How does The Flash fit into Warner Bros.’ DC continuity? It doesn’t

The FlashThe DC multiverse reboot may have failed, but this movie has one positive thing to say about it. Of all the multiverse movies out there — the Spider-Verse, The World at One Time, Avengers: Endgame, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness — there’s only one that’s using the best version of the multiverse ever invented by comics.

And that’s no faint praise. Since over 60 years, superheroes have been linked to parallel Earths. That’s 60 years of innumerable writers, editors, and artists exploring every narrative nook and cranny of that combination, with a correspondingly huge number of contradicting explanations of how it all works.

Is it possible to time-travel and change the future? What’s the difference between a parallel universe and an alternate timeline? What the hell even is a “pocket dimension”? When comics sit down and try to hash out the rules, it’s almost always prescriptive. But The Flash’s version of the multiverse, ripped from the pages of some of the nerdiest comics ever made, is Description.

The book takes a more realistic approach to superhero multiverses, rather than dictating how they should function in the perfect setting. It is a practical solution that fits around your needs.

And it’s called Hypertime.

Wait, don’t leave, I promise Hypertime is cool

Warner Bros.

If you’ve read this far, you probably have an idea of how the Superhero Multiverse works. The multiverse is an assortment of worlds all slightly different and not interacting. The protagonists in stories interact with the multiverse almost constantly.

The past has changed the worlds of some people (see: LokiDisney Plus is available. Spider-Verse is a good example of a world that’s just different. But forget about teasing out the difference between “parallel earth” and “alternate timeline” — in superhero cosmology, they’re essentially interchangeable. The “what if?” question itself includes the concept of linear time, and changes to the past having an effect on the present. “What if this one thing was different? What would have happened next?”

[Ed. note: The rest of this piece contains some minor spoilers for The Flash.]

You can also read: The Flash, the notion of cause and effect gets thrown right out the window when Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne throws a bunch of cooked spaghetti on a table. He does this to explain how a relatively isolated change — The Flash’s mother was never murdered — could have created a timeline in which Batman was a completely different person.

Bruce says timelines split at moments when things could have went one way. Like floppy spaghetti strings, however, they are also able to bend towards each other. The Flash changed his timeline by moving it around, until he touched different spaghetti strands. Superman didn’t make it to Earth and Eric Stoltz was Marty McFly.

And that’s Hypertime, baby!

Hypertime is a term that describes the speed of a computer.

Image: Mark Waid, Mike Zeck/DC Comics

Mark Waid, Grant Morrison and other comics artists are credited with the concept of Hypertime. It is meant to explain the contradictory stories of DC Universe.

Time travel is often portrayed as a tree with endless branches. A branch would represent each possible alternative outcome. Hypertime imagines time as an infinitely branching river. Rivers can also flow. The Back to themselves.

One fork in a Hypertime River could be a river that the supervillain Catman ended up dying inside the hyperintelligent stomach of a gorilla. Another river would have the gorilla being a bad dream or metaphor. It is true that the former Hypertime river happened in DC Comics. When Gail Simone used Catman for her debut, you might say that rivers flowed together. Secret SixMiniseries is a good way to watch.

The death of an insignificant villain can be compared to a small stream. Parallel Earths have their own histories, which are like rivers with many tributaries that feed back as events and characters are remembered and forgotten. Priorities are set and then re-prioritized. Do we really need an explanation for why Cyclops’ eye beams are setting things on fire in this story, when we all You can learn more about this by clicking here. that canonically they’re not incendiary? Can we just say we’re getting a little flow from the stream where Cyclops’ eyes shoot lasers instead of “beams of pure force”?

“But!” you cry. “If the details of the setting can change without explanation, then the reader will become confused or lose interest because events don’t seem to stick or ‘matter.’”

And I’ll look down and whisper, “No. They won’t. Because you just described the experience of reading superhero comics.”

Image: Mark Waid, Mike Zeck/DC Comics

It’s the essence of comic book continuity. Before the advent of Marvel Unlimited, and the market for collectible editions that followed, it was impossible to keep up with the story. This is what I tell people who are worried they don’t know enough comic book continuity: Don’t worryAbout it.

Batman sometimes has five Robins or three Batgirls. He almost got married with Catwoman. Batman only had one Batgirl in the past, but he has always had at least two Robins. He almost married The Phantasm. Batman can be an older man that comes out of his retirement to have one Robin. This Robin is usually a female. Sometimes Batman mentors Terry to be the new Batman. Batman can be a Lego character. And I think it’s pretty clear that we’re cool with all of that!

Even if we’re just talking about the main DC Comics universe, Batman has been at least three different Batmans with three slightly different histories. And before Marvel Comics fans get in here and tell me that Marvel doesn’t do this because Marvel doesn’t have reboots, Marvel’s lack of reboots arguably makes Hypertime an even better explanation for its continuity than DC’s.

Technically, it may be true that Magneto is today the same Magneto from the past who had to grow back up after being regressed to a child. The Punisher may have served in Vietnam. Technically, it may be true that Captain Marvel was impregnated by a cosmic freak, who then had him grow up within a day.

But you won’t find a single Captain Marvel comic talking about that these days, because it was a terrible story that everyone desperately wants to pretend did not happen. Hypertime is the perfect version of the multiverse because it’s not describing linear continuity at all. It’s describing how superhero universes actually operate.

Image: Mark Waid, Mike Zeck/DC Comics

Deep down, underneath all the promises, comic book continuity is forged by creative people choosing to use the bits they like and ignore the bits they don’t like. The fundamental forces of cause and effect in comic book universes aren’t subatomic; they’re just creative decisions. Which is why Hypertime is particularly perfect for a superhero “universe” so loosely connected as to have almost no connections at all — like the movies in Warner Bros.’ DC Films stable.

Can Jason Momoa’s Aquaman hang out with the Batman played by Ben Affleck? Michael Keaton, what about him? George Clooney Robert Pattinson? Who will they choose to be the star of their film? Batman & Robin? What if the tale is really good? It may well be that the story is what makes it so powerful. The FlashHypertime is introduced just before Warner Bros. changes the direction of things. It doesn’t matter how the studio’s new multiverse works — whether it has parallel earths, or alternate timelines, or Elseworlds.

Hypertime — and therefore, The Flash — encompasses them all.