some random reactions and tangential tidbits. Here they are in the order of their prompts throughout the episode.
Across the Universe
I’d been planning to write up the last three Fringe episodes of this season, which reportedly form one continued story, to quell persistent requests made by friends and as practice for potential weekly reviews come autumn now that Fox has renewed the show. A few things conspired to convince me that it was a good idea to start early with last night’s episode. Here’s a bit of background to save us all from recap fatigue in future chapter-specific editions.
My initial essay on Fringe — an earlier post on its glyphs notwithstanding — came midway through Season Two. While I’ll run down some of the salient plot points that have taken center stage since then, it provides a good overview of my thoughts on the first half of the series to date. To folks reading this who are unfamiliar with the show: You’re going to be confused, for sure, and you’re missing an excellent television experience. I highly recommend catching up via downloads or DVD; both Fringe and Supernatural (which is nearing the conclusion of a welcome albeit weak-by-comparison season a year after many expected it to wrap entirely) are worthy successors to the very best of The X-Files and choice viewing not just for “genre” fans but for anyone who enjoys great character work played out through superbly inventive storytelling.
Swap Things
I really need to write about Fringe more often. A couple of friends have been urging me to do periodic if not weekly reviews, but that’s almost certainly not in the cards. While I’m hoping to publish at least some thoughts about what’s happened on the show since my first major post on it this time last year, soon, right now I just want to finally clear my metaphorical desk of several images that have been on the docket to share for nearly that long.
The week after I finally got that piece up, Fox aired one of Fringe’s best episodes — confirming Peter Bishop’s origins and blowing the show’s mythology wide open. “Peter” was a flashback to 1985, with awesomely retro opening credits; it showed the Walter Bishop of the standard Fringe universe spying upon the denizens of a parallel universe whose history and technology were slightly divergent from the familiar but which was inhabited largely by close counterparts of Fringe’s Earth. Later in the season Peter Bishop returned to the alternate universe in the present day, and in Part Two of May’s season finale “Over There” we saw some intriguing framed comic-book covers in his room.
A Wing and a Prayer
I may have scared off most readers, understandably ignorant of and disinterested in
the intricacies of DC Universe continuity, with yesterday’s post on Batman’s status quo. Which I’m loathe to do when recommending accessible graphic novels to civilians — but I wanted to properly set the backdrop for my review of Neil Gaiman and friends’ Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?. Since I don’t really consider the tales contained therein accessible, though, I suppose it’s all good.
Fixing a Hole
Okay. I’ve been working on a theory for a while now about the alternate timeline on Lost. At heart it’s not all that complicated (really), but I had written it up as part of a post on other general musings that in typical fashion for me keeps getting longer and revised and left fallow and revised again thanks to my intermittent concentration as
the show keeps marching on.
Screencap © 2010 ABC Studios.
The gist of things is that the apparent flashes to a new reality we’ve been seeing are
not actually flashing sideways — or diagonally, i.e. one universe over plus several years back — but rather flashing back to the selfsame universe where all the events we’ve seen to date have taken place. It’s just that in the wake of “The Incident” there’s been some very considerable course-correction.
I recall hearing at Nik at Nite that in an interview or podcast, around the time of Desmond’s head trip in Season 3’s “Flashes Before Your Eyes” and his subsequent attempts to save Charlie’s life based on visions of his death, the producers said there was only one timeline on Lost. When Mrs. Hawking appeared to Desmond during that episode’s funky flashback narrative, she explained that the universe had a way of course-correcting to what should happen, a nice way of allowing for both free will and destiny. This was illustrated by Charlie ultimately dying no matter what Desmond did, although there’s also a convincing argument to be made that Desmond’s actions in warding Charlie away from the previous would-be deaths course-corrected Charlie’s path not to a substitute death but to the one he was “supposed” to have; we’ll never know, presumably, who’d have performed Charlie’s actions at the Looking-Glass station and died his heroic if somewhat senseless death had Charlie died earlier in the jungle
or in the ocean or at Claire’s tent.
Magical Mystery Tour
I didn’t get a look at Lost’s season premiere up as quickly as hoped for and skipped
last week entirely, but here, for my readers who don’t frequent Nik at Nite, I’m sharing my initial reactions to last night’s episode...
Holy frackin’ shoot!
I think this makes up for any perceived apathy or frustration over the previous
episode. They honestly could have run nothing but deleted scenes of Nikki & Paulo getting tattoos in Thailand last week and this still would have redeemed my faith in
the show.
The Numbers were finally explained: