The Multiversity

I have a general intolerance to multiverse stories. DC treats the concept like a reset button it can hit whenever the line needs a jolt, and I thought we'd buried it for good after they detonated the entire multiverse years back, right before dragging it back from the grave like clockwork.

Issue one of Multiversity does nothing to ease that suspicion. Plots knot themselves up for no clear reason, characters show up with punchlines attached and no history behind them, and the whole thing reads like classic Morrison with the guardrails removed. Usually that's a compliment but here it isn't.

The tie-ins almost change my mind. Pax Americana opens with real intrigue, a president assassinated by Peacemaker, before settling into a structure lifted directly from Watchmen. And that's the crack this whole event falls through. Morrison is trying to hard. Every issue reaches for something clever and layered, and most of them land disjointed instead. The book keeps gesturing at big ideas, comics as literal portals, the reader written in as a character, and none of it works.

Structurally it refuses to sit still. The main story keeps getting interrupted by Pax Americana's Watchmen cosplay (genuinely the strongest material here) before swerving hard into Thunderworld Adventures, a total tonal left turn. Morrison writes like the Vince Russo of comics: capable of some of the most dissectable, layered plotting in the medium, and completely incapable of reining himself in when nobody's holding the leash. Brilliant instincts, zero discipline, addicted to the obscure for its own sake.

From there we land in a timeline where Nazis found a Kryptonian baby instead of the Kents. Sivana's hopping across realities chasing an agenda that never fully resolves into anything legible. Overman fighting for fascism instead of truth and justice, flanked by a corrupted German Trinity. It's an unsettling image, the kind of high concept that argues an icon isn't defined by its powers but by whoever's does the rearing. Pitting him against a walking, talking Uncle Sam undercuts some of that with pure camp, but the underlying idea has teeth.

Then Ultra shows up and buries the whole thing. The event wants to read as high-concept meta commentary and mostly plays like an art project in jr college.

The finish collapses completely. A cosmic Rubik's Cube, a flat, forgettable brawl, and the one moment with real emotional stakes, Captain Carrot losing his head, gets defused two pages later when he turns out fine. In a multiverse where every version of every character exists somewhere, death stops meaning anything.

The team finally reaches The Gentry, the architects of the entire crisis, and instead of a confrontation, everyone just trades threats and walks away. They form Justice Incarnate to keep watch over the multiverse going forward, and the story simply ends, less an epic, more a shrug.

This might be the least enjoyable comic I've read in years. I don't understand the acclaim this event gets. Strip away the art and I'm left disliking almost everything on the page. Lazy storytelling, antagonists with no real weight behind them, and one of the flattest endings I can remember. Maybe I'm missing something. It's Morrison, so that's always on the table. But I love his work more often than not, and this one just didn't work for me.