Thing is, if they all went down the same route as Nix Uotan and were reborn as non-superpowered everyday folk, how exactly are they supposed to protect the multiverse? And if they're all now existing on their separate Earths they were assigned to as Monitors, how are they going to stay in touch with each other? For the heroes and villains who hop between the different worlds there's any number of ways to break through the barriers of reality - advanced technologies, teaming up with the Anti-Monitor (who is still around, and still wanting to wreck everything, the party pooper), running really fast - but for the new race of Monitors, there's a particularly novel way of sending messages. Comic books. Like, comic books within comic books. Nix Uotan still retains some memory of being a Monitor, and the sense of responsibility for the Earth-0 he lives on, but he doesn't seem to have any memory of having compatriots, let alone having any idea of how to contact them. How do you send messages across different dimensions? It's physically impossible, even in the "impossible is nothing" world of superhero comics. And Nike adverts. Knew we'd seen that phrase somewhere before. How do people communicate through alternate worlds - and how do people even know they exist? It's because of comic books. Seriously. It's something that's been hinted at in previous DC titles but it's being made explicit in The Multiversity, which will be made up of a series of one-shots set in different realities that are somehow connected. And that connective tissue will be that characters in each story will read comics about the last story, experiencing them as fictional stories when they actually happened. Which is a lot to get your head around, sure, but just wait until you get to the single most ridiculous part of DC's multiverse...
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/
