Warning: I’m just kinda pointlessly rambling about multiverses in comics here.

§ July 25th, 2022 § Filed under dc comics, multiverse talk § 29 Comments

So I was thinking about multiverses and parallel Earths, as one is wont to do, specifically in the context of comical books. Amongst this reflection one of the topics was “what was the first multiverse story I ever read in comics?” Given I was primarily a DC kid, and given that company was the one that traded most in this sort of thing, I’m sure it was some DC comic from the late ’70s/early ’80s.

Just to keep you from being in suspense, the answer is “I don’t know,” as DC’s set-up of “Earth-One” (where DC’s main line of heroes lived), “Earth-Two” (where the Golden Age characters lived, and for the most part were older than our regular heroes), “Earth-Three” (Oops, All Villains) and so on were pretty ingrained in me from the start. Maybe it was introduced to me in the digest reprints, maybe a Flash team-up with the Golden Age Flash. I even remember Bob Rozakis in one of his Answer Man columns running down the list of DC’s various Earths (which is where I learned that “Earth B is where all the stories that don’t make sense take place!” — a veiled reference to Robert Kanigher and/or Bob Haney, apparently. And no, that exact column isn’t at the link, but plenty of good examples of what Bob was up to there).

I know my favorite parallel Earth story is this one, a Justice League of Earth One/Justice Society Earth Two team-up — an annual tradition, as least for a while. That Gerry Conway/George Pérez extravaganza remains in my head the quintessential multiverse story, and is just plain Good Comics.

Anyway, parallel universes were just part of the fabric of DC’s superhero comics, and while it could lead to some confusion for the uninitiated, such as when apparently DC got some real world attention when Superman married Lois Lane in Action #484…the Earth Two Superman that is! Some folks were like “um, so not the real Superman?” Anyway, it was sort of deliberately misleading even to the initiated, as you may be able to tell from this cover:


…where Superman’s chest emblem is deliberately obscured. As all true Earth Two fans know, the Superman of that Earth had a slightly different design. You can see the difference in this pic from Crisis on Infinite Earths, with Two on the left and One on the right:


And I’m pretty sure the fact that it was Earth Two Superman tying the knot was not made explicit, as per this news blurb from The Comic Reader #150 (February 1978):


I mean, sure, you can maybe infer it after the fact, with all the “40 year relationship” talk, as, well, the Superman of Earth One clearly hasn’t been wooing Lois for 40 years, they must be talking about that Superman on Earth Two who’s been around since Dubbya Dubbya Too. But honestly, even without all this, most people picking up the book were probably “yeah, right, sure, Superman’s getting married, I’ll believe that when I see it” and then, well, they saw it. Surprise! Just not the Superman they may have been expecting.

That was bit of an aside, I realize. Been meaning to bring that up somewhere for years. So please excuse the lack of transition to the next bit.

When Crisis on Infinite Earths hit a few years later, well…okay. I think I’ve said it here before, I’ve definitely gone on about it on Twitter, but a major element of COIE was experiencing the Big, Permanent Never-to-Be-Reversed Changes in real time. Opening up issue #1 and having it lead off with the destruction of Earth Three and the character thereon was quite the shock. The art’s impeccable, the story is, um, well…the art’s impeccable, and it was an exciting read at the time as you didn’t know what drastic thing was going to happen next to the DCU. And worlds lived, worlds died, and nothing remained the same…

…and then DC spent decades trying to make everything the same as it was, or at least a close approximation, as event after event was released trying to patch Crisis with more Crises, more events, more restorations of parallel Earths and multiverses, even until right this very moment. And none of it feels as simple and as, honestly, organic as when we had our annual JLA/JSA crossovers, or when the Golden Age Green Lantern would team up with our Earth One Green Lantern, and so on. Sure, there was the occasional roadbump, like that Action #484, but eh, we dealt with it.

I’m trying and likely failing to not sound like Cranky Old Fan Wants Things Like They Were, because…look, I like new comics just fine. I’m even enjoying Dark Crisis (now Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths, as of issue #4). And I’ve liked a lot of the weird multiverse stuff we’ve been getting recently. But I keep thinking “maybe if COIE didn’t happen, a whole lot of creative energy could’ve been used for something other than trying to fix it.” Hypocritically, I’ve read every one of these attempts and mostly enjoyed them for their strange metatextual efforts. Yes, even Doomsday Clock.

But I think DC has given up their once-strong multiverse advantage to Marvel, who’s grabbed the concept with both hands and wrestled it to the ground, making the idea their own. Should the Flashpoint movie ever actually come out, it’s gonna look like an also-ran with its multiversal storytelling after Marvel’s been riding that wave through multiple movies and TV shows. And yes, the Flash TV show covered that ground as well, but I still think it’s really Marvel’s ball now.

More on Marvel next time. Thanks for enduring this post, pals…had a lot of semi-related thoughts to get out of my head, and it turned out I have a blog so here they went. See you Wednesday.

29 Responses to “Warning: I’m just kinda pointlessly rambling about multiverses in comics here.”

  • Daniel says:

    My first multiverse story was probably the Alan Brennert/Joe Staton issue of Brave and the Bold from 1983-ish where Batman reveals his identity to Catwoman (which was also the story where it was revealed that his back is covered with scar tissue). I think on the first page there was a montage of Batman fighting with the JSA and some reference to “Earth-Two,” which, at that time, I thought was a reference to the fact that all of the DC universe was on Earth-Two (and the reader lived on Earth-One). Not sure when I figured out that Earth-Two was the golden age heroes and Earth-One was the present day heroes (and we lived on Earth-Prime). Probably not long after that.

    I’m still of the opinion that COIE was the best thing that ever happened to DC (although I agree with Mike that, 35 years later, the actual story itself is…a little wonky (but, oh, that artwork by George Perez!)). I’m agnostic on the *idea* of the multiverse. But what I never liked was how it was used as a crutch by DC’s writers. The overly-complicated, unbelievably stupid revised origin of Black Canary (by, I think, Roy Thomas) in the mid-1980s is Exhibit A of how misused the concept was by DC at the time.

    DC would have been better served if their in-universe history had played out like it did in Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier, with it all taking place on the same Earth, and with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman bridging the gap between the JSA generation and the JLA generation. The generational aspect of DC (with a new generation of characters organically inheriting the mantle from a character of a previous generation) is inherently much more interesting (to me anyway) from a narrative perspective than having different versions of the same characters in different universes.

    That being said, considering that they did go all-in on the multiverse, I think the biggest mistake that DC made was to narratively tie the Earth-Two characters to a fixed point in history (e.g., World War II). Just as the Earth-One characters perpetually took place in “the present,” there’s no reason that the Earth-Two characters couldn’t have perpetually taken place “20 years ago” without being tied to a specific historical period. The illogical narrative twists that writers have had to contort themselves into ever since in order to 1) maintain that WWII historical connection, and 2) keep these characters alive and active have been downright stupid. Just having those stories take place “20 years ago” would have solved that problem (and allowed the writers to focus on telling good stories instead of coming up with perpetual continuity fixes).

  • I’m pretty sure if the editors would have just tamped down on the creators (and yes, i know, that smacks of a version of “censorship”) and kept them from just randomly diggin up things that were supposed to be “gone”, far fewer things would need to have been “fixed”. Or, really, just start a new given character from scratch. The need to “justify” or “explain” how a character is back is actually the reader’s fault. So a character is back. read the story, call it even. Cmon.

    Of course, they could have just let the errors and mistakes sit there, instead of trying to justify them. Honestly that probably would have been best. Just put good stories on paper and let what happens happen. If they wanted another COIE, wait another thirty years at a time when it would be useful. annually, nearly annually, it just brings to my mind that they never really knew what they were doing anyway, and the creators ignored it all. Always made me think “well, why are there editors when the writers are just gonna ignore stuff.”

    This all sounds a lot more angry and cynical than it is, but really, just stop making it worse and go with the flow.

  • Thom H. says:

    COIE was a huge education for me. It started when I was 11 years old and had been collecting comics for about 3 years. I was mostly reading Marvel books at the time and dipping my toe into New Teen Titans. COIE had the same team I liked on NTT, so I picked it up.

    That’s the first time I learned that there were 2 Supermen, 2 Batmen, etc. There were a handful of “Charlton” characters that were being folded into the story. I had no idea what that meant. The death of the Crime Syndicate was exciting, but I didn’t know who they were.

    But it was a story that had real stakes, so it was easy to emotionally invest in it. And one of my favorite things about comics was being dropped into the middle of ongoing stories and working my way backwards to other stories. A big, old ramshackle universe like DC’s was fun to explore.

    Every subsequent Crisis has been a letdown in my opinion. Some of them were fun to read, but the idea that any of them had real stakes was eventually comical. If you restart and reshuffle your universe(s) every few years, then how is anyone supposed to take it seriously? Especially when you’re also actively undoing all the big character changes along the way?

    Unfortunately, DC has become so obsessed with its own continuity that it seems like retcons and continuity-fix stories are all that they sell anymore. It’s become harder and harder to find quality DC books that aren’t upended by some Crisis or another, so I mostly read books on the fringes of continuity like whatever mini-series Tom King is writing at the moment.

    I keep hoping to recreate the hit of adrenaline I got with each new issue of COIE, but no Flashpoint or Dark Metal quite reaches those heights. I think DC needs to focus on telling quality stories for the next 30 years or so, and then they can blow everything up again in a way that feels like it has real stakes.

  • Matthew Murray says:

    The other tip off for that Action Comics cover is that it features the Daily Star newspaper. (Though, I can’t take credit for noticing this. I posted the cover in a group and someone else identified that!)

  • Hal Shipman says:

    I can’t remember my first Earth-2 story, but I’m pretty sure it was early 70s when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. Probably one of the 100 Pagers.

    The parallel universes were never confusing to me and my friends – they were explained in one, maybe two panels. I never got the references in COIE stories about them being a problem.

    The ONE thing I kind of liked about the consolidated world was that it did make it easier to team up or make groups like the Giffen JL. But the constant retelling of pre-Crisis stories (especially in the Superman titles) to basically reintroduce elements was tiring.

    I’m kind of concerned about the MCU leaning so heavily into Multiverses because it really involves a lot of navel-gazing at the expense of interesting stories. When I heard the word “Incursion” in Dr. Strange, I thought, “Uh oh, here we go.” (That run of Hickman’s was also where I dropped Avengers.)

    The elements I have found most engaging of MCU material has been the most “human;” normal people dealing with the craziness of the super-hero stuff. Scenes like the end of Shang-Chi with their friends in the bar and pretty much all of Hawkeye and Ms Marvel.

    The Multiverse was good device for DC to reach back to the Golden Age and to fold in other companies like Fawcett, etc., but past that, it’s really not that interesting.

    Side notes:

    * I always thought they got the “B” in “Earth-B” from The Brave & the Bold, where most of the stories that didn’t “make sense” ended up.

    * The other visual cue I always noticed with Kal-L/Earth-2 Supes was the ribbing lines on his cuffs at his wrists

  • Rob S. says:

    I think I probably knew of the multiverse before I ever read a multiversal story — by which I mean literally taking place in more than one universe. At the time I started reading DC comics, they were publishing All-Star Comics (the 70s revival, on Earth-2), Freedom Fighters (on Earth X, or at least with characters *from* Earth X, I don’t remember), and Shazam! (on Earth S). And they were pretty diligent with editor’s notes saying what took place where.

    But it took a few months of reading before I got to see characters visit another universe, in Justice League 147-148, the annual JLA/JSA team-up (with the Legion of Super-Heroes as special guests). And by that point, I was well and truly hooked.

  • Tim says:

    My first real introduction to alternate universes was reading the classic ‘To Kill A Legend’ in a collection I had as a lad. The idea of Batman going to another universe with the chance to save the lives of his parents BLEW MY LITTLE BOY MIND.

  • Buck Ripsnort says:

    I think what blew the Multiverse out of my mind was the origin of Powergirl. Instead of making her a new character, or even just Earth-2’s Supergirl, they made her into something so convoluted that my mind refuses to recall it.

  • This was a lot of fun, Mike. I still love that cover. Why can’t superhero comics ever look that good anymore?

  • David J Conner says:

    I still have most of my early comics, so I think my first was All-Star Comics #60, with the “Super Squad” of the JSA. Which oddly doesn’t even mention Earth-2, and doesn’t have Superman, Batman, or Robin in this particular issue. And it alludes to, but doesn’t state, the fact that Power Girl is Superman’s cousin.

    Green Lantern and Flash were in the story, but I’m not sure what I made of that. I might not have been super familiar with their Earth-1 counterparts yet.

    So I guess what I’m saying is that it was a particularly odd introduction to the multiverse concept.

  • CP Bananas says:

    I remember that the thing I most missed in the post-Crisis DC universe was the idea (prevalent in the late ’70s, I believe) that, on both Earth-1 and Earth-2 (maybe more?) Superman was the first superhero. It made him special in-universe and mirrored his role in the real world. One debuted in 1938, the other in some indeterminate recent–ish year. I just kept expecting them, once that year got too far back, to roll the odometer over into a new earth. Still makes sense to me.

  • Sean Mageean says:

    In my opinion, the saddest thing about COIE is that it killed Gardner Fox’s original vision and wonderful explanation for the emergence of the Silver Age DC heroes, when their Golden Age counterparts had already existed in DC’s published continuity from the late 1930 until the early 1950s. I suppose the logic at the time was for DC Comics, circa 1985, to more closely follow Marvel Comics’ Earth 616 model, but, despite fantastic art by the late, great George Perez, Jerry Ordway, and Dick Giordano, the overall script by Marv Wolfman was a letdown. Sure, at the time it seemed huge to kill off Barry Allen and Kara Zor-El along with other characters (why, oh why wasn’t Guy Gardner killed off??? Or, for that matter, why wasn’t Booster Gold killed off–before he was even created! Or Geo-Force, Halo, Looker???), but the idea of getting rid of all Earths except for one was, frankly, lame! First, it completely screwed over Roy Thomas’ All-Star Squadron comic, which was an excellent Earth-2-based retroactive continuity comic which actually folded in historical events from World War II as well as storylines from actual canonical published 1940s JSA adventures into its monthly plots. The first 40 issues of A-SS are a solid read with consistently great stories by Thomas and art by the likes of Rich Buckler, Jerry Ordway, and Rick Hoberg — from issue 41 on, the art goes downhill, but the scripts are still pretty good…until COIE cut the series off at the knees by not allowing the Golden Age/Earth II Superman, Batman & Robin, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Arrow & Speedy (and probably other characters) to exist any more! It also wrecked Power Girl and Huntress’s cool origins as legacy characters and made them mere shadows of their former selves. The smart thing would have been to kill of many Earths in the Multiverse in COIE but keep Earth II (Golden Age characters and their progeny), Earth S (Shazam Family/Fawcett characters: Bulletman & Bulletgirl, Spy Smasher, Ibis, Minute Man, Golden Arrow, etc.); Earth -C (Charlton characters which DC had just acquired: Captain Atom — DC Comics should have just kept him wearing the second Ditko-designed costume, not gone for the hideous chrome look!; Blue Beetle; The Question; Nightshade; Peacemaker; Peter Cannon, etc.); and, of course, Earth I.

    For the most part, the Earth II JSA stories in the mid-Seventies revival of All-Star Comics by the likes of Gerry Conway, Paul Levitz, Ric Estrada, Wally Wood, Keith Giffen, Joe Staton and Bob Layton were a lot more interesting than a lot of the JLA stories being published concurrently–and “The Untold Origin of the Justice Society” by Levitz, Staton and Layton in DC Special no. 29 (1979) is a must read!

    As far as pre-COIE great JLA/JSA team-up cool reads, I think the early Bronze Age stand outs include: JLA no.91-92 (1971) by Mike Friedrich and Dick Dillin, wherein the Earth I and Earth II Robin’s meet for the first time and Neal Adams’ cool Earth II Robin redesign costume is introduced; JLA no.100-103 (1972) by Len Wein and Dick Dillin, wherein Earth I and Earth II Wonder Woman first meet, and the JLA and JSA seek to reunite the time-displaced Seven Soldiers of Victory–this story arc has a very poignant ending; JLA no.107-108 (1973) by Wein and Dillin, wherein Earth X is first introduced as the home of the old Quality Comics heroes (I wonder why it wasn’t called “Earth Q” ???) which DC Comics acquired in the 1950s–including Uncle Sam, Doll Man, The Ray, Phantom Lady, Black Condor, and The Human Bomb (the only Quality Comics characters DC had previously used in Earth I continuity were The Blackhawks, and Plastic Man); and JLA no.135-137 (1976) by E. Nelson Bridwell, Martin Pasko, and Dick Dillin, wherein the JLA and JSA (with Golden Age Batman temporarily coming out of retirement!) finally get to meet the Shazam Family and Fawcett Comics characters. I like to think that on a parallel Earth out in the Multiverse, unlike on our Earth Prime, COIE never happened. Instead, DC Comics continued the great tradition of the annual JLA/JSA team ups…maybe obtaining permission from the likes of Archie Comics or JC Comics to have the JLA and JSA meet the Mighty Crusaders or The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents in the 1980s–or maybe even team up with ’80s independent comics greats like The Elementals, The Justice Machine, or even Gold Key-gone-Valiant characters Magnus–Robot Fighter, Doctor Solar, and Turok. Or…what if Alan Moore wrote a JLA/JSA vs. Miracle Man team up wherein the JLA and JSA confront Miracleman over his totalitarian control of his Earth…??? DC Comics also could have also kept the ball rolling by exploring Public Domain comics universes…with the JLA and JSA meeting the Nador Comics superheroes one year (Black Terror, Pyroman, Miss Mask, etc), the Fox Comics superheroes another year (The Flame and Flame-Girl, Golden Age Blue Beetle, Stardust the Super Wizard, Green Mask, Wonder Man, Rulah–Jungle Goddess, etc.) and so on…

  • Mike Loughlin says:

    I grew up with the post-Crisis DCU, and I like the more streamlined universe. The JSA being the older generation that influenced the newer generation of heroes was one of my favorite aspects of the set-up. Starman made excellent use of the revised continuity. I actually prefer Black Canary to Wonder Woman as a founding member of the JLA. Mistakes were made (see: Power Girl being Atlantean, not understanding that Tim Truman’s Hawkworld was a prequel to the Silver Age, confusion about Donna Troy), but the mid-late ’80s and mid-’90s until about 2002 were my favorite eras of DC comics.

    I don’t have anything against the multiverse, I just like the streamlined set-up better. Too bad Didio & Co. ran that version of the DCU into the ground.

  • DK says:

    I am just a humble fan but it seems like a rational move to have a Golden Age Earth, a Silver Age Earth, a Bronze Age Earth, etc. with different versions of our favorites so there is something for everyone and you can tell any kind of story you like.

    As we move further away from WW2 it gets more and more strange that Alan Scott and Jay Garrick are still around, they would be 100+ years old by this point. A handwaving “magical energy” keeping them spry made sense when they were in their 60’s but its time for the Captain America Iceberg now.

    Or….they just live on an Earth where it’s 1963 now, unlike Earth 1 where it’s 2022. or Earth 7 where it’s 1982, and so on.

    It was always a treat to see Earth 2 Superman and killing him off was a total mistake, there is space for a grandfatherly version.

  • Hal Shipman says:

    “Earth X is first introduced as the home of the old Quality Comics heroes ”

    IIRC, “X” was an allusion to what they really wanted to call that Earth: Earth-Swastika, i.e. where the Nazis won.

    Kind of like (but not really) where the Fawcett world was Earth-5, rather than Earth-S because a) they were already were using numbers, mostly, and b) someone thought everyone would think the “S” was a “5” anyway.

    Old comics printing, basically.

  • Snark Shark says:

    “I even remember Bob Rozakis in one of his Answer Man columns running down the list of DC’s various Earths (which is where I learned that “Earth B is where all the stories that don’t make sense take place!” — a veiled reference to Robert Kanigher and/or Bob Haney, apparently. ”

    I vote for it being called “Earth Bob”.

    “The art’s impeccable, the story is, um, well…the art’s impeccable”

    Funny how Marvel Super-Hero Secret Wars actually holds up BETTER than Crisis, despite being a glorified giant slugfest. DC aimed high, but missed the bar, Marvel aimed for the middle, and got it.

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  • Donald G says:

    Technically, my first multiverse story was a reprint of a mid-sixties Alan Scott Green Lantern, Dr Fate, and Hourman vs Solomon Grundy story in Brave and the Bold #115, but my eight year old self glossed over the description/explanation of Earth-2 in the opening.

    My first Earth-2 story in which I actually understood the concept was Flash #235-237, which was cemented for me a few months later by my first JLA-JSA team-up that concluded in JLA #125, which also introduced me to Earth-Prime.

    By that point, the concept had definitely clicked for me.

    The destruction of the multiverse concept in 1985 struck me as so unnecessary to me at the time (and still does) and I didn’t (and still don’t) much care for the post-Crisis DC universe. It derailed and damaged my two favorite comics of the period (Legion and All-Star Squadron, and I didn’t much care for the revamping of Superman and Batman, either.

  • CalvinPitt says:

    I think my first multiverse story would have been an issue of Captain America where Nighthawk gets sent over by a blind mystic guy to recruit allies to help him overthrow the Squadron Supreme (Gruenwald tying in to his own mini-series I guess). Issue #314, I think.

    I would have to have been pretty young at the time, but I didn’t seem to have any problem accepting there were other worlds with other heroes and they might team-up sometimes. Maybe it helped that Cap wasn’t all that surprised or bothered by it, so it must be normal.

  • S says:

    “Kind of like (but not really) where the Fawcett world was Earth-5, rather than Earth-S because a) they were already were using numbers, mostly, and b) someone thought everyone would think the “S” was a “5” anyway.”

    Wait, I’m confused – wasn’t the Fawcett world Earth-S?

  • Snark Shark says:

    CalvinPitt: “Maybe it helped that Cap wasn’t all that surprised or bothered by it”

    He’s fought NAZIS! Other worlds mean little to CAP!

    S: “wasn’t the Fawcett world Earth-S?”

    I thought it was, too. though I would have chosen Earth Fawcett.

  • […] Multiverse Talk from last week is still on hold just a bit longer, as I forgot I had a very early morning doctor’s […]

  • Sean Mageean says:

    Hey Mike, regarding your intriguing MF Enterprises Captain Marvel recent scores — it seems that these (probably public domain) characters, which Human Torch creator Carl Burgos hand a hand in “creating,” are ripe for a return, albeit with some name alterations. I’d love to see what Grant Morrison could do with them…perhaps rechristening the “SPLIT!” super-android Captain Marvel as: “Captain Whiz” (if the chest emblem were turned upside down), Captain Miracle,” “Captain Magnificent,” or “Captain Mod” (in a salute to the spirit of the times he comes from). On an interesting side note, it does seem that this iteration of Captain Marvel, sporting a red jumpsuit, does somewhat resemble Burgos’ most famous android creation, Jim Hammond, when he’s flame off. I think right around this era Burgos was trying to get the rights back to the G.A. Human Torch, but, due to Johnny Storm being one quarter of “the world’s greatest comic magazine!” (according to hype-master Stan Lee) and Martin Goodman’s sizable coffers, was not about to happen; Joe Simon, likewise, struck out in trying to secure the rights to Captain America. Anyway, it seems that MF Enterprises published a few issues of a Captain Marvel spin-off series: Captain Marvel Presents The Terrible Five (“the worst bad guys in comicdom”) — which featured the knock-off characters Elasticman (Plastic Man rip-off who had to be renamed); Tinyman (Atom rip-off); Dr. Fate (!); Dr. Doom(!); and Atom-Jaw (Golden Age Lev Gleason Comics villain Iron Jaw rip-off). I’ve never read any of these comics, but intriguingly issue number two also features some additional villains: The Destroyer, Big Max, and Tarzac (who seems to be a Namor/Aquaman rip-off). And in Captain Marvel’s own short-lived series, the SPLIT! android battles The Bat (renamed The Ray after his first appearance); Mr. Brilliant and Pyro (are they Mr. Fantastic and Human Torch rip-offs???); The Vapor Man; Dr. Darkness; and Colonel Cold. So, if DC were to create an Earth in the Multiverse with iterations of these characters, the villains Dr. Fate, The Ray (formerly The Bat); Elasticman (formerly Plastic-Man) could actually retain their original character names…only Dr. Doom would need to be renamed “Dr. Dread” or “Dr. Death” or “Dr. Demento”… hell, even android Captain Marvel’s sidekick Billy Baxton could be brought back! And, adding to the list of possible new names for android Captain Marvel, he could be called: “Captain Mazahs!” Also, apparently MF Enterprises released a few issues of Archie Andrews knock-off character Henry Brewster. It would be fun to see these characters worked into the background of a new “Earth MF Enterprises” story.

    If DC isn’t into it, I could see Dynamite Comics branching off with their Project Superpowers series and exploring an Earth with iterations of the above mentioned characters–renamed when necessary…or maybe the Codename Action characters( Captain Action; Green Hornet and Kato; Green Lama; etc) could cross-over in a story with these characters set in the 1960s.

    While I’m on a roll, it would be fun if this possible as-yet-uncharted DC Multiverse Earth also featured iterations of other obscure Silver Age/Groovy Age comics characters (if they are in the public domain) from other defunct publishers such as Harvey Comics (Bee-Man; Jigsaw; Spyman; Tiger Boy; Pirana; Jack Q. Frost; Glowing Gladiator; MIracles Inc., etc); ACG Comics (Herbie; Nemesis; Magicman); Dell Comics (in particular their odd horror/superhero/Spy fusion characters: Dracula, Frankenstein, and Werewolf); and Lightning Comics (Fatman the Human Flying Saucer; Super Green Beret); and more. Maybe all of these defunct ’60s characters could exist on the same Earth as The Agents of W.O.N.D.E.R.

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