DC’s new story encompassing a new universe that they are calling Omniverse debuted in Dark Nights: Death Metal # 7 January and readers will be seeing this more closely in Infinite Frontier # 0 on March 2. But a week earlier, on Tuesday, February 23, he is already in expansion mode with a new DCU corner within the Omniverse called Linearverse.
What is Linearverse? We explained the background here and received some comments from Dan Jurgens, one of the co-writers of the new story, Generations: Forged # 1.
But for a more straightforward explanation of the Linearverse, you have come to the right place.
DC readers may want to leave now if you are planning to read Generations: Forged # 1 and want to wait.
[That’s a spoiler warning, FYI.]
So, what is the Linearverse DC? First, you have to understand what DC Omniverse is.
As the history of DC comics began in 1938 with the debut of Superman in Action Comics # 1, the official canonical history of the DC Universe – what comic book readers refer to as continuity – has been officially rewritten several times to explain how super- heroes like Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman who have published adventures dating from real-world events, such as World War II, may still be active in new adventures that take place here and now.
This resulted in a series of retcons (retroactive continuity) and reboots (introducing a new version from scratch) that try to explain how a character like Batman can still be somewhere between 30 and 40 years old in 2021, despite not being less than more than 100 if you assume he was in his 20s during his 1939 debut.
This led to the creation of the Multiverse concept in the 1960s, specifically in 1961’s The Flash of Two Worlds, which explains how two versions of the speedster character, the Flash – one created in 1940 (Jay Garrick) and another created in 1956 ( Barry Allen) can coexist.
The popularity of superhero comics waned in the post-World War II years and characters like Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman disappeared while Superman and Batman resisted.
A rebirth of superheroes in the 1960s caused DC to bring back Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman, and others, but in new and updated versions, unrelated to previous ones.
But ‘The Flash of Two Worlds’ established the premise that previous versions of the characters existed on a second Earth, Earth-Two.
Terra-Dois eventually became home to other versions of classic characters who have aged and whose lives have changed more than their mainline counterparts, like a gray-temple Superman who married Lois Lane decades before they were married on the mainline. DC, and a much more adult Robin, who in his 60s was still in his teens, 40 years after his debut in the main Batman titles.
Years of stories taking place at different times and the expansion of Multiverse to include more Earths, including worlds that DC acquired from other comic book publishers like Captain Marvel of Fawcett (whom you know as Shazam) resulted in DC’s first attempt to juxtapose all their stories in a unique and cohesive timeline.
The iconic and very meta 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths (recently loosely adapted to a DC superhero DC crossover) tried to end the Multiverse, but the gravity of trying to turn what were then 50 years of stories into a timeline of 10 years resulted in DC having to publish recurring maintenance stories (most with the word ‘Crisis’ in the title) to try to correct the logical inconsistencies that the Crisis introduced, but to no avail.
In 2011, DC tried again more definitively with the full reboot ‘The New 52’, which once again tried to streamline the entire history of DC in a manageable timeline. But again, the weight of its complete history and the fact that many of its editors and writers revered much of the story that was eliminated resulted in the concept of the Multiverse slowly returning over the ’10s.
Apparently recognizing the folly of trying to defeat time, DC’s new approach is to stop trying to make everything make sense and just acknowledge that EVERYTHING happened. All timelines and multiverses and alternative and future realities exist in an Omniverse.
Although the current iterations of classic DC heroes like Batman and Superman exist in an approximation of real / current time, they are also meta-aware of the existence of the Omniverse and somewhat aware that their own lives, memories and history are part of a intricate tapestry and a patchwork of time and reality.
And because it’s still so new, we don’t yet know how much DC will try to explain how it fits narratively, or if they’ll try it in any way.
This brings us to the newest wrinkle (and thanks for joining us), the Linearverse.
A separate reality within the new Omniverse, this way of looking at DC history has a much simpler approach than DC has never seriously tried … until now.
In Linearverse, characters simply live longer than people who don’t live in Linearverse, and this is true for aliens from other worlds like Superman, mythological characters like Wonder Woman and normal human beings like Batman.
So the same Bruce Wayne whose parents were killed in the Crime Alley in the late 1920s or early 1930s and took to the streets of Gotham City as a vigilante in 1939 is the same guy who was still fighting crime in 2021.
Technology has advanced, fashion has changed, world events like wars and presidential mandates have usually occurred in real time, but the characters have only aged a few years and lived it and lived and remember everything.
Like DC’s previous attempts to make its story linear, it is not a perfect solution. The aforementioned 1956 Barry Allen (who is the current Flash) first took the name as a tribute to Jay Garrick from the 1940s, who in Allen’s world was a comic book character and not a real person.
On the Linearverse, Barry Allen would have to be aware that Jay Garrick really existed when he adopted the name Flash because, of course, Jay Garrick had adventures with the same Superman as Barry.
And events like the original Crisis on Infinite Earths would not make sense in a reality where there was no Multiverse.
As Jurgens explains to Newsarama, the Linearverse is its own exclusive playground for the time being. DC’s regular regular series starring Superman, Batman, Justice League, Green Lantern and more will still exist in the great Omniverse, where time theoretically passes normally for the characters, despite the fact that it doesn’t really pass for readers.
Linearverse seems to exist as a storytelling option, to tell specific tales that require or benefit from the premise (for example) that today’s very serious Batman really had and resembles his craziest and most child-friendly science-fiction adventures from the 50s, or that Superman and Batman have been friends for almost 80 years.
So far, DC hasn’t announced any plans for more stories set on the Linearverse, but it’s a new club on the stock exchange for writers with a story to tell.
Some of the stories we mentioned are on Newsarama’s list of best DC stories of all time.