Many Worlds

 


AMY: 
I killed someone -- 
Madame Kovarian, 

in cold blood.

RIVER: 

-- in an aborted Timeline, 

in A World that never Was.

AMY: 
Yeah, but 
I can remember it, 
so, it HAPPENED, so, 
I DID it -- 

....what Does that make Me, now? 

" From California, 

Jim Starlin and Steve Englehart were, 
quite literally, destroying and 

re-creating galaxies. 

As Kirby had done with Ragnarok in Thor 
and as Steranko had done with 

the Prism of Miracles in “Nick Fury,” 
the respective Armageddons in 

Warlock and Doctor Strange — 
-- unleashed simultaneously, 

at the end of the year — 
left lingering trauma. 

Adam Warlock had defeated 

his corrupted future self, The Magus, 

only by allowing The Universe to end 

and start anew; 
he remained haunted by the memory 

of “this explosive reshuffling of time.” 

Simultaneously, Doctor Strange 

had battled his old foe Mordo 
for the fate of the world, and lost. 

The World was brought back, 
of course — but Strange alone 

carried the heavy knowledge that 
everything was a re-creation, 

a living replica of what had died. 

Much like, some readers were 

beginning to say, Marvel Comics. 

“The notion,” said Gerry Conway, 

“was that you had a cycle, 

and every three years 

you replaced Your Readership. 
Once boys hit puberty they would stop reading comics, and 
you’d be picking up the next group of ten-year-olds. 
So the goal was to write material 
appropriate for that age group.” 
If you couldn’t have anything but the ILLUSION of Change, 
the most you could hope for was to reset the buttons for 
the new crop of ten-year-olds. "


-- Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, by Sean Howe