Yep. Let that sink in for a moment. DC has designated you as part of their fictional comic book universe. In an interview for The Multiversity Grant Morrison talked about continuity and alternate worlds, and his opinion was that "there is no canon. To me, its all real. Every comic you ever read is real". Not only has every fictional superhero story happened in their fictional universes, but they all actually took place in our reality, too. Well, somewhere in our reality. Because we actually have our own place in the DC multiverse, if that's not too abstract a concept to get your head around. There's actually a precedent for this, starting with Crisis On Infinite Earths but really peaking with the more recent Infinite Crisis miniseries (yeah, they all tend to have pretty similar names, it's confusing). In those stories we got introduced to the concept of Earth Prime which was, for all intents and purposes, our reality. Superheroes only existed as characters in comic books, it's where DC editor Julius Schwartz lived and was briefly met by Superman, and it was eventually home to Superboy Prime, the world's only metahuman and total comic book fanboy who ended up punching through the walls of reality. But we don't need to get into that right now. Earth Prime isn't quite our Earth though, obviously - because, unless we've just not been paying attention to the news, no Superboy has turned up yet - and its appearance in The Multiversity is actually way more meta than that. The issues based in Earth Prime centre on a haunted comic book, but the implication is that the comic itself will also be haunted. Like, the actual comic we'll be reading. So we're going to be part of the story. Which is pretty cool on an existential, mind-freak level. Morrison rather touchingly suggests that these stories, superheroes and comic books are real in a different way, too. There are plenty of stories of superheroes breaking through into other realities to sort out bad stuff, but they do it in ours, too. A scene in the writer's All-Star Superman where the Man Of Steel talks a girl out of killing herself is said to have saved the lives of readers, and he believes Batman gives us the power to conquer our own darkness. We're just as prone to being saved by comic books, and is there any greater proof that we're part of the DC Multiverse? We still kinda wanna live in the Kangarat Murder Society, mind.
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/
