LIBRARY artefact #032
On the 2nd Day of Xmas…
Today’s advent confection is one for the DC Comics fans with this bite-size version of our semi-regular Bulletins from Bizarroworld feature which aims to correct some common misconceptions!
BULLETINS FROM BIZARROWORLD #3
HYPERTIME IS GEOMETRY
I note that the Hypertime concept Mark Waid and I introduced to the DC Universe in the ‘90s has made a comeback as a means of addressing DC’s disastrous collapsing continuity issues.
As the principal creator of the idea, I fear it’s open to misinterpretation, confusion and the kind of unnecessary complexification that tends to bog down DC cosmology. For this reason, there follows a brief overview of the concept to help guide fellow creatives in their voyages beyond the multiverse!
Batman, in the guise of the Archivist, explains Hypertime quite clearly, with visual aids, in The Return of Bruce Wayne issue #2, so I’d advise anyone who’s interested to start there.
It started when I was ruminating on the phrase ‘timeline’ which we just accept in comics and, indeed, had been discussing that fateful day in San Diego. Waid and I were talking about the timeline for the DCU, that starts with a giant cosmic hand at the Big Bang and ends at Vanishing Point’s Heat Death of the Universe.
It struck me straight away that a timeline implied a timepoint (Tom Peyer ran with this idea brilliantly in Hourman #3).
Given time point and timeline, it was obvious what came next, and here was where it got interesting – point, line, plane…
There had to be a time plane, and I imagined what that would look like, as a flat sheet with all the various timelines – parallel worlds alternate histories, cancelled continuities – laid side by side across the time plane like multitudinous rail tracks, sometimes crossing over, branching off, reconnecting, terminating.
The 2-D timeplane was what all of your comics looked like spread out on a massive floor. Where 1938 Superman could exist at the same time on the same floor as 2022 Superman.
The time plane naturally implied a time cube of stacked realities, piled timeplanes extending perpendicularly into our own dimensionality (both the aliens in 52 and Bat-Mite in Batman call this cube Space B, implying that Space A is the Timeplane).
From there you can do hypercube time and so on, in each case imagining a more panoramic and elaborate picture which not only includes we, the readers, but also potentially higher dimensional forms of life or intelligence existing ‘above’ our own.
This was the schematic I drew on a hotel notepad and showed to Mark Waid the next day. It was Waid who suggested calling the idea ‘Hypertime’.
If someone explains Hypertime to you and it sounds way more complicated than point, line, plane, cube, etc, just tell them Batman sent you and set them right…
NO, I HAVEN’T READ THAT ONE…
Some readers have advanced the theory that the metafictional aspects of my Animal Man series with artist Chaz Truog were inspired by Alisdair Gray’s novel Lanark, which I have not read. Gray, another Ban-the-Bomb activist, was a friend of our family when I was a kid, but my attempts to read Lanark at the age of 18 foundered a couple of chapters in (a recent attempt to re-read fared no better). I found it too depressing.
Aside from Clifford Simak’s City, Flowers for Algernon, The Man who Fell to Earth and Dune, I mostly steered clear of science fiction, although I liked Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny. Philip K. Dick’s novels, of which I’ve read only three, are not a big influence on my work, and I have never read any books by Kurt Vonnegut, though I do like the movie version of Slaughterhouse 5.
As mentioned above, the approach to Animal Man was suggested partly by Dennis Potter’s TV drama Blackeyes but mostly by 1960s and ‘70s Julius Schwartz-edited comics about Earth-Prime.
As most of my readers know by now, I prefer to read non-fiction books.
DARKSEID’S BIG DAY OUT
It’s all too easy to get the details wrong when it comes to Jack Kirby’s New Gods mythos, and I could devote an entire series to the repeated errors that arise, especially as we move further away from the source material, but for today we’ll focus on the Omega Effect. There are still those lost souls who believe Darkseid’s Omega Effect is a simple force blast, or some evil anti-life version of Superman’s heat vision!
Indeed, an article on CBR insisted it was only Batman’s ‘plot armour’ in Final Crisis that protected him from the destructive effects of the Omega Sanction and another more recent piece, saw its writer double down on this assertion with, ‘Before Batman, Darkseid’s Omega Beams usually disintegrated whoever they hit…’
This is not correct.
In fact, the first time we see Darkseid unleash the Omega Effect is in Forever People#6 (Jan ‘72) entitled ‘The Omega Effect’ where it is clearly indicated that the Omega Effect is used not to destroy them but to scatter its victims through TIME!
That issue and the next (entitled ‘I’ll Find You in Yesterday’) revolve around the Omega Effect and it’s quite clear what it is, and what the eyebeams are, and how it all works.
Kirby naturally chose a weapon for Darkseid that yielded story potential rather than charred skeletons. Darkseid is not a brawler or battleground general, he is an authoritarian despot tactician who prefers not to dirty his gloves.
In Forever People #6, the Dark Lord of Apokolips uses his eyebeams to hurl the titular heroes back to mediaeval England where Kirby plays out a brilliant throwaway King Arthur gag, while Sonny Sumo is transferred to feudal Japan. Unlike the Forever People, Sonny does not return; happy to remain in what he regards as a time of honour and nobility.
In the Mister Miracle series, as part of Seven Soldiers, I added a twist where the Omega Effect instead caused a victim to endure an endless series of increasingly more degraded lives (based again on Forever People #6 where Darkseid says ’ AS MASTER OF THE OMEGA EFFECT I CAN MANIPULATE IT IN MANY INTRIGUING WAYS!!’) but by the time Final Crisis, Batman RIP and The Return of Bruce Wayne came around, I’d gone back to source, hence Batman’s trip through time.
More laffs soonest!..
I was actually shocked in the Justice League movie that after Darkseid is introduced as the ultimate baddie, he gets his ass swiftly handed to him and dragged away off of Earth.
And then he’s swinging an axe around? Yes, it felt wrong.
Darkseid : (to a Batman in the DCAU in 2006) FLEE.
[ He does, and successfully avoid The Omega Effect finder-beams by stomping-out a stray Parademon that was NOT in Darkseid’s initial firing-line-of-SIGHT to use as a Judas Goat decoy/UnHuman-Shield ]
Darkseid : Impressive. NOBODY Has Ever AVOIDED My Omega-Beam BEFORE —
[ my emphasis ]
(Turns His Gaze towards Luthor, who is swatting-down parademons by double-handgunning it, John Woo-style)
I Wonder if The Other One is as Agile — ( He begins to harden His Stare (like Paddington))
( Luthor has the preternatural sense that The God of All Evil is LOOKING at him, shits himself, abandons The Battlefield and runs away — )
Darkseid : Excellent Strategy.
#JamesRobinson
#RupertSheldrake
#BlueTits
#MorphoMeMeticField
#TheBatmanThe
“All blue tits are connected – at least somehow.
A couple of apes are sitting on a lonely hilltop somewhere, let’s say Africa, and together they learn a new skill. Before long, this new ability will have spread in waves across the entire planet.
The acquired knowledge then pervades the entire species, becoming part of the collective memory of all apes in the process. British biologist Rupert Sheldrake is convinced that all animals of the same species worldwide can draw on a vast library of once acquired practical knowledge. What a wonderful thought.
Rupert Sheldrake has attempted to prove his theory in various experiments. In Japan, a group of apes learned to break open a fruit using a stone. At almost the same time, other groups in Congo and New Guinea began exhibiting the same behavior. In England, blue tits learned to diversify their diets by pecking open the aluminum lid on milk bottles left on doorsteps by the milkman. Within a short space of time, blue tits throughout England, up into Scotland and even as far afield as Sweden and the Netherlands were opening milk bottles using the same technique. Blue tits have a flight radius of 15 miles. None of them could have flown to Sweden and taught their Nordic cousins the new trick there. By the same token, none of the Scottish blue tits could have travelled to southern England and learned the skill first hand.
Another example: A dog owner leaves his office at 5 p.m. every day, gets into his car and drives home. At the precise moment he hops into his vehicle, his dog – a loving companion for 9 years – heads straight to the gate at the bottom of the garden and waits impatiently with tail wagging. One day, the dog owner isn’t feeling well, and leaves work early at 2 p.m. His dog then unexpectedly gets up in the kitchen and scurries down to the gate in the garden. The man’s wife laughs and calls out “Your body clock’s not ticking right today.” A short time later, the man’s car pulls up in the garage. So how did the dog know? What connects blue tits to other blue tits and apes to other apes is the fact that they belong to the same species and can draw on the same collective memory of nature. In contrast, the human owner shares a close emotional bond with his dog. The dog knows when its owner is coming. This isn’t due to once acquired knowledge, but the entwinement of feelings and contact – something the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls morphic fields, or the memory of nature.
According to this, every tool acquired somehow quickly becomes something everyone can draw on: newly-learned knowledge and intensive feelings are transferred into the consciousness of all animals of a specific species, whether blue tits or apes, and can even cross between species as with the human and the dog. How else to explain that weird moment, as it so often happens, when I think intensively of an old friend whom I haven’t seen in a long while and decide to write him a letter, only for the phone to ring, and it’s him! … or my wife.”
https://open.prodir.com/en/2019/02/all-blue-tits-are-connected-at-least-somehow/
https://youtu.be/4cG4BNJBXBU?feature=shared