The Four Color Media Monitor

ComicBook asks why alternate dimensions are so popular, but near the beginning, they really go to the absurd with the following:

Both Marvel and DC Comics have an extensive history with multiverses. One of DC’s most famous events, Crisis on Infinite Earths, was made possible thanks to the multiverse. Likewise, Marvel has been playing around with this concept for decades. No matter where fans look, they’re bound to find at least a hint of the multiverses and alternate universes tucked into these comic book franchises.

Gee, if they believe alternate universes or parallel dimensions are a fun, creative idea, why are they obscuring and confusing how COIE served to jettison much of these alternate worlds, supposedly to merge much of their casts of characters into one, single world? After COIE, not much was left of the alternate worlds, if at all, when it comes to superheroes from the Justice Society and Justice League living on different planes of existence, or even worlds where non-superhero guests could live. If we take Skartaris, the world in which the 1975-88 Warlord series took place, as an example, that was still around, and the funny thing is that, if it originally began as an allusion to Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, it may have been retconned into more of a parallel dimension, in contrast to Earth-1 and Earth-2 for the superheroes proper. But again, many of the alternate worlds, certainly those in which the different versions of superheroes lived, were abandoned and basically combined into one, while some characters received retconned backgrounds. And by the 1990s, they hardly dealt with parallel worlds, if at all. So creativity was watered down to some degree, and then, if the "multiverse" was brought back, it was unfortunately via the terrible Dan DiDio in the mid-2000s in poorly developed "nostalgia", and today, whatever he oversaw in writing certainly isn't remembered like the original multiverses are.

In the long run, if DC ever sought to bring back parallel dimensions to their continuity, they failed miserably due to all the PC they went by, and resulted in an unappealing product, and certainly a lack of interest by the audience. Also note how ComicBook's writer doesn't seem disappointed COIE was used as an excuse to erase parallel dimensions. If he's not dismayed, what's his point?

Labels: bad editors, dc comics, history, marvel comics, msm propaganda