I am a comic book collector and happy to be one. I might say “proud” if I hadn’t, over a year ago, switched to reading digital as opposed to print comics. I feel a bit robbed of the tactile sensations of the hobby – of the turn of the page, the sneaking look to the panel a page over, the bagging and shorting and stacking and filing. Though I read my comics in a different medium than I used to, I still treat each Wednesday (comic book delivery day to specialty shops around the country) as different from the other days of the week. I subscribe and now, rather than go to the comic store to be handed the books pulled for my “Hold Slot,” I click a button on my iPad and watch them download.
Then I read them.
Rare is the week that I don’t read them all between Wednesdays and some weeks I have, well… let’s just say more comic books in my digital downloads than a grown man should. Comic book legend Will Eisner (creator of The Spirit) is one of the most influential men even to put pencil to drawing board in the pursuit of making comics. So influential was he that the industry awards (think the Oscars or the Emmys or the Grammys) are named The Eisner Awards. He called comic books “sequential art,” perhaps because he became embarrassed by his profession when he had to admit what he did for a living. This is my weekly reaction to the comics I read.
I read 10 comics last week: Batman Eternal #43, All New X-Men #35, Batman #38, Uncanny X-Men #30, New Avengers #29, Gotham Academy #4, Arkham Manor #4, Uncanny Avengers #1, Spider-Man and the X-Men #2 and The Multiversity: Guidebook #1.
The best comic I read last week was The Multiversity Guidebook #1.
In prior reviews, I have decried comic books that I don’t understand because, as far as I am concerned, they are too clever for their own good (hello anything recent by Johnathan Hickman!) but I am overcoming that prejudice here. I won’t claim I understood everything in the Grant Morrison scripted Multiversity: The Guidebook, but I will say I enjoyed all of it! This comic book seemed as though it was simply going to be a tour through the newly codified DC Comics multiverse. And, while it was that, it was much, much more.
At the core of the story in this issue (as with all the issues of The Multiversity) is the idea that comic books are the key to seeing into alternate universes – that, when I read a Superman comic book, I am really looking into the “New 52” reality – the “New 52” universe that is an alternate universe of ours, where the adventures of Superman really take place. Actually, the New 52 characters populate Earth-0, something I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t read Multiversity: The Guidebook.
In fact, I thought the entire Guidebook was only going to be about that sort of thing – listing the earths that make up the 52 parallel universes of the DC multiverse (confused yet?) but it wasn’t just that. There is a remarkable frame story wherein the “Atomic Knights” Batman of Earth-17 teams up with the baby-boy Batman of Earth-42. Again, this could have been a throw-away story, but Morrison infuses it with meaning and it was through these characters that I really began to comprehend the overarching narrative of The Multiversity.
Had this just been a guidebook, I would have liked it as it solidified some of my favorite DC stories as taking place in alternate universes (the Kingdom Come heroes on Earth-22, the Red Son heroes on Earth-30, the New Frontier heroes on Earth-21). I would have liked it because it leaves 7 earths as yet revealed. I would have liked it because it talked about the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” and the way it relates to “Infinite Crisis.” I would have liked it because it was a quintessential DC story.
What a fun read.
And There Came a Day... 