Thought Bubbles: Crossing the Timestreams
A powerful being takes the residents of multiple timelines and places them on the same world, where tensions flare and conflict inevitably breaks out. Coming this summer from __________ Comics!
It’s a favorite pasttime of the internet to call out rip-offs. Whether it’s artists borrowing figures or layouts from other artists or writers using similar concepts, there’s always someone ready to point a finger and shout what amounts to “Simpsons did it!” And let’s face it, comics as we know them have been around for nearly a century – there’s bound to be some repetition.
But this is ridiculous.
Marvel this week announced that Secret Wars, the long-teased summer event series, would see the main, ‘616’ Marvel U and the Ultimate Universe combined into an all-new Battleworld. Judging from the promo images Marvel’s released thus far, those won’t be the only two universes smashing together.
Across the street, DC has been ramping up for their own summer event, Convergence, in which heroes from different points in DC’s history are all placed on the same world by Brainiac, “bottle city of Kandor”-style. When the domes around the eras fall, they begin to interact with each other. Cue fighting.
The fact that these two stories are very similar can’t have escaped many people’s attention, and it’s not the first time that DC and Marvel have put out books with similar goings-on. For years the deaths of sidekicks Bucky Barnes and Robin Jason Todd were considered irreversible, until early 2005 when the characters were both resurrected as villains within months of each other. Sure, the reasons for their resurrections weren’t exactly the same (Bucky, it turned out, was never really dead, and while Jason had died, Superboy punching the walls of reality helped correct the timeline and bring Jason back because he was never supposed to have died in the first place and I’d like to go lie down now, please), but the fact that they came back so close to each other raised a few eyebrows.
Convergence and Secret Wars also appear to be riding something that’s in the comics zeitgeist at the moment – a trend in which alternate universes collide. Marvel’s current “Spider-Verse” storyline has Spider-Man teaming with other spider-characters from different times and timelines to stop Morlun and his family, who are out to kill all Spiders. In DC’s weekly New 52: Futures End, there are frequent references to a war between parallel Earths that happened before the series began but that has informed many of the events of the book. Before that, DC’s Forever Evil had the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3 infiltrate the DCU and remove the Justice League from circulation for a while. Sure, stories involving parallel earths and different timelines have been a regular comic trope since 1961, but there sure seem to be a lot of them lately.
The press around Secret Wars also bears a striking similarity to that of Flashpoint, with creators swearing up and down that ‘this isn’t an alternate timeline, this is the real universe’…even though, as we know, the main DCU books continued even while Flashpoint was coming out. We don’t yet know the structure of Marvel’s tie-ins for Secret Wars, but if it’s anything like past Marvel events it will likely be a combination of specific miniseries and a handful of regular books, meaning most of the publisher’s regular line of titles will be able to steer clear of it completely.
Another thing that remains to be seen at this point is how permanent anything coming out of either Secret Wars or Convergence will be. Will Miles Morales and Peter Parker swap universes? Could Jai and Iris West or Renee Montoya’s Question somehow become part of the New 52 DCU? With events like these I can’t help but worry that DC’s bringing back fan-favorite characters just to kill them off, as they have something of a history of dusting off infrequently-used characters just to use them as cannon fodder. I’m less concerned about Marvel doing that, though with the scope of Secret Wars still largely undefined, it’s always possible we could see some old MC2 or New Universe characters bite the dust before all’s said and done.
Whatever happens in these two books, it’ll be interesting to read them side-by-side, to compare and contrast the way the stories play out. Hopefully they’re like the respective returns of Bucky Barnes and Jason Todd – really good comics that hold up to multiple rereads – and not like Armageddon and Deep Impact – entirely forgettable disasters.