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Hello all.
Three years ago now, the DC Comics cosmology was divided on the basis of the inconsistency of certain writers with each other, though, as of last month, Vertigo comics have largely been reintegrated into the main cosmology, whereas John Marc DeMatteis' cosmology remains separate for the same reason all cosmologies were originally split–and later merged–into the main one: perceived inconsistencies or inaccuracies between them.
As will become clear, the ongoing separation of DeMatteis' cosmology from the main continuity, like that of Vertigo or Williamson's material, does not stand on strong ground for such a firm division as well.
Given this, I thought it would be fitting to conclusively overturn the DC cosmology split, and unify the cosmology completely by addressing the issues with DeMatteis’ cosmos as it relates to the main one.
Without further ado…
What follows is a clear consequence, God as being completely detached from reality and the DC multiverses “meta-narrative” so to speak, can take on the stories of many different tales, religions and myths, and have them all be true. This happens precisely because God is unknowable, and since reality is a story, any attempts at reality itself describing the unknowable, or giving it a fixed narrative will always come short at doing so.
This in-verse system also fits in with the Overvoid, as even Grant Morrison does not have a fixed origin story as to how creation (or the Flaw) came to be, he expresses in an interview that it was an analogy (although perhaps a literal one) of the white canvas of the comic spotting a mark on it, the mark being the DC multiverse itself. But also has explained on several occasions that creation came about as a result of non-duality (he Overvoid) bringing forward duality (the DC Multiverse), a consistent theme throughout Morrison's entire history, actually.
But besides, this non-duality motif is precisely what happens with DeMatteis’ the Smile (The Divine Presence) as well, as he emanates light and darkness which themselves fracture more into all dualities.
Thus, both the Smile and the Overvoid following the above schema here: are non-dual, undifferentiated and unknowable principles, which then emanate into dual being, which then brings about all of creation as a dichotomic play of opposing forces.
This then establishes a firm ground by which many different opposing views of God can be realised, to quote Zeus: “each merely reinterprets in their own fashion what actually happened so all are true”.
In essence, to come back to the issue with the Overvoid (through Morrison, at least) and the Divine Presence, both clearly the same concept, can be reinterpreted in many different ways (e.g. the Smile as the Brahman/the Trinity, or the Overvoid as a white canvas), both not the same story, but still the same unknowable force expressed through different knowable stories.
Which I think addresses the issue at heart: these are different stories based on the same idea.
But to immediately clear this up, what a writer knows or doesn't know about another writers characters and cosmological elements does not completely override any chance at aligning both visions roughly with each other. As that both are implicitly writing within the same narrative fold by dint of being (canon) DC Comics writers. And most certainly, what they don't know about future comics does not mean any two future works or their writers disagree on something; it means that DC Comics is a narrative, and it changes and evolves through time.
By that same metric, Siegel and Shuster's Superman work isn't connected to mainline DC because they have no idea who Imperiex is, for example. This obviously wouldn't track.
Nevertheless, I mentioned the similar theme of a dualistic cosmology shared between Morrison and DeMatteis above, which is prudent to this here because clearly, if DeMatteis doesn't know what the Overvoids name is, he knows what Morrison means when he refers to a non-duality (otherwise: God) from which everything in the DCU is made, which as we established above, can be called whatever name, really.
The conclusion then can be reached that both of these don't contradict each other, and this specific word of god does not invalidate any connections between Morrison and DeMatteis. Making this a moot point.
But beyond that intuition, DeMatteis’ entire framework is structured around the idea that several conflicting viewpoints on the cosmos do not exist separately from one another, but within the very same framework. Reminiscent of the critique above.
We see here for example, all individuals within the universe hold their own intersecting, yet separate “bubble” universe, since the universe is itself nothing more than the set of all beliefs of its inhabitants, as that the mind is the source of all of creation.
Many different conclusions can be reached here, for one example, history can be reimagined simply by agreeing to a different consensus, which is allowed by the fact that history is itself reducible to these subjective “subspaces.”
This comes through most vividly in Green Lantern: Willworld, where Hal realises his powers directly through comprehending the basic fabric of reality as two things: will and imagination, which are brought together by God, a oneness that precedes both. And since imagination is infinite, any act of imagining is realised immediately as parallel universes that “stand one beside the other.”
Hence, reality (from the quantum, all the way to God himself) as DeMatteis describes it is certainly not fixed in its structure; rather, it is radically malleable.
Importantly, one should also not view it as a crude multiverse of alternative universes: a recurring word that appears in DeMatteis’ works in relation to reality in its truest form is that it isn't “objective” reality, neither is it “subjective” but “omnijective” and so for that reason, is one reality which embraces all of the things it can be conceived as.
Something that exceeds even the mere freedom of imagining what is real, wherein all viewpoints are realised at the same time.
What is meant by this is obvious, reality is a play of mental “spirits” generating existence and history, and all feasible realities that could be imagined are intertwined to where they are one reality at the end, organised by God. And since there is no rigidity there, one mind could imagine reality as being X, while another mind can imagine it as Y, and the differences there don't make it so there is an inescapable wall that would divide these two, quite the opposite.
And so in relation to the ploy that partitioned DeMatteis' cosmology, we do not address this very fact. We do not address that his cosmology isn't strictly rigid, and can actually account for different viewpoints in the story that may arise later. Certainly in a reality where one or two continuity issues can be reconciled rather easily.
With that in mind, it's prudent to bring up the fact that this also falls in line perfectly with the main cosmology; matter of fact, DeMatteis is simply building on top of that very notion that had existed in DC for ages.
Let's map the two onto each other:
Examples of reality and imagination being one and the same in the main cosmology are plenty, for e.g. Alec Holland realises reality to be reducible to the mind, to the extent that if humans were to stop believing in the Gods, it will be the end of them.
Furthermore, Brainiac says that the conscious mind makes the world, and that phenomena as whole exists because of perception. Or Lex Luthor discerning that reality is reducible to thoughts in All-Star. Or Dream of the Endless saying that the job of dreams is to shape reality. In addition to that, we have a rather infamous Sandman issue: A Dream of Thousand Cats, in which a cat narrates a previous reality, where cats existed as the dominant species of the world, this is until humans became aware that dreams shape and make the world in its form, then proceed to dream themselves as the dominant species on Earth, and overnight, reality itself changes and makes them so, as if the cats simply never were dominant in the first place, and so on and so forth.
The fact is that we see on more than one occasion this fact being used specifically to alter history altogether, whether it's making the roles of humans more prominent in history, or quite literally creating and/or destroying God(s).
In further congruence with DeMatteis, the exhaustive nature of reality–that is, the extent to which imagination encompasses the whole of all possible realities–is also found in the DCU's sixfold dimensions, each perceiving the others as fiction, a theme central to Mr. Mxyzptlk character, whose battle with Bat-Mite nearly “undraws” the universe itself. But beyond that, the dimensions also have broad metaphysical roles: the fourth dimension is (capital T) Time, the fifth channels the energy for infinite possibilities, and the sixth contains all of Time simultaneously.
All of these comprise everything that was, is, or can be, all at once.
And thus, the play here is also highly malleable: reality is reducible to the mind, which in turn shapes and alters reality in every way, mapping quite neatly onto DeMatteis' framework:
Make no mistake, the core thesis here is a bit deeper than just “these cosmologies look similar”, as that this judges the specific metric by which we decide to divide these cosmologies, since when we do so, we completely forgo the fact that these cosmologies are sort-of made in such a way to “adapt” to changes and retcons.
This focus on the mind in DC as the central metric in which history itself is realised, a theme that as we established exists throughout DCs entire history, is also a pretty convenient in-verse way to tweak entire folds of the story to fit whatever modern writers are doing, something that both DeMatteis and the main cosmology agree on.
If two writers were to clash on some topic, the internal logic set in the cosmology allows both of these to exist by simply reimagining the cosmology to fit the new plot. There simply isn't an incentive there to think that this writer is operating in an entirely different framework; rather, it is the same framework, just that it's tweaked, or simply retconned.
We did also intentionally leave the idea espoused in the Convergence event (and later, Snyders works)–that the DC cosmology is already merged and accounts for all stories in its history–because we have decided it to be inconsequential, since we've also decided that the cosmology is too inconsistent to stay combined.
But beyond the fact that most cosmologies (save DeMatteis) are now combined anyways, or that even these issues with DeMatteis no longer hold, this is a system that we have decided to agree on, specifically against what the entire editorial of DC believes: Take for instance, Dan DiDio's description of the DCU as being one singular continuity that includes all of its rebrands, or describing the Convergence event as including “literally every DC story ever told”, or that it includes the entire DCU from “the dawn of time through The New 52”, and infinite other worlds.
Given that, there's always room for oddities in these cosmologies, just that none of that would immediately imply a complete irreconcilable nature between both.
Bearing in mind DeMatteis and the rant above, this post is done.
In addition to that, I have covered cases where DeMatteis agrees almost with one-to-one correspondence with the main cosmology on the malleability of reality and history in general, as that reality in both embraces all possible states it could be, and is not just one state/story that cannot be changed later. Amounting to an in-verse system where it's not impossible to assume changes in the larger DC story can happen and there wouldn't be an irreconcilable divide there.
Accordingly, both of these cosmologies make it so there isn't (and there can't be) a cosmology split between them, as that it's easier to assume whatever has been contradicted has simply been retconned, and this is rooted in the nature of the entire cosmology to begin with.
And as such, I believe the DeMatteis cosmology ought to be recombined into the main cosmology, ending the DC cosmology split that took place three years ago now.
Three years ago now, the DC Comics cosmology was divided on the basis of the inconsistency of certain writers with each other, though, as of last month, Vertigo comics have largely been reintegrated into the main cosmology, whereas John Marc DeMatteis' cosmology remains separate for the same reason all cosmologies were originally split–and later merged–into the main one: perceived inconsistencies or inaccuracies between them.
As will become clear, the ongoing separation of DeMatteis' cosmology from the main continuity, like that of Vertigo or Williamson's material, does not stand on strong ground for such a firm division as well.
Given this, I thought it would be fitting to conclusively overturn the DC cosmology split, and unify the cosmology completely by addressing the issues with DeMatteis’ cosmos as it relates to the main one.
Without further ado…
Reunification
Incompatibilities
There are not many–only two–both of them focus mainly on the role of the Divine Presence as he relates to the role of God / The Presence / The Overvoid / and other appellations.So far as creation origin stories in DC go, cosmogony in the DC multiverse has never really been centered around a fixed event with a singular story, take for example, The Spectre vol. 3 #58 (1997), wherein God assumes different manifestations and stories altogether, taking the form of different chief deities of various religions, and thus, taking their creation origin story with them, many of which contradict others. Likewise, in DeMatteis’ Doctor Fate vol. 2 #15 (1990), Wotan similarly alludes to messianic and prophetic figures of different religions in history that assist humanity in their spiritual journey to understanding the “ultimate power”, understood to be God. Further examples of this are genuinely plenty, but these express what I mean.
What follows is a clear consequence, God as being completely detached from reality and the DC multiverses “meta-narrative” so to speak, can take on the stories of many different tales, religions and myths, and have them all be true. This happens precisely because God is unknowable, and since reality is a story, any attempts at reality itself describing the unknowable, or giving it a fixed narrative will always come short at doing so.
This in-verse system also fits in with the Overvoid, as even Grant Morrison does not have a fixed origin story as to how creation (or the Flaw) came to be, he expresses in an interview that it was an analogy (although perhaps a literal one) of the white canvas of the comic spotting a mark on it, the mark being the DC multiverse itself. But also has explained on several occasions that creation came about as a result of non-duality (he Overvoid) bringing forward duality (the DC Multiverse), a consistent theme throughout Morrison's entire history, actually.
But besides, this non-duality motif is precisely what happens with DeMatteis’ the Smile (The Divine Presence) as well, as he emanates light and darkness which themselves fracture more into all dualities.
Thus, both the Smile and the Overvoid following the above schema here: are non-dual, undifferentiated and unknowable principles, which then emanate into dual being, which then brings about all of creation as a dichotomic play of opposing forces.
This then establishes a firm ground by which many different opposing views of God can be realised, to quote Zeus: “each merely reinterprets in their own fashion what actually happened so all are true”.
In essence, to come back to the issue with the Overvoid (through Morrison, at least) and the Divine Presence, both clearly the same concept, can be reinterpreted in many different ways (e.g. the Smile as the Brahman/the Trinity, or the Overvoid as a white canvas), both not the same story, but still the same unknowable force expressed through different knowable stories.
Which I think addresses the issue at heart: these are different stories based on the same idea.
This issue is weirdly formulated, almost as if it was just conjured up.
But to immediately clear this up, what a writer knows or doesn't know about another writers characters and cosmological elements does not completely override any chance at aligning both visions roughly with each other. As that both are implicitly writing within the same narrative fold by dint of being (canon) DC Comics writers. And most certainly, what they don't know about future comics does not mean any two future works or their writers disagree on something; it means that DC Comics is a narrative, and it changes and evolves through time.
By that same metric, Siegel and Shuster's Superman work isn't connected to mainline DC because they have no idea who Imperiex is, for example. This obviously wouldn't track.
Nevertheless, I mentioned the similar theme of a dualistic cosmology shared between Morrison and DeMatteis above, which is prudent to this here because clearly, if DeMatteis doesn't know what the Overvoids name is, he knows what Morrison means when he refers to a non-duality (otherwise: God) from which everything in the DCU is made, which as we established above, can be called whatever name, really.
The conclusion then can be reached that both of these don't contradict each other, and this specific word of god does not invalidate any connections between Morrison and DeMatteis. Making this a moot point.
DeMatteis’ Meta-cosmology
Endemic to DeMatteis’ cosmology is its, as it were, “all-subsuming nature”, which is itself an unavoidable truth when you factor in the fact that the Smile is itself Tier 0, so as per our tiering system, nothing really falls outside of its scope of influence. It'd be impossible to imagine a "separate DC” outside of his realm.But beyond that intuition, DeMatteis’ entire framework is structured around the idea that several conflicting viewpoints on the cosmos do not exist separately from one another, but within the very same framework. Reminiscent of the critique above.
We see here for example, all individuals within the universe hold their own intersecting, yet separate “bubble” universe, since the universe is itself nothing more than the set of all beliefs of its inhabitants, as that the mind is the source of all of creation.
Many different conclusions can be reached here, for one example, history can be reimagined simply by agreeing to a different consensus, which is allowed by the fact that history is itself reducible to these subjective “subspaces.”
This comes through most vividly in Green Lantern: Willworld, where Hal realises his powers directly through comprehending the basic fabric of reality as two things: will and imagination, which are brought together by God, a oneness that precedes both. And since imagination is infinite, any act of imagining is realised immediately as parallel universes that “stand one beside the other.”
Hence, reality (from the quantum, all the way to God himself) as DeMatteis describes it is certainly not fixed in its structure; rather, it is radically malleable.
Importantly, one should also not view it as a crude multiverse of alternative universes: a recurring word that appears in DeMatteis’ works in relation to reality in its truest form is that it isn't “objective” reality, neither is it “subjective” but “omnijective” and so for that reason, is one reality which embraces all of the things it can be conceived as.
Something that exceeds even the mere freedom of imagining what is real, wherein all viewpoints are realised at the same time.
What is meant by this is obvious, reality is a play of mental “spirits” generating existence and history, and all feasible realities that could be imagined are intertwined to where they are one reality at the end, organised by God. And since there is no rigidity there, one mind could imagine reality as being X, while another mind can imagine it as Y, and the differences there don't make it so there is an inescapable wall that would divide these two, quite the opposite.
And so in relation to the ploy that partitioned DeMatteis' cosmology, we do not address this very fact. We do not address that his cosmology isn't strictly rigid, and can actually account for different viewpoints in the story that may arise later. Certainly in a reality where one or two continuity issues can be reconciled rather easily.
With that in mind, it's prudent to bring up the fact that this also falls in line perfectly with the main cosmology; matter of fact, DeMatteis is simply building on top of that very notion that had existed in DC for ages.
Let's map the two onto each other:
Examples of reality and imagination being one and the same in the main cosmology are plenty, for e.g. Alec Holland realises reality to be reducible to the mind, to the extent that if humans were to stop believing in the Gods, it will be the end of them.
Furthermore, Brainiac says that the conscious mind makes the world, and that phenomena as whole exists because of perception. Or Lex Luthor discerning that reality is reducible to thoughts in All-Star. Or Dream of the Endless saying that the job of dreams is to shape reality. In addition to that, we have a rather infamous Sandman issue: A Dream of Thousand Cats, in which a cat narrates a previous reality, where cats existed as the dominant species of the world, this is until humans became aware that dreams shape and make the world in its form, then proceed to dream themselves as the dominant species on Earth, and overnight, reality itself changes and makes them so, as if the cats simply never were dominant in the first place, and so on and so forth.
The fact is that we see on more than one occasion this fact being used specifically to alter history altogether, whether it's making the roles of humans more prominent in history, or quite literally creating and/or destroying God(s).
In further congruence with DeMatteis, the exhaustive nature of reality–that is, the extent to which imagination encompasses the whole of all possible realities–is also found in the DCU's sixfold dimensions, each perceiving the others as fiction, a theme central to Mr. Mxyzptlk character, whose battle with Bat-Mite nearly “undraws” the universe itself. But beyond that, the dimensions also have broad metaphysical roles: the fourth dimension is (capital T) Time, the fifth channels the energy for infinite possibilities, and the sixth contains all of Time simultaneously.
All of these comprise everything that was, is, or can be, all at once.
And thus, the play here is also highly malleable: reality is reducible to the mind, which in turn shapes and alters reality in every way, mapping quite neatly onto DeMatteis' framework:
- God
- Main Cosmology: emanates the entire cosmology, acts as its arbiter and the very framework on which it exists.
- DeMatteis’ cosmology: Likewise
- Plurality of reality
- Main Cosmology: The universe and all of its phenomena are at their core reducible to the mind, which shapes and brings them to existence, which allows it to be flexible for more than one interpretation of history.
- DeMatteis’ Cosmology: The Universe is omnijective, includes even different perspectives of itself within bubble universes that coexist as one.
- Reality as a logical space
- Main Cosmology: Reality includes everything that was, is or can be.
- DeMatteis’ cosmology: All that can be imagined materialises in Willworld.
Make no mistake, the core thesis here is a bit deeper than just “these cosmologies look similar”, as that this judges the specific metric by which we decide to divide these cosmologies, since when we do so, we completely forgo the fact that these cosmologies are sort-of made in such a way to “adapt” to changes and retcons.
This focus on the mind in DC as the central metric in which history itself is realised, a theme that as we established exists throughout DCs entire history, is also a pretty convenient in-verse way to tweak entire folds of the story to fit whatever modern writers are doing, something that both DeMatteis and the main cosmology agree on.
If two writers were to clash on some topic, the internal logic set in the cosmology allows both of these to exist by simply reimagining the cosmology to fit the new plot. There simply isn't an incentive there to think that this writer is operating in an entirely different framework; rather, it is the same framework, just that it's tweaked, or simply retconned.
We did also intentionally leave the idea espoused in the Convergence event (and later, Snyders works)–that the DC cosmology is already merged and accounts for all stories in its history–because we have decided it to be inconsequential, since we've also decided that the cosmology is too inconsistent to stay combined.
But beyond the fact that most cosmologies (save DeMatteis) are now combined anyways, or that even these issues with DeMatteis no longer hold, this is a system that we have decided to agree on, specifically against what the entire editorial of DC believes: Take for instance, Dan DiDio's description of the DCU as being one singular continuity that includes all of its rebrands, or describing the Convergence event as including “literally every DC story ever told”, or that it includes the entire DCU from “the dawn of time through The New 52”, and infinite other worlds.
Given that, there's always room for oddities in these cosmologies, just that none of that would immediately imply a complete irreconcilable nature between both.
Bearing in mind DeMatteis and the rant above, this post is done.
Conclusion
To summarise the above, the justification behind dividing J.M. DeMatteis from the main cosmology, much like Joshua Williamson or Vertigo comics before him seem to not warrant any trouble. The listed incompatibilities are only about two, and both of them have been addressed here.In addition to that, I have covered cases where DeMatteis agrees almost with one-to-one correspondence with the main cosmology on the malleability of reality and history in general, as that reality in both embraces all possible states it could be, and is not just one state/story that cannot be changed later. Amounting to an in-verse system where it's not impossible to assume changes in the larger DC story can happen and there wouldn't be an irreconcilable divide there.
Accordingly, both of these cosmologies make it so there isn't (and there can't be) a cosmology split between them, as that it's easier to assume whatever has been contradicted has simply been retconned, and this is rooted in the nature of the entire cosmology to begin with.
And as such, I believe the DeMatteis cosmology ought to be recombined into the main cosmology, ending the DC cosmology split that took place three years ago now.
