Monday, August 25, 2014

The Multiversity #1


I'm so starved for a Captain Carrot comic I'll even read one by Grant Morrison. What has the world come to? The Multiversity launches here, and in typical Morrison fashion it's big, messy, and jumps wildly from entertaining to pretentious and crappy.

The concept is pretty simple. There are 52 parallel Earths in the DC Universe, in-between them there exists a sort of weigh station where heroes from various worlds are assembled to deal with the threats which threaten the entire Multiverse (even if it is a stupid looking giant eye with bat wings).

The first dozen or so pages deal with events on Earth-7 where Nix Uotan (a Monitor dressed up like Static Shock for some unknown reason) falls to the grave threat of the eyeball-bat-thingy. Things pick up a bit with the introduction of President Superman of Earth-23 who is recruited into the Multiversity where he comes into contact with a variety of heroes including Captain Carrot (who thankfully is more similiar to the original character rather than the awful New 52 version).

Grant Morrison has trouble working inside established continuity often needing to make serious changes to existing characters and storylines (most of which aren't worth it) to make his tales work. A project such as The Multiversity allows him the freedom to color as far outside the lines as he wishes. On the negative side, DC is going to be stuck with several of Morrison creations filling up countless worlds which might be better served to be crafted by a variety of creators rather than just one mind.

Some of what he dreams up here works well (reincorporating the classic idea that events from one world bleeding over into the fiction of others) while other aspects (such as the introduction of the comic's bad guys) leave room for improvement. There's half a good comic here, saddled between the less interesting storylines and various worlds, when Morrison focuses on the Multiversity itself. As a fan of Captain Carrot I'm going to give it a marginal pass, but it's going to need far more of fun characters like Captain Carrot and the zany worlds which spawn them and less of Morrison's bag of tricks (oh great, music is reincorporated as bending reality because it worked so well in Final Crisis) and gritty post-apocalyptic worlds to keep me around for any length of time. For fans.

[DC, $4.99]

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