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Answering the Objections

by Cecil Adkins

"The problem with the Linear Men is that they're too linear. They're vested in enforcing an inflexible view of reality... They think orderly, catalogued continuity is preferable to a kingdom of wonder."
                                                                 -- Rip Hunter, Kingdom # 2

The following are the most frequently raised objections to Hypertime...

I have read Kingdom Come, and you, Kingdom, are NO Kingdom Come!

One of the first backlashes to come up about the Kingdom Event series (which introduced Hypertime) was that it didn't seem to be much of a sequel to Kingdom Come, the Elseworlds mini-series concerning a super-human's place among humanity, a series which has since taken on an almost mythic quality.

My response? There's a reason for this. Kingdom ISN'T a sequel! My reasoning behind this comes from two things:

1. Comments made by Alex Ross, artist and co-creator of KC (I have taken care to gloss over Mr. Ross's colorful language here): "F*ck The Kingdom. I f*cking hate it. Think about this. He's doing stories that actually sequel Kingdom Come to the point where he's putting characters back in costume. Doesn't that go against the entire theme of that series, which stated that these characters were going to stop having that separation between man and superman? So that would mean that they wouldn't have guys running around with capes on, so Mark is basically overlooking the entire f*cking point, okay?" (Tripwire Special B -- Earth X) Mr. Ross's (insert sarcasm here) highly mature tone aside, this illustrates the fact that Kingdom is NOT a sequel. The differences are blatantly obvious, and Mark Waid, despite what some people seem determined to believe, is not an idiot. The POINT which Alex Ross (and so many others) has missed is that The Kingdom takes place in a different timeline (i.e., Hypertimeline) from KC. Perhaps in Kingdom's timeline, things went a bit differently from what happened at the end of KC. Several characters who died in Kingdom Come were shown to still be alive in The Kingdom. This, to me, would seem to indicate that there are different timelines at work here, and thus Kingdom would not be a true sequel.
2. Labels. Kingdom Come is an elseworlds. The Kingdom isn't. If the latter were meant to be a true sequel to the former, it would've had an Elseworlds label slapped on it, too (like the excellent Thrillkiller Elseworlds stories).

Yay!! The Multiverse has returned!!!

All across the country, people in comic shops everywhere began talking about the return of the pre-Crisis Multiverse and the undoing of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Internet message boards, chat rooms, and Usenet newsgroups began proclaiming the equation "Hypertime=The Multiverse."

My response? Uh, no it doesn't. Nothing about Hypertime changes what happened in Crisis. The Crisis STILL happened, the Multiverse was still destroyed, and we still have a SINGLE UNIVERSE existing in DC's mainstream timeline. The only thing is that now, thanks to Hypertime, we have access to timelines in which the Crisis DIDN'T happen, and so we have access to OTHER Multiverses. It's NOT the same Multiverse that we used to read about in pre-Crisis DC Comics, but many of these other Multiverses would be similar enough for most people's tastes. This topic is covered better elsewhere on this site, so I'll leave it at that.

If "it's ALL true," then why care about any of it?

Hypertime proclaims that if something happened in a DC story anytime in DC's vast history, then there is a timeline out there in which that event is considered "in-continuity." This would include all pre-Crisis stories, all Elseworlds, and all Imaginary Tales. Many fans have a problem with this, in that they think it reduces the impact of the mainstream DCU by admitting that other timelines are just as real as "the one, true timeline."

My response? Well, aren't other timelines just as real as "the one, true timeline"? It's all fiction, isn't it? Just because we now have to believe that there's a timeline out there in which the Justice League existed in the Old West (i.e., The Justice Riders), that doesn't take away from the "here and now" aspect of the mainstream DCU. The mainstream DCU will continue to be the mainstream DCU, because that's what we read about every month in the pages of the "main" DC books. I don't understand this objection, to be honest. Saying "It's all true" merely means, "There's alternate timelines that differ from the mainstream timeline," which fans have never had a problem with before. Fortunately, the furor over this particular aspect of Hypertime seems to be dying down, unlike the next two objections.

The last two major objections concern the mixing-of-timelines aspect of Hypertime...

Hypertime gives writers and editors a chance to be lazy!

Since Hypertime allows mistakes to be easily explained away ("You mean Superman's not a short, fat guy with a glandular problem? Better invoke. . . Hypertime!"), many readers fear it WILL be used to explain away trivial mistakes, or, even worse, give writers and editors a license to not research their characters properly.

My response? Let's take a look at a couple of problems with this logic.

1. Trivial mistakes happen anyway. Hypertime is merely an in-story construct for explaining something that's bound to happen when you have so many different creators playing around in a shared universe. To those who care about this sort of thing, Hypertime will be there to help them out. To those who don't, Hypertime (at least, in this respect), should be fairly unobtrusive, working "behind the scenes," so to speak, and shouldn't get in the way of the story. (I have trouble believing that any writer or editor would haul out Hypertime into an actual story to explain why someone's eyes were colored incorrectly, or why someone was wearing a ring on the wrong finger...)
2. The benefit of the doubt. The people complaining so strongly about this aspect of Hypertime are supposedly those who love DC Comics so much they don't want their DCU messed up. Can we agree that DC wouldn't have become the favorite company of so many people without the very creators who some are now fearing will suddenly become lazy? Until we actually see a writer using Hypertime because he didn't feel like tracking down a back issue and screwed up a character, we shouldn't assume Hypertime's going to be used in this manner. I believe DC's creators will still want to do their best job, with or without Hypertime. Only time will tell.

It's the end of the DCU as we know it!

Perhaps more dangerous than using Hypertime to fix trivial mistaks is that it causes "fluxes. . . carryovers from one kingdom to another..." (Kingdom 2.36.2-3) that could conceivably create massive continuity upheaval in the DC Universe. If this is followed to its inevitable conclusion, we won't be able to keep up with DC continuity at all.

My response? Is DC continuity that easy to keep up with in the first place? Even before Crisis, continuity "fluxes" happened, and since Crisis, it's been even worse (What's Hawkman been up to lately? Was Wonder Woman in the JSA or not? Who is. . . Donna Troy, and do we really care now?). At the very least, Hypertime explains WHY these existing continuity fluxes (i.e., screw-ups) have happened. All of this aside, I don't think Hypertime will lead to any more confusion that what's already present, and I say this for one very important reason:

DC COMICS NEEDS OUR MONEY

IF Hypertime leads to the kind of confusion where continuity changes between panels like some people fear (a bit of an exaggeration, but not too much), DC will lose readers faster than Rob Liefeld. DC's first priority is keeping their properties marketable, and they can't do that by confusing readers so much they have no choice but to drop titles.

The Final Word (for now...)

Of course, the point is, there can be NO final word for awhile, anyway. The best course of action is to wait and see what Hypertime is going to do. Most Hypertime detractors have already proclaimed Hypertime to be one of the worst concepts ever introduced in comics simply because of what it COULD do. Let's wait and see if Hypertime really turns creators into lazy bums, or if it destroys the very fabric of DC cosmology/continuity, okay? Then, if it does, I'll join everyone in the complaining.