Recent critical opinion of DC Comics has not been great. Well, the sales have been doing okay, but the prevailing wisdom from readers and reviewers alike is that the publisher has, in some ways, hit a bit of a creative slump. A few years ago they rebooted their entire fictional universe and its 75 year history with an initiative called the New 52, beginning with a clean slate that returned a lot of characters to old status quos, undid a lot of interesting stuff and all seemed to be in pursuit of resurrecting a certain sort of superhero comic: cynical, self-consciously trying to be cool - and whatever you do, don't mention the multiverse. In its first few decades DC managed to accumulate a pretty impressive collection of alternate universes, populated by backwards Supermen like Bizarro and vampire Batmen, which were pretty much standard fare for the wacky comic books of the fifties. It all got a little hard to keep up with, and not particularly easy for new readers to get onboard with. But it was fun! We can deal with flying people and magical rings that make whatever you imagine, we can deal with alternate realities. Especially when we're used to seeing Brian Cox on our screens. Looks like they've come back around to the idea, however, with the ongoing Earth-2 series taking place on a totally different plane of existence to the regular DC Comics, and the vanilla Justice League meeting their dark doppelgangers from another dimension. Now it's all coming to a head with The Multiversity, a new miniseries by noted writer and nutjob Grant Morrison, which takes place across all the weird and wacky worlds we've seen over the years. Here are just ten of the more ridiculous parts of the DC multiverse we're hoping to see.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
