IN 1961 JULIUS Schwartz hit upon a way of resurrecting the old DC trademarks that his new generation of heroes had supplanted. Editorial offices at the publishing giant were all rivals, which is why their universe came together more by accident than design, unlike Marvel’s meticulously constructed interconnected world. While the other DC editors held on to their trademark characters, Julie’s office specialized in assembling the streamlined beginnings of a shared universe where all the DC superheroes were friends and partners.
By spreading a given brand across multiple versions of a character designed to appeal to different sections of his audience, Julie had invented a trick that would be adopted as the industry standard. Schwartz was a world builder, and, under his guidance, the DC universe became part of a “multiverse,” in which an infinite number of alternate Earths occupied the same space as our own, each vibrating out of phase with the others so that they could never meet. The idea of infinite worlds, each with its own history and its own superheroes, was intoxicating and gave DC an even more expansive canvas.
In the story “Flash of Two Worlds,” police scientist Barry Allen was shown reading an old comic about the Flash adventures of Jay Garrick. In Allen’s world (soon to be known as Earth-1), Garrick was a fictional comics character who inspired Allen’s choice of a superhero identity when he too became the Flash, the Fastest Man Alive. Not only did this confirm that Barry was a comics fan like his readers, it enmeshed the character and his audience in a complex meta-story that would eerily mimic the large-scale structures of our universe, as they’re currently being debated by cosmologists.
By spinning fast enough to alter the pitch at which his molecules vibrated, Barry Allen discovered he could cross over to a second Earth. Here twenty years had passed for the wartime champions of the Justice Society, so that Jay Garrick was middle aged and married to his Golden Age sweetheart, Joan. It took the arrival of Barry Allen and the machinations of a trio of Golden Age criminals to bring Jay out of retirement. The way was paved for the return of Doctors Fate and Mid-Nite, Wildcat, Sandman, and Hourman. The vanished heroes of the Golden Age were duly resurrected as denizens of the newly christened Earth-2, but there were even more Earths—as many as imagination could conceive. On some of these worlds, the familiar superheroes had evil counterparts like the Crime Syndicate of America. On Earth-X lived DC’s recently acquired stable of Quality Comics characters locked in a decades-long battle with an unbeatable mechanized Hitler.
As a child, I loved to angle two bathroom mirrors so that I could look down a virtual corridor into the infinity of reflections that lay in either direction. I imagined that those distant versions of myself, glimpsed at the far end of the receding stack, were inhabitants of parallel worlds, peering back down the hall of faces at me. Alternate realities were as easy as that; they were waiting for us in our bathrooms.
There were inevitably philosophical ramifications for the reader. If Barry lived on a world where Jay was fictional, and we lived in a world where Barry was fictional, did that mean we, as readers, were also part of Schwartz’s elegant multiversal architecture? It did indeed, and it was soon revealed that we all lived on Earth-Prime. Julius Schwartz even met the Flash on several occasions in print, and in one story, two young writers named Cary Bates and Elliot Maggin wrote themselves into a Justice League adventure involving Earth-Prime. Bates became an insane villain and immediately donned a garish costume with cape, boots, and overpants, while adding a new twist to the standard superhero look with his long hair, beard, and glasses. When the clean-cut Maggin joined the Justice League in a search for the rogue Bates, this Schwartz-edited adventure pushed the Earth-Prime idea as far as it could go. Or so it seemed.
By the 1980s, as comics became more realistic, or at least more like Hollywood’s version of realism, the idea of parallel worlds was declared too outlandish and prepubescent—as well as too forgiving of any ludicrous story turn. Batman could be shot dead, only for a last page to reveal that he was really the middle-aged Earth-2 Batman or even the evil Earth-3 Batman/Owlman, and it’s true that many writers used the parallel Earths not to create a sense of wonder and possibility but to justify some overcooked twist in an undercooked story.
Then, in the intervening years, something became apparent to our cosmologists.
The Multiverse was Real.
Flash Fact: Our universe is one of many, grown inside some unimaginable amniotic hypertime. It may even all be hologram, projected onto a flat mega-membrane, which is, in turn, embedded, along with many others like it, within a higher dimensional space some scientists have dubbed “The Bulk.” In the brane model of the multiverse, all history is spread as thin as emulsion on a celestial tissue that floats in some immense, Brahmanic ocean of … meta-stuff. Got all that?
If cosmologists are right about this (and I’d dearly love to hope they are), the superheroes, as usual, have been here already.
It will take a long time for these new maps of existence to instill themselves in the culture at large, but it will happen. It’s fun to imagine what our world might be like when theories of simultaneous time, parallel worlds, and holographic branes in hyperspace are taught to schoolchildren as the accepted facts of nature they will be.
I’ve always imagined that the structure and underlying patterns of the universe would most likely be repeated across every aspect of its disposition, including the lowliest superhero comic books. If our universe is some kind of hologram, it would make sense for the same patterns to turn up on all scales, from the infinitesimal to the unimaginably vast, like the spirals that coil through our DNA and our galaxies, and track the vast Coriolis of some Prime Movement.
If a comic-book universe were a scaled-down representation of the kind of reality we all inhabit, we might expect it to behave in certain ways. It would have a beginning and an end: a big bang and a heat death. It would be populated with life-forms capable of replicating themselves through time.
And in place of time, comic-book universes offer something called “continuity.”
Continuity is an emergent phenomenon, at first recognized by Gardner Fox, Julius Schwartz, and Stan Lee as a kind of imaginative real estate that would turn mere comic books into chronicles of alternate histories. DC’s incoherent origins formed an archipelago of island concepts that were slowly bolted together to create a mega-continuity involving multiple parallel worlds that could not only make sense of pre–Silver Age versions of characters like the Flash, but also fit new acquisitions from defunct companies into a framework that made Marvel’s universe look provincial. Marvel improved on the formula by taking us on human journeys that could last as long as our own lives—eternally recurring soap operas—where everything changed but always wound up in the same place; where Aunt May was always on the verge of another heart attack, and Peter Parker couldn’t get a break from J. Jonah Jameson, his editor at the New York newspaper the Daily Bugle.
“IT IS NOT TOO FAR-FETCHED TO PREDICT THAT SOME DAY OUR VERY OWN PLANET MAY BE PEOPLED ENTIRELY BY SUPERMEN!” Joe Shuster assured us back in 1938, but comic-book reality predicts developments in our own in many other ways.
What we construct in our imaginations, we have a knack of building or discovering. We may not have flying men or invulnerable women racing among us, but we now have access to supertechnologies that once existed only in comic-book stories.
“Mother Boxes,” empathic personal computers like the ones in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World story cycle, are already here in embryonic form. Is the soothing contact offered by the Mother Box so different from the instant connection that a cell phone provides? Twenty-four-hour access to friends, family, and the buzz of constant social exchange can make us feel cocooned and safe in a reportedly hostile world. In many cases, Mother herself can be summoned on the Box.
Metron was Kirby’s avatar of ruthless, questing intellect, whose Mobius Chair twisted through time and space to make him the god of couch potatoes, surfing channels, gathering information, without ever leaving the comfort of his armchair. Metron’s magic furniture seems less a wonder of supertechnology than a fact of daily life. As Kirby tried to tell us in his book of the same name, we are the new gods, just as we are the old ones, too.
There is already technology that allows people to drive remote-controlled cars with their minds. What’s to stop someone becoming Auto-Man, the Human Car? Secretly, he sits in his room, munching Maltesers at his computer screen, while he listlessly pilots his incredible RV supercar around town to save lives and fight the crime that ordinary police cars just aren’t fast enough to handle.
In so many ways, we’re already superhuman. Being extraordinary is so much a part of our heritage as human beings that we often overlook what we’ve done and how very unique it all is. We have made machines to extend our physical reach and the reach of our senses, allowing us to peer into the depths of space and outer time. Our cameras and receivers allow us to see across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. We can slow down, freeze, and accelerate time on our screens. We can study and manipulate microscopic worlds, print our names on single atoms, analyze soil on Mars, and observe the rings of Saturn at close range. Our voices and our photographic records of everything we’ve seen are carried at the speed of light on an expanding bubble of radio, into the infinite. Television broadcasts of the first moon landing are still traveling, growing fainter as the waves spread out. If you had a powerful enough receiver and a TV on a planet forty light-years from here, you could watch Neil Armstrong take his first step on mankind’s behalf and hear our silly, hopeful summer 1969 songs.
Our space machines are the remote physical tendrils of our species launched across gulfs of nothing to land on other worlds or to travel, gathering data until the signal fades, or until there’s no one left to listen. These ultimate extensions of human senses thread our awareness into the absolute freezing dark 10.518 billion miles from where you’re sitting. As I write, that’s how far Voyager 1, humanity’s farthest-reaching finger, has extended. Launched in 1977, it remains connected to its home world by radio and by the silver thread of its passage through time from launchpad to interstellar void. Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that’s so big we forget it’s there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to fish. We are cells in the body of a singular three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system.
The superheroes may have their greatest value in a future where real superhuman beings are searching for role models. When the superhumans of tomorrow step dripping from their tanks, they could do much worse than to look to Superman for guidance. Superhero comics may yet find a purpose all along as the social realist fiction of tomorrow.
Superhero science has taught me this: Entire universes fit comfortably inside our skulls. Not just one or two but endless universes can be packed into that dark, wet, and bony hollow without breaking it open from the inside. The space in our heads will stretch to accommodate them all. The real doorway to the fifth dimension was always right here. Inside. That infinite interior space contains all the divine, the alien, and the unworldly we’ll ever need.
To find out what higher dimensions might look like, all we have to do is study the relationship between our 3-D world and the 2-D comics. A 4-D creature could look “down” on us through our walls, our clothes, even our skeletons. Our world would be a Cubist X-ray, and perhaps even our thoughts might be laid bare to their gaze.
As comics readers gazing down from a higher dimension perpendicular to the page surface, we can actually peer inside characters’ thoughts with balloons or captions that provide running commentary. We can also control time in a comics universe. We can stop on page 12 and look back to page 5 to check a story point we missed.
The characters themselves continue to act out their own dramas in the same linear sequence, oblivious to our shifting perspective.
They can go back in time only with the help of supermachines, like the Flash’s cosmic treadmill, but we can look at 1938 Superman next to 1999 Superman without colliding the two stories anywhere but in our heads.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby could send drawn versions of themselves into the created world of Fantastic Four, and those little drawings of Stan and Jack were like angels, UFOs, avatars from a higher universe, entering a world they’d made to interact with its inhabitants. They created, as I came to call them, “fiction suits,” like space suits for sending yourself into stories. The comics page depicted the flow of a different kind of digital time, expressed in discrete images, each of which captured a single visual moment and usually a snippet of audio time in the form of a balloon-dialogue exchange. The comics page, like the movie screen, took us through a story in a straight, linear progression from past read to present reading and future completion, but the comics page was a more personal and intimate interface than the cinema screen. It lacked the intimidating luster of the movies, and the images could be slowed down, rewound, fast-forwarded, and studied in detail. They could even be copied, traced, or improved upon, making this an ideal DIY medium for the imaginative and reasonably gifted. The pace of a film or television show was dictated by its director. The comics allowed its reader to direct his or her own experience of the story.
And now there were two healthy universes living and growing inside our own. The DC universe was a series of islands separated for years, suddenly discovering one another and setting up trade routes. And there was Marvel’s beautifully orchestrated growth and development. Two living virtual worlds had been grown and nurtured inside conventional space-time. These were not like closed continua with beginnings, middles, and ends; the fictional “universe” ran on certain repeating rules but could essentially change and develop beyond the intention of its creators. It was an evolving, learning, cybernetic system that could reproduce itself into the future using new generations of creators who would be attracted like worker bees to serve and renew the universe.
Just as generations of aboriginal artists have taken it upon themselves to repaint the totems, so too does the enchanted environment of the comic-book dreamtime replicate itself through time. A superhero universe will change in order to remain viable and stay alive. As long as the signs stay constant—the trademark S shields and spiderweb patterns, and the copyrighted hero names—everything else can bend and adapt to the tune of the times.
These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music. This meant interesting work could be done by writers and artists who knew what they were getting into and were happy to add their own little square to a vast patchwork quilt of stories that would outlast their lives. In return for higher page rates and royalties, of course. The parasitic relationship of universe to creator that saw the rebellions of people like Siegel and Shuster or Jack Kirby had become a little more symbiotic; following changes in the business in the eighties, creative people adding to the DC or Marvel universe would be ripped off with a little more reward on the back end.
In this respect, a thriving fictional universe simulates the behavior of a “real” organism, but only as far as you wish to follow me down this path of conjecture.
Nevertheless, human beings had built working parallel realities. Given market value as corporate trademarks, the inhabitants of these functioning microcosms could be self-sustaining and outlast their creators. New trademarks could be grown in the concept farms of fictional universes under the auspices of the corporate concerns that kept them under control, maintaining, trimming, and looking after their burgeoning gardens of newsprint and ink. Most important, they had acolytes: priests in the form of creative types such as artists who would grow up with a strange desire to draw Superman in motion and writers who would form early bonds that encouraged them to devote their talents to putting words in the mouths of characters they’d grown up with. These creative people would sustain the likes of Spider-Man, dripping their blood and sweat into the ink to give their lives to him. Batman could regularly feed on energy that kept him vital for another ten or fifteen years until the next transfusion of meaning.
Emergence is a simple idea. The Universe is the way it is because it grew that way. It emerged piece by piece, like a jigsaw solving itself over billions of years of trial and error. When atoms stuck together, they naturally formed molecules. Molecules naturally grouped into compounds. People naturally formed tribal associations that made them look much bigger to predators from a distance, and as a result of clumping together and swapping experiences, they naturally developed specialization and created a shared culture or collective higher intelligence.
Everybody’s heard writers talk about a moment in the process of writing a novel or story when “it was as if the characters took over.” I can confirm from my own experience that immersion in stories and characters does reach a point where the fiction appears to take on a life of its own.
When a character becomes sufficiently fleshed out and complex, he or she can often cause the author to abandon original well-laid plans in favor of new plotlines based on a better understanding of the character’s motivations. When I was halfway through the seven-year process of writing The Invisibles, I found several characters actively resisting directions I’d planned for them. It was a disorienting, fascinating experience, and I eventually had to give in and let the story lead me to places I might not have chosen to go. How could a story come to life? It seemed ridiculous, but it occurred to me that perhaps, like a beehive or a sponge colony, I’d put enough information into my model world to trigger emergent complexity.
I wondered if ficto-scientists of the future might finally locate this theoretical point where A Story becomes sufficiently complex to begin its own form of calculation, and even to become in some way self-aware. Perhaps that had already happened.
If this was true of The Invisibles, then might it not apply more so to the truly epic, long-running superhero universes? Marvel and DC have roots that run seventy years deep. Could they actually have a kind of elementary awareness, a set of programs that define their rules and maintain their basic shapes while allowing for development, complexity, and, potentially, some kind of rudimentary consciousness?
I imagined a sentient paper universe and decided I would try to contact it.
