neumi5694: A decade or two ago there was indeed a rumor that Marvel bought DC.
Breja: Try four.
https://www.gamesradar.com/when-marvel-comics-almost-bought-dc-really/
[…]
Thanks for the link.
[…] Just a year later, in 1985, DC published Crisis on Infinite Earths, reordering and rebooting its entire comic book continuity, and reaching a renewed surge of sales. And by the end of the '80s, the publisher was once again receiving critical acclaim and even more increased revenue from titles such as Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and The Sandman. […]
I remember skimming through one of those issues, back then. IIRC Medusa (she had prehensile hair that could grasp objects) was one of the higher powered heroes which was a conceit they investigated within it.
Breja: And anyway, it's not like the concept of the multiverse is where all these different versions of things start, at least as far as the movies are concerned.
neumi5694: The movies are only the end of the development. You now see it as a natural thing, but it started far away from that.
Of course not all comics are always canon, that is normal. DC was aware of the discrepancies and how it would confuse fans and actually wanted to get rid of it. They created the "Crisis" story arc, created the concept of parallel worlds coexisting and called it the "Multiverse". The storyline was about the Animonitor who wanted to destroy all worlds. In the end he was almost successful, one new world emerged with the last survivors from all universes.
But of course this could not last forever, new story arcs were created not fitting into that one official universe. Many years later DC had a second crisis, this time not as hard as the first one. What followed, was the New52, the 52 universes able to coexist.
After that a third sorf-of-crisis happened, DC tried a few things that fans didn't like and backed off (like having heroes from different realities fight each other, that was just stupid). Now we have the "Rebirth" universe, a mix of New52 and Back-To-The-Roots, while leaving other universes intact.
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Marvel? I bet they bit their tongues for not having that idea first. They never came up with a cool alternative concept. Instead they made for example Peter Parker make a deal with the devil, eradicating and replacing reality.
It took them a long time to acknolodge that they had different parallel worlds and even longer to come up with a story that broke the boundaries of a single universe. Still they avoided the term "multiverse" at all costs. Instead they had the "Spider-verse", which was basically the same thing, but with a different name. The multiverse only made it into the movies recently with Spider-man and Dr. Strange.
[…]
The concept of
Parallel Universes was first published by the physicist Max Tegmark (who wrote a four-dimensional version of Tetris whilst at university before he became Professor of Astronomy at Penn State) famous for his analyses of the cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and galaxy clustering.
I still have the fourteen-page lift-out from SciAm (from the early naughties, back when I was subscribing; the latest reference 2003) with the byline:
Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations. (From the second paragraph: "[…] The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 10²⁸ m from here. […]".)
LEVEL 1 MULTIVERSE
The simplest type of parallel universe is simply a region of space that is too far away for us to have seen yet. The farthest that we can observe is currently about 4 × 10²⁶m, or 42 billion lightyears — the distance that light has been able to travel since the Big Bang began. (The distance is greater than 14 billion lightyears because cosmic expansion has lengthened distances.) each of the Level 1 parallel universes is basically the same as ours. All the differences stem from variations in the initial arrangement of matter.
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LEVEL II MULTIVERSE
A somewhat more elaborate type of parallel universe emerges from the theory of cosmological inflation. The idea is that our Level I multiverse — namely, our universe and contiguous regions of space — is a bubble embedded in an even vaster but mostly empty volume. Other bubbles exist out there, disconnected from ours. They nucleate like raindrops in a cloud. During nucleation, variations in quantum fields endow each bubble with properties that distinguish it from other bubbles.
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LEVEL III MULTIVERSE
Quantum mechanics predicts a vast number of parallel universes by braodening the concept of "elsewhere". These universes are located elsewhere, not in ordinary space but in an abstract realm of all possible states. Every conceivable way the world could be (within the scope of quantum mechanics) corresponds to a different universe. The parallel universes make their presence felt in laboratory experiments, such as wave interference and quantum computation.
Quantum Dice
Imagine an ideal die whose randomness is purely quantum. When you roll it, the die appears to land on a certain value at random. Quantum mechanics, however, predicts that it lands on all values at once. One way to reconcile these contradictory views is to conclude that the die lands on different values in different universes. In one sixth of these universes, it lands on 1; in one sixth, on 2, and so on. Trapped in one universe, we can perceive only a fraction of the full quantum reality.
[…]
LEVEL IV MULTIVERSE
The ultimate type of parallel universe opens up the full realm of possibility. Universes can differ not just in location, cosmological properties or quantum states but also in the laws of physics. Existing outside of space and time, they are almost impossible to visualize; the best one can do is to think of them abstractly, as static sculptures that represent the mathematical structure of the physical laws that govern them. […]
A recent update can be heard when Brian Cox (the cool Mancunian cosmologist, not the useful idiot, politically active thespian who thinks highly of socialism —— the last three centuries of history notwithstanding) who noted that observations (of black holes, notably) tell us that the fundamental properties of matter are not actually fundamental. In other words, what our minds have deduced from the behaviour of matter is nothing more than an illusion because spacetime doesn't have these properties: we have invented them. (Check out his
Universe series, at the end.)
