DC’s new all-story series calling the new universe they call the Omniverse, which launched in Dark Nights in January: Death Metal # 7, and readers will take a closer look at Infinite Frontier # 0 in 2 minutes. But a week earlier on Tuesday, February 23, it is already in expansion mode with a new corner of the DCU in the Omniverse called the Linearverse.
What is the linear? We explain the background to this and get some remarks from Dan Jurgens, one of the co-authors of the story in which it debuts, Generations: Forged # 1.
But for a more straightforward explanation of the Linear verses, you have come to the right place.
DC readers might want to check it out now if you plan on reading Generations: Forged # 1 and want to wait.
[That’s a spoiler warning, FYI.]
What is the DC Linear? First, you need to understand what the DC Omniverse is.
Because DC Comics history began in 1938 with the debut of Superman in Action Comics # 1, the official canonical history of DC Universe – which comic book readers call continuity – has been officially rewritten over and over to explain how superheroes like Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman who has published adventures that are dated to real events like World War II can still be active in new adventures that take place in the here and now.
This has led to a series of retcons (retrospective continuity) and reloads (with a new version from scratch) that try to explain how a character like Batman in 2021 could still be somewhere between 30 and 40 years old, although chronologically not less than more than 100 if you assume he was in his twenties during his 1939 debut.
This led to the creation of the Multiverse concept in the 60’s, specifically in 1961 ‘The Flash of Two Worlds’, which explains how two versions of the Speedster character the Flash – one created in 1940 (Jay Garrick) and one created in 1956 (Barry Allen) may coexist.
The popularity of comic book arcs for superheroes declined in the post-World War II era and characters such as the Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman disappeared while Superman and Batman endured.
A superhero revival in the ’60s caused DC to bring back the Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman and others, but in new, updated versions not related to the previous one.
But ‘The Flash of Two Worlds’ established the premise that the previous versions of the characters existed on a second Earth, Earth-Two.
Earth-Two eventually became home to other versions of classic characters who grew older and whose lives moved beyond their main characters, such as a gray-patterned Superman who got married decades before in the main DC series was with Lois Lane, and a much more mature Robin, who by the 60s was still in his mid-teens 40 years after his debut in the major Batman titles.
Years of stories that took place in different eras and the expansion of Multiverse to include more Earth, including worlds DC acquired from other comic book publishers, such as Fawcett’s Captain Marvel (who you know as Shazam), led to the first attempt of DC to put all their stories together one single, coherent timeline.
In 1985’s iconic and very meta-crisis on Infinite Earth (recently loosely adapted for a DC superhero CW crossover), the Multiverse tried to do away with the seriousness of trying to turn 50 years of stories into a ten-year timeline at the time. converted, led to DC having to publish recurring interview stories (mostly with the word ‘Crisis’ in the title) to try to correct the logical contradictions that Crisis had instituted, but to no avail.
In 2011, DC tried more definitively with the full recharge ‘The New 52’, which again tried to streamline DC history on a manageable timeline. But again, the weight of its full history and the fact that many of the editors and writers respected much of the history that was done away with, led to the Multiverse concept slowly making a comeback during the 10s.
DC’s new approach is apparently the folly of defeating the passing of time, and is trying to make everything meaningful and simply acknowledging that it all happened. All timelines and multiverses and alternative realities and futures exist in an Omniverse.
Although the current iterations of the classic DC heroes like Batman and Superman exist an approximate real / present time, they are also meta-aware of the existence of the Omniverse and are aware that their own lives, memories and history are part of of an intricate tapestry and patchwork of time and reality.
And because it’s still so new, we do not yet know how many DCs will try to explain how it fits together narratively, or whether they will try at all.
This brings us to the latest ripple (and thank you for carrying us along), the Linear verses.
A separate reality in the brand new Omniverse, this way of looking at the history of DC follows a much simpler approach that DC has never seriously tried … until now.
In the Linearverse, characters simply live longer than people who do not live in the Linearverse, and this applies to aliens from other worlds like Superman, mythological characters like Wonder Woman and normal people like Batman.
The same Bruce Wayne whose parents were murdered in Crime Alley in the late 20s or early 30s and first took to the streets of Gotham City in 1939 is the same man who is still fighting crime in 2021.
Technology has advanced, fashion has changed, world events such as wars and presidential terms have usually taken place in real time, but the characters have only become a few years old and lived through it and experienced and remembered everything.
Like DC’s earlier attempts to make history linear, this is not a perfect solution. The aforementioned Barry Allen from 1956 (who is the current Flash) took the name for the first time as a tribute to Jay Garrick from the 40s, who in Allen’s world was a cartoon character and not a real person.
In the Linear verses, Barry Allen should have known that Jay Garrick really existed when he named the name Flash, because Jay Garrick obviously had adventures with the same Superman that Barry did.
And events like the original Crisis on Infinite Earths would not make sense at all in a reality where there is no Multiverse.
As Jurgens explains to Newsarama, the Linearverse is his own unique playground for now. DC’s regular ongoing series starring Superman, Batman, the Justice League, Green Lantern and more will continue to exist in the larger Omniverse, where time theoretically passes normally for the characters, though not at all for readers.
The Linear verse seems to exist as a story option, to tell specific stories that require or benefit from the premises (for example) that the current very serious Batman actually had and remember his awake, child-friendly science fiction-inspired adventures from the 50s , or that Superman and Batman have been friends for almost 80 years.
As of now, DC has not yet announced plans for more stories set to take place in the Linearverse, but it’s a new club in the bag for writers with a story to tell.
Some of the stories we mention are on Newsarama’s list of the best DC stories of all time.