The Multiversity

What do you think of Multiversity? I enjoyed it, but thought it was a bit esoteric since I haven't read a lot of Morrison. What was Ultra Comics all about anyway?

I feel like I was missing something. I got the whole Gentry thing in each book but were they just fun episodic adventures? Or am I just a brainlet?

The real question is which issue is the best? I'd say my favorite is either Pax Americana, Thunderworld Adventures, or Ultra Comics. But those are probably the top 3 anyway.

Also I rarely see people discuss the significance of pic related in regard to the Empty Hand/Gentry, Watchmenz and the story as a whole. Pax Americana is such a fucking great issue.

thunderworld adventures is my favorite.

It's a wonderful work on art, comics and people who read them.
>What was Ultra Comics all about anyway?
Reading too much into things have detrimental effects, basically.
Eh, I dunno, I enjoyed it all. Maybe Thunderworld, but even that universe where the superheroes where a bunch of edonistic people was good too.

I believe the gentry were trying to attack every world in the multiverse (including ours) and what you're seeing are the early stages of that. They haven't fully arrived or manifested there though, probably because they're busy enslaving/corrupting nix uotan. If they had, each of those universes would be as fucked as the marvel analogue.

I could be wrong though.

You think THIS was esoteric? Id hate to see your reaction to watching a Bergman movie or reading Le Bus.

Ultra Comics was about a living breating comicbook that was also a superhero that gets corrupted be the Gentry (which are basically all the worst parts of comics/comics fandom manifest)

A theme of Multiversity is the power that fiction has, and that ideas have. The Gentry represent bad, dark, horrific, nasty, hateful, etc ideas, and they can only get in your head if you let them in. Morrison said in an interview something along the lines of "nobody is careful about the ideas that we allow into our minds. Everything we read, we're just absorbing these thoughts and feelings without thinking about the effects on our mind." That's what the idea of the Gentry are.

Ultra Comics stems from that idea. First the question is asked "How can a superhero affect our reality?", and drawing from the same place as the Gentry, the answer is "through our thoughts". By reading about heroes, our lives are affected. Sometimes they simply brighten up our day, or engage our imaginations, sometimes they can drive us to commit good deeds and even save some people from suicide. Therefore, in a way, a comic IS a superhero, taken form in our world.

Ultra Comics is literally a comic book, with the entire way he is born and formed in the story representing how a comic book is printed and written.

The other side of Ultra is Empty Hand. A story needs conflict, and by reading and consuming the story you are creating the need for that conflict. The story must go on, with the histories and nature of the comics becoming more complex and dark as they continue indefinitely.

Ultra Comics is really the only issue that's meta to that level, and that's because it's the issue about how superheroes exist on our Earth. The rest of the stories are simply analyses of different types of comics. You've got a pulpy action story, you've got a whimsical Golden Age power fantasy, you've got a slow and methodical and political take on superheroes, you've got young legacy characters more focused on drama than fighting villains, you've got a dark and complex alternate history story, and so on.

well articulated, my thoughts excatly

Imo ultimately the series is about not being a toxic fanboy. Ultra was (You) and corrupted by the obsession of the oblivion machine. The Gentry are just personifications of negative aspects that cause conflicts in stories. I think if anything it probably didn't do enough to present a foil to this because there is a way to consume in a positive manner (maybe ultimately the Empty Hand is not truly evil because of this), but also that "comics are gud" is what most of Morrison's other shit is about so I get why maybe he didn't do it here.

I feel like The Just is still my favorite, but I should do a reread to be sure.

Good summary, although you could have thrown in something about the gentry being editorial as well. That's what's implied by "the anti-death equation".

The just might have my favorite cover out of all of them.

>Don't call me superboy!

literally this.

The angle of editorial was my interpretation when I first read it, but I never see anyone talk about that so I abstain from sharing my ideas of it here at risk of being laughed at.

>main series
Mediocre

>Thunderworld
10/10

>Pulp
Forgettable

>Master Men
Barely above average but potential for expansion

>The Just
Nice to see 90s guys but otherwise it was Kingdom Come 3 that's a bad thing

>Ultra Comics
kino

>Guidebook
8/10 info, 6/10 stories

>the gentry being editorial as well.

Didn't Morrison do something similar with the Monitors in Final Crisis?

Mastermen is my favorite. It's just so concise and still incredibly rich with this tale of tragedy.

Plus Nazi Jimmy writing his memoir of how he led to Overman's downfall is an incredible conceit.

I see that part of it as being a criticism of inserting problems from our world into the DCU for the sake of 'realism'. The only thing that comes from wanting 2 make u like us is that the world becomes corrupted and hopeless. It's like when Captain Atom dissects his dog: the analysis of said art doesn't improve the story or your enjoyment of it. In fact, sometimes the story just gets torn apart and killed, even if you were trying to do something as benign as finding the love inside it. Just imagine what you could do to it if you were TRYING to kill the thing.

Yes which is probably why most people shy away from that interpretation here since Nix is in both. Though I guess editorial does influence other editorial anyway.

You could probably interpret Nix as the "good" editor. He keeps things orderly but otherwise doesn't interfere with the "story." It would explain why the Gentry were so interested in corrupting him, and it's notable that when he is he looks a lot like Mandrakk.

>Nazi Jimmy writing his memoir of how he led to Overman's downfall
Wait what.
I thought Overman was the mole, helping the Freedom Fighters because of guilt + the multiverse making him aware that Nazis winning was an aberration in the scope of multiversal history except the FF were more extreme than he realized.

Well, you're right.

But Nazi Jimmy is the narrator and mentions how he ends up discovering and betraying Overman for his crimes.

The Atom one was probably most memorable, but the dissection stuff was mentioned repeatedly. Nix literally cutting panels apart and Chris Kent x-raying a comic were two others. Kind of an underrated issue to issue connection for me. I like the idea that Morrison was literally telling hypercrisis threads to stop with it.

The Gentry were attacking every universe in the DC Multiverse at once. Do remember that whilst it seems like there are only five members of the Gentry (not counting the Empty Hand), each individual Gentry is basically an army unto themselves, with multiple versions of themselves existing simultaneously, each seemingly a piece of the "larger" entity. And thus, they can strike and infect each universe at the same time, which is made even easier since from what's shown in the story itself, the Gentry are connected in an apparent Hive-Mind, with Intellectron acting as the "mouth" for its fellows, and directing them when the Empty Hand is otherwise busy.

>Judge of All Evil
>gets turned evil
What did Grant mean by this?

Reading Multiversity and his Batman makes me really, really, REALLY want to read a Doctor Fate by Morrison.

That would be the most utterly surreal shit ever put to print. I don't think we would even be able to understand what's happening half the fucking time if it happened.

That's been consistently the reaction from fellow anons when I utter this desire of mine.

So what do you think the Empty Hand represents? Most people seem to think it's an allegory for the reader, which makes sense to me. We ultimately controls the fate of comics and are responsible for propagating ideas, including the bad "Gentry" ones, because we decide which comics to buy.

Eh, the "reader" can't be the empty hand, since the reader supports both good and bad ideas. Maybe it's the reader's pettiness, like our inability to let go of storylines we want, to acknowledge good ones we don't approve of and so on.

The Empty Hand is the general "apathy" of people towards comics, heroes, justice, and even just Hope in general. It's supposed to be the pure embodiments of the disregard that most people have nowadays towards anything hopeful and joyous, towards any work or even were Good prevails, and heroes triumph. The Empty Hand is quite literally just man's desire for grimdarkness and despair to reign eternal over all things, both fictional and non-fictional.

The empty hand is moore?

It was garbage. Yu should read Moore

T. Empty Hand.

He's here.

I read The Multiversity a couple of weeks ago pretty good stuff but there is something about this page that I don't quite understand, did anyone else see Jesus Christ when they read this, is this some sort of religion implication?

There's definitely meant to be a little. One of the things Moore and Gibbons did was play with how the page looks when you look at it as a whole, often inserting imagery in that way

Here if you look at the top middle four panels they very much give an illusion of the classic image of Christ.

Christ allegory is incredibly common and is used in Watchmen, too. I wouldn't look too much into that, I think it's just referencing something Watchmen did rather than trying to tell you the character is a Christ figure.

>Yu
Get out of here, Intellectron. This is a place of light and life.

...

...

It's explicitly a Christ-analogue, down to the self-sacrifice, with Peacemaker as Judas.

Any chance for a storytime for this? It looks neat.

I think Norrin will do it as part of his Doomsday CLock prep

Honestly even if it’s not hinted at that much I still think Overman was being played a sucker by underwaterman or someone else on the team