From what we see in the issue, the Ancestor Box seems only to be the origin of the hyper-time creature following Bruce through "The Return of Bruce Wayne", a creature who will eventually become Dr. Hurt.
The actual time travel/synethetic lives/altering history 'around' Bruce seems to be attributed to "The Omega Sanction", just as it was in Mr. Miracle.
Cooly, this puts Neil Gaiman's "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader" into continuity and context.
Anyway, it's left ambiguous, and I'm mostly indifferent, but that's what I got out of it, especially with the Ancestor Box's name (specifically that it takes over the form of Batman's ancestor, Thomas Wayne, and turns him into Batman's greatest enemy, Dr. Hurt).
He didn't actually do much with it, he mostly just confirmed what Kirby and Kupperberg did in Superpowers. It wasn't doing anything that a cosmic cube couldn't do.
It was, weirdly, Tom Peyer and Geoff Johns who really elevated to something more. Especially Johns, who had Extant destroy and remake universes in his own image, with his own physical laws.
Before the Rock of Ages arc the Worlogog was written as little more than a New God trinket that allowed for time manipulation. Morrison is the one who introduced the concept that the 'gog is a complete map of time/space from big bang to omega point, and allows it's user to manipulate every facet of reality (a concept which paved the way for Extant's rampage with it.)
Before Rock of Ages, the Worlogog had only ever appeared in the Kirby/Kupperberg Super Powers series that introduced it, and there it was introduced as a 'physical manifestation of time and space itself! The worlogog contains the power to accelerate or suspend time AND space if you are its master!"
Morrison's description is almost identical to that given at its inception, and he didn't actually have the thing do anything more impressive, either. Again, Peyer and Johns gave it far more credit.
That's not really what happened, though, in Rock of Ages. While the exact mechanism was never elucidated upon, the implication was that destruction of the Worlogog (by Superman, stopped by J'onn ultimately) would have led to Darkseid being free to take over the universe. Now given what we know now, it appears that the Worlogog was some DEFENSE that the universe had against Darkseid's incursion into 'lower' space.
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Aug 26th, 2010 01:08 AM
