Tell me everything you know about The Empty Hand. Is he ever going to be relevant? I can't find any material about him...

Tell me everything you know about The Empty Hand. Is he ever going to be relevant? I can't find any material about him. Is he comparable to being like the antithesis of The Writer or The Presence?

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ie.ign.com/articles/2015/10/21/grant-morrison-on-finishing-multiversity-and-whats-next-at-dc
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He's the personification of everything ruining superhero comics. Take of that what you will. We'll never see him as a villain again because he's manifested himself in our world as Doomsday Clock.

He is pretty much the end of fiction. He represent the loss of interest in anything. His Gentry is a corruption force that represents everything that makes you drop a book (like 90% of all the shit Marvel does this days).

he's a meme baddie that was taylor-made for reddit

Oh jeez, meta-villain.

What next? Will the pencil and eraser go to be next villains in DC crossover? Is Superman going to fight comic book prices? Or Batman going talk about how superheroes need good endings in order to survive.

Well, they do. Look at Marvel, they are dying.

Captain Carrot makes a point about superheroes needing happy endings in Multiversity 1.
Superman fights Multiversal Ink in Superman 14ish.

This meta-shit is never as clever as the creators think it is. And Gentry looks like a rip-off of Vaati from Zelda: The Minish Cap. Shit design for such a supposedly conceptual entity.

>e'll never see him as a villain again because he's manifested himself in our world as Doomsday Clock.

Exactly.

He is here!

He's the end of all fiction itself. The very embodiment of the decay that is running rampant through the entirety of the industry, ruining good things like comics, which are his primary target. His Gentry are the forces that act in his stead, and are the withering corruption that poisons stories and makes you want to drop or burn once-good books, simply because of how bad they've become (Nearly all of Marvel, for instance).

He represents apathy and homogenisation. His 'gentrification' grinds universes down to bland and soulless entities only moving on through inertia before they die out.

It's no coincidence he sets up shop in the Ultimate Marvel universe when IRL it was clear everything unique about it had been eroded and all its rule broken (e.g. Peter resurrecting) and Marvel was going to kill it off.

>I can't find any material about him

>Morrison: Always I've thought, and particularly now in the era of event-driven comics where characters are subjected to these absolutely life-ruining events in every story arc, I wanted to sum up what all these stories are. It's where the characters get to the end and they appear to have beaten the bad guy, and then an even bigger bad guy shows up and says, "I'll get you later." The real big bad guy at the end - he looks like the Ultra Comics character, but he's also the reader. The empty hand of the reader when he puts the comic down and everything ends. But like the bad guy, he can also come back in full force and say, "You'll meet me again."
>I like my books to have multiple meanings. There's multiple ways of reading it. The big bad at the end represents all the big bads in every story. We just beat that villain, now here comes the Anti-Monitor. We just beat the Anti-Monitor, now here comes something that's bigger than big. That was my thinking - the ultimate bigger than big, the ultimate universe destroyer. It's the reader, who chooses to either participate or not.

See, I think Superman Beyond was really clever, and I re-read it a half dozen times over the years and I still come back with more each time.

Final Crisis itself (setting aside the Mandrakk stuff as that was really a side-story) was not nearly as deep as people pretend it is, and was just Morrison writing a massive fight in a very compressed way that we're simply not used to, but it's still at its core just people punching each other for 7 issues.

Multiversity had a lot of fun ideas but the Gentry seem to me like they came too late. They're not tethered to the greater mythos like Mandrakk (via Monitors in Crises) or Barbatos (via being a Batman villain), two similar villains.

I feel like Multiversity itself (excepting the standalones which were largely brilliant) is a re-hash of Superman Beyond with slightly different characters.

But
>multiversal army led by President Superman
>Assembles in the Ultima Thule to travel beyond the universe to fix a cosmic problem caused by some ULTRAMETADIMENSIONAL fuckery or whatever meme term Morrison would use to describe them
>They fight the Best of the Monitors, corrupted by corrupting corruption to be the baddie
>S T O R I E S
>T
>O
>R
>I
>E
>S
>It's like they're in reality???? Or you're in a comic book see????
I just found Multiversity to be a worse sequel to Beyond.

Forgot source: ie.ign.com/articles/2015/10/21/grant-morrison-on-finishing-multiversity-and-whats-next-at-dc

>seriously talking about how stupid Gentry looks

confirmed for not reading the comic

His name's not Gentry, it's Intellectron, and he's a member of The Gentry. Did you read the comic?

Sorry for remembering some parts of it but not others. I guess I got meta-wanked on by someone pretending to be retarded, thanks Morrison.

See my big problem with this whole waaa look at how big and scary they are is that by intentionally evoking the comic/reader divide you cheapen the story.

When the Anti-Monitor wants to destroys the DC Multiverse I care because I care about the characters, and because it's a problem they can't easily solve.

If you try to write a story that's sorta-kinda-wink-wink meant to represent a real world problem VIA using the exact same trope of indestructible multiversal conqueror there's no comparable fear or tension.

What, you think I'm scared of the Gentry? They literally don't exist. "NIGGA JUST CLOSE THE COMIC HAHAHAHA" etc. as the meme would go.

>inb4 meme responses "Then the Gentry win!"
No, dolt. The Gentry "win" if we somehow a) stop caring about these stories enough that they die out but somehow b) care enough about them to feel bad about that. This is nonsensical. Superman and Batman have no ontological inertia. They exist on published paper which is unchangeable. The Killing Joke and For the Man who had Everything will always exist no matter what happens (except if somehow all copies are destroyed, which would imply greater real world concerns).

All the retcons and angst and shit don't erase prior storylines. Their universes, in that sense, will always exist. You might argue that this isn't the same as them 'receiving' new stories, but the Gentry are all about new stories being shit. Pleasant stasis seems antithetical to them. Like the concept of each issue of Superman being a fixed point in time, which it is, is a clear antidote to their shit.

But okay, let's say no new stories is bad. Why is it bad? It's bad because we care about what happens to them. But if we do care, then market demands means they'll keep being published, so the Gentry lose.

cont. because fuck the Gentry.

...

What's Doomsday Clock?

But what if you move the goalposts even further and say the Gentry win if the universe is shit? I'd say why? Event fatigue might be a real thing but it's a clear consequence of us precisely CARING about these characters and wanting to see more and greater stories.

Also note that the heroes do win in the end. They might be bitter victories but they go forward. The arc of the DC universe tends towards increased good and justice, after all. More villains have been redeemed than heroes have fallen. The fact that threats keep being bigger and yet the Earth endures means the heroes are getting stronger.

OG Superman fought organized crime. Modern Superman can sing a song that kills the God of Evil.

OG Batman fought organized crime. Modern Batman is Batgod.

Etc. etc.

You can argue that the reader is the ultimate bad guy because our insistence on needing more and bigger stories with these characters is the cause of all their troubles but a) they're not real so it doesn't fucking matter but b) (because a)'s no fun) that's the exact opposite of what Morrison argued in Beyond and FC. That stories are natural and good and that all life is conflict, in a sense, where we build and build up our own heroes. The ultimate heroic moment is the creation of the story of Superman. Giving him more powers to fight stronger foes is just continuing this logic of empowering hope.

On no level, in no universe, do the Gentry make sense as anything more than "newest biggest baddest threat".

Good blog-post friend. I'd probably care to read more of it if it wasn't just your usual response to meta-stuff being brought up in DC. But have a (You) for your troubles.

>usual
I literally read Beyond, FC and Multiversity this week.

I'm primarily a Marvelfag so reading DC's more esoteric stuff never appealed to me.

I have no idea who you're referring to, but it's not me. Also this isn't a fucking blog post, this is discussing the topic at hand. When did actual discussion of comics on Sup Forums become worthy of memes?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Hypercrisis and think it's really cool (it's what got me reading Morrison's DC output), but it gets wanked too far here and the Gentry are nowhere near as innovative or as omg so scary as people present them. They're an obvious metaphor for the reader, but they don't work because they're presented as a Big Bad to 'punch', so we know the heroes will prevail because genre traditions (that Morrison often subverts but fundamentally respects, which I appreciate).

Something really metaphorical would be impossible in a mainstream Big Two comic, and almost impossible to pull off without being "Superman fights an eraser" cheesy.

Maybe write a story where they come across a bunch of DC comics from our Earth, and this leads to a philosophical panic - are we real? Do we have free will? Can we do anything or is it all just writers writing us into scenarios? Even this discussion, is it just a particularly experimental comic?

A Morrison-esque ending would have them come to terms with the fact that they're fictional characters to us 'higher' beings, but deciding to fight the good fight because their people need them to, and because even their fictional actions can inspire us to do good, and in that way, they transcend the bounds of the medium.

He's Morrison's latest metavillain, so nobody else will ever use him.

Multiversity starts with the destruction of Ultimate Marvel.

"I feed on the corpse of my last victim -- Multiverse-2!"

Yep, pretty much.

The Watchmen/DCU crossover that stinks of desperation, unoriginality and greed.

>The Empty Hand represents the end of the fictional reality comic books take place in that exists only in the collective readers imagination
>when you reach the end of a comic book and stop reading it, thus ending its most vivid activity in your mind, and put it down, your Hand is literally now Empty

would be extreme pottery if anyone actually picked up physical comic books anymore and didnt just read them on a screen

Not Gentry. The Gentry. It's a group of beings, not a single entity. And each one has a different name. The eye is called Intellectron.

But I doubt you read it.