quote: (post)

Originally posted by Endless Mike
Flash is the only being who can travel to other universes at will now?

quote:

After joking with the room about hangovers from partying on Saturday night, Morrison revealed his spotlight would function as a Q&A where he'd answer absolutely any question the audience posed. This statement was immediately put to the test when the first audience member to the floor's microphone asked Morrison to describe what the fifth dimension -- a dimension Morrison has claimed to have experienced -- looks like.

"It's the start of the day!" Morrison said as the audience laughed. However, his teasing demeanor gave way to seriousness as he began to describe his encounter in detail.

"If you can imagine infinite blue in every direction, this really good, azure blue and through it were kind of red lines and the red lines were so close it looked like frameworks and it could appear or disappear and it seemed the things that lived there, these blob things, [that] would plug into these systems of moving grids and take information from it and put information into it," Morrison said, adding it was hard to describe as humans do not posses a fourth dimensional language.

"It could be the interior of a cell as much as it could be the fifth dimension -- but it felt like a place and it felt better and more real than this as I'm sitting, with much more high-definition, better colors, more emotional content. This," Morrison continued, gesturing around to indicate real life, "feels flat in comparison."

Adding that in the dimension he saw our universe, which looked like a "bowl of sphincters," Morrison said he was told by a being the dimension was how universes were built and the planet Earth was an incubator for the beings' children. The timeless nature of the dimension also made him realize the past still exists independent of human ability perceive -- much like how comic book characters move forward in their stories, but the panels and grids still exist on the page.

"So if you're getting any of this shit," Morrison added, suddenly very self-conscious as the audience laughed. Despite trying various psychedelic drugs in the '90s to recreate the experience, which he had while sober, the writer admitted "none of them have ever taken me anyplace close to that -- really I have no explanation for it," Morrison said.

quote:

"In a world where everything is protected -- people live in houses with locked doors, they put their valuables in safes, they keep their information safe behind passwords and antiviral controls -- we allow pretty much anything into our heads. Particularly since the Internet age has really got its teeth in and we're starting to see some of the effects it's having on people.

I think, to some extent, that's a glut of information and a tide of information that's almost too much for people to take. It has resulted in a kind of sickness in people, exhaustion or resignation. So, ultimately Multiversity is about that, because I like to write stories about stuff that I'm seeing in the world around me, or the stuff I'm feeling. It's about, are you sure you should be letting all this stuff into your head? How do you honestly feel about all the porn and all the things you see, all the beheadings? What's it doing in there?

The Gentry kind of represent all those things that we just accept. To me, the result I'm actually seeing is a kind of soul weariness, a cynicism, a sickness that permeates culture. I think we're all fed up with ourselves and we're just waiting to be destroyed by the other."

----------------------

"At the same time, I'm trying to talk about real things. That's where the symbolic content comes in, where the Gentry represent all these bad influences, but really each one of the Gentry is kind of a villain archetype taken to the limit. Intellectron is the mastermind taken to the limit. Dame Merciless is the femme fatale taken to the demonic limit. Demogorgunn is the zombie horde taken to the limit, and so on through the rest of them. Lord Broken is the madhouse, Arkham Asylum taken it to the limit. Each of them represents a fairly understandable villain type once you think about it.

So the symbolism becomes, well what do they represent in the real world? For me, they represent forces of nihilism and anti-human hatred, ignorance and greed and stupidity that I see every day. Those aspects of the story, how do you deal with those? How do you communicate those? What happens when there are too many of them in your head and you're starting to feel sick with it? That's the symbolic element in the comic, but at the same time I still have to show what happens with Red Racer's affair with Flashlight [laughs]. I still have to show what happens to President Superman at the end and make sure everyone gets returned to their homes and all the crises are brought to an end satisfactorily."

----------------------

"The Gentry was one of those names and it just stuck with me when I was thinking about beings from beyond, and we used to call them The Gentry. Then I thought of them as being bad things from beyond. From that, they started to grow, and then as you said, this idea of gentrification. When I'm talking to you about the kind of ideas we let into our heads, and taken as a thesis of, what if we let in so many shitty, shoddy ideas that we have completely ruined the neighborhood in there? We've dismantled, we've wrecked our inner houses and we've destroyed our inner palaces, and we've placed crackhouses in there, imaginatively.

I don't necessarily believe that this is all true. I thought it would make an interesting idea for a story, so the Gentry then are these bad ideas that come in you when you've messed up your head [laughs], so they come in and start rebuilding because you've now made it comfortable for them to recreate and build in their own image. So that, again, that's one of the big things it's about, this notion of gentrification coming into places and places that have been seemingly broken down and left to ruin and then rebuilding for them the benefit of your own kind."

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Digi
F*CK



This is my struggle with Morrison. His ideas have such depth and beauty to them, but they need a treatise from a superfan to decipher. Final Crisis and the Batman stuff leading up to it was another example. Intelligent, thoughtful readers had no clue what was going on, and if you missed the interview with his big explanation, you just thought it was high-minded pablum.

quote: (post)

Originally posted by blair85
This threat is gold. Thanks.

But. Is there no DKR universe anymore? It used to be Earth-31, I think. But 31 is now some "post apocalyptic drowned world."

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Don Draper
yeah, excellent stuff galan! Really helped me decipher multiversity!

question though: what exactly is the overvoid?

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Galan007
Barry Allen references Hypertime:
http://i.imgur.com/1lteztc.jpg
-Flash #22 (2017)

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Galan007
Barry Allen references Hypertime:
http://i.imgur.com/1lteztc.jpg
-Flash #22 (2017)