Originally published February 12, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1317
Lots of fans are writing me (mostly via e-mail) asking what I think of hypertime.
Now for most of America, there are various definitions of hypertime. April 15 represents hypertime to many, while for others it’s the last couple of shopping days before Christmas. But for comics fans, hypertime is the concept introduced in the second issue of the excellent Kingdom, Mark Waid’s follow-up to the Kingdom Come limited series.
At the climax of Kingdom, the heroes of the DC universe find themselves confronted with “the greatest secret in creation.” To me, that would have to be the mystery of Pauly Shore’s continued popularity, but instead we learn of the existence of Hypertime: the revelation that “the universe… is actually a part of an unpredictable multiverse, an infinite realm of parallel worlds where reality as you know it has taken different twists and turns. Where fallen allies live on… where tragedies can be turned to triumph.”
This, of course, will come as no shock to anyone who was clued in to the same thing by sources as diverse as Larry Niven’s “All the Myriad Ways” or even the Watcher back in the first issue of What If?
For that matter, I even put forward my own theory several years back in this very column. What I said was:
I think that time is constantly in flux. That there are fault lines in the time stream, and they’re constantly shifting in thousands of little subtle ways, just like tremors rearranging California real estate. Or think of time as telephone lines stretching from the present backwards to infinity (kind of like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and you get line noise that screws the connection up. It’s part of your day to day existence, and you accept it and move on.
Proof? That’s easy.
Ever walk into a room to get something and suddenly you can’t remember what it was you wanted?
Ever put something down, go back and look for it, and it’s not there?
Ever run into someone who greets you like you’re old friends, and you are absolutely clueless as to their identity?
We chalk it off to lapsed memory, but it’s not. It’s Time Burps. You can’t remember what you wanted in the room because time just Burped and suddenly the reason why you went in there ceased to exist. The item you put down has vanished because time Burped and you never put it there in the first place. Your newfound old friend, in his or her past, was a close buddy… but in your own past, you never met.
The thing is, I floated the notion and then did nothing with it. Mark brilliantly (and independently, I’m sure… as if he’s going to remember a passing concept that was part of a BID Time Cop review) expanded upon that same notion.
“Off the central timeline,” we’re told, “events of importance often cause divergent tributaries’ to branch off the main timestream… On occasion, those tributaries return–sometimes feeding back into the central timeline, other times overlapping it briefly before charting an entirely new course. An old friend is suddenly recalled after years of being forgotten. A scrap of history becomes misremembered, even reinvented in the common wisdom.” Mark calls them “hyper-time fluxes,” which is certainly infinitely classier than “time burps.”
What do I think? I think it’s the best scab yet.
The continuity of long-time comic companies invariably creates wounds. The passage of time renders origins and events problematic if you have any intention of trying to keep the characters current. And whenever one of these wounds becomes too big, too gaping, the companies try to do something about it. Try to heal it, scab it over. Sometimes topical references are just thrown out wholesale, origins rebooted with no other explanation than, “We’re the publisher. We say so.”
Other times, the scab is more creative; but what makes a truly creative scab is its simplicity, its elegance. The first great scab was the revelation that the Golden Age DC heroes were alive and well and living on Earth-2. In one shot it solved the problems of fans who were wondering where Jay Garrick, Alan Scott and the rest of the bunch got off to.
The problem is, most comic book creators are kids at heart. And you must remember perfectly well the eternal link between kids and their scabs. You just can’t… resist… picking at it. It sits there, big and inviting, hard and crusty, like nothing else on your skin, and no matter how much you know you shouldn’t, you just keep going back to it and fiddling with it.
Which is why, a mere decade or so after its inception, Earth-1, Earth-2 and its offspring had swollen to such unwieldy proportions that an entire limited series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, was required to get rid of it. But even Crisis couldn’t quite be left alone as people tried to sort out the fallout, and thirty seven incarnations of Hawkman later, we had Zero Hour, and even that’s kind of confusing as fans argue and dispute what counts and what doesn’t count, what’s part of continuity and what’s moot.
Mark Waid, in laying out Hypertime, even seems to fire a broadside at continuity mavens, recasting them as the Linear Men and saying, “They’re too linear. They’re vested in enforcing an inflexible view of reality…They think orderly cataloged continuity is preferable to a kingdom of wonder.” Basically he’s saying, Let the creators alone to tell the best stories we can, and stop obsessing about how it ties in with books published years ago.
Hypertime is the comic book equivalent of the moment in Fiddler on the Roof, where two men are in dispute and Tevye the dairyman allows that both of them are correct in their opposing views.
“He’s right… and he’s right? They can’t both be right,” a villager chides Tevye.
Tevye hesitates only a moment and then says, “You know, you are also right.”
Although Hypertime takes its potshot at fannish obsession with continuity, it is in fact the continuity buff’s dream. It’s the all-purpose explanation. Two stories in conflict? Hypertime. Wait, this character was killed off fifteen years ago… why’s he alive? Hypertime. Subspace is suddenly being called the Negative Zone? Hypertime. Botched continuity has been transformed into Pee Wee Herman catapulting headlong off his bicycle, dusting himself off, and announcing, “I meant to do that.”
It’s great. I love it.
Just one problem.
The moment I read, “The possibilities of hypertime are infinite… and humble the power of any man,” I started getting a queasy feeling. Oh lord. Here we go. Scab picking. Hypertime is the most elegant explanation for snarled continuity ever proffered. Great. Perfect. Now leave it the hëll alone! Don’t pick at it! Just tell stories, don’t worry about occasional continuity glitches, and never mention Hypertime again!
Not going to happen. New hypertime stories are already in the works. And for all I know, they’ll be nifty and imaginative and whiz-bang keeno… just like the first JLA/JSA crossovers were after the Earth-1/Earth-2 introduction in Flash.
But…
Pick. Pick. Pick. And ten years down the line…
Crisis on Infinite Hypertimes.
Pass the Bactine, please…
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)
• 
“And ten years down the line… Crisis on Infinite Hypertimes.”
Well, it was more like 12 years, and it was called Flashpoint, but you were pretty much right.
Actually, Superboy Prime punching reality happened before that, so they already had a continuity reshuffle before Flashpoint.
Infinite Crisis came first like Jason said. It made New Earth and only one universe for one year – on in universe year. Then at the end of “52” fifty two universes came into existence. Then came Final Crisis in which I have no idea what happened even though I read it. That was what made me stop reading DC comics.
And now it’s time for people like me to start picking at the Flashpoint scab…
Of course, in the end, the continuity mavens won.
Sometimes I feel like I’m one of the only ones left who still likes the idea of the old multiverse and all of the various combinations of meetings it created.
You’re not alone, Jerry. I liked them too. I just wish DC would formalize the multiverse and state, “Yes, they’re all out there, they still exist.” I know they avoid it because they don’t want to deal with the “bring it all back” backlash, and they’ve sort of alluded to the possibility, but I still wish they’d just go on the record and say it.
The one thing I did enjoy was the JSA being “elder statesmen” on the same Earth as the JLA, but again, that version fits into the multiverse, too.
Not to open a can of worms, but Marvel’s been pretty good at this by identifying the 616 universe and then differentiating it from the Ultimate universe, etc. Nobody seems to get confused. They’re also the best at passive retcons, where you just drop inconvenient facts, like Ben Grimm and Reed Richards serving in WWII. That’s the way I always felt DC should handle it — just stop talking about anachronisms or awkward/clumsy plot points. Don’t do a massive reboot every time you want to change Superman’s shorts.
I would like to see them split their line up in maybe 4 earths. 13 comics series every month for each earth so they can keep their 52 series. One can be the modern earth like they have now and you can have another where Wally, Donna, Ðìçk and Roy took over the mantle of their mentors, another with the JSA heroes and something more like the pre-new-52 era. They could have one Superman and one Batman title in each earth and then allocate the other titles in the rest. In one earth green arrow can have a solo title and in another he is part of a team book. People that couldn’t afford all 52 titles can pick their favorite earth and enjoy a smaller interconnected universe.
Nah, it would never work.
Jerry,
count me among those who still likes the idea of the Multiverse. Frankly, I never found the Multiverse confusing, and as much as I enjoy Crisis on Infinite Earths as a story, I’m not sure how “necessary” it was.
Still, it seemed to do a better job overall than the various Crises of the last decade to “patch” the “problem.” I’ve lost count of how many there were. 50? 100? A googolplex?
I wasn’t a regular reader of Justice League of America (according to my records, I only own 14 issues total), but three of those issue were the team-up with the JSA in #s 195-197 in 1981.
It was far from the first such team-up, of course, but it was the first one that I read. But I enjoyed reading those books and getting a sense of DC’s long history from them.
My first exposure to the Multiverse came in 1979 when I bought Adventure Comics #462, which featured the death of the Earth 2 Batman.
I also own Action Comics #484, where the Earth 2 Superman and Lois Lane marry, but I’m pretty sure I bought that after the Adventure Comics issue.
And in both cases, the reader was told, almost at the outset, that the tales took place in a different universe; that they didn’t involve “our” Batman or Superman.
I wasn’t reading much in the way of superhero books by the time Hypertime came into being. In fact, I think PAD’s original article was one of the few mentions of it I came across. I get the impression, which may be wrong, that Hypertime wasn’t mentioned all that often.
I’m still not reading much in the way of superhero books (just Astro City, now that it’s back), but I understand that some semblance of the Multiverse was restored in one of those infinity of Crises miniseries. I don’t know if the Multiverse still exists in “the new 52.”
Short of having characters in comics age like those in Gasoline Alley, publishers are going to have to hit the “reset” button from time to time. A Multiverse is probably the most convenient way to handle it. Every 10 years or so, retell the origins of your characters and establish that the adventures recounted in the previous decade took place in an alternate universe. Those stories “still happened.” Just elsewhere.
Rick
I maintain that Hypertime is the period between Snacktime and Naptime.