The Flash may not have rebooted the DC multiverse, but it has one thing going for it. Of all the multiverse movies out there — the Spider-Verse, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Avengers: Endgame, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — there’s only one that’s using the best version of the multiverse ever invented by comics.
And that’s no faint praise. The idea of superheroes has been intertwined with parallel earths for over 60 years. That’s 60 years of innumerable writers, editors, and artists exploring every narrative nook and cranny of that combination, with a correspondingly huge number of contradicting explanations of how it all works.
Can you or can you not time-travel to change the past? What’s the difference between a parallel universe and an alternate timeline? What the hell even is a “pocket dimension”? When comics sit down and try to hash out the rules, it’s almost always prescriptive. But The Flash’s version of the multiverse, ripped from the pages of some of the nerdiest comics ever made, is descriptive.
Instead of mandating how a superhero multiverse should work in an ideal setting, it takes a realistic look at how superhero multiverses actually work in practice, and fits itself around that.
And it’s called Hypertime.
If you’ve read this far, you probably have an idea of how the Superhero Multiverse works. A multiverse is a collection of universes, all at least slightly different, and never interacting with each other. (Except for how the protagonists of stories are constantly interacting with them.)
Some worlds are different because of something that happened in their past (see: Loki on Disney Plus). Some worlds are just different for no particular reason (see: Spider-Verse). But forget about
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