http://web.archive.org/web/20091027095511/geocities.com/hypertime2000/features/morrison.html
Home > Features > Morrison's Hypertime
If you visit Warren Ellis' message boards at his official website, you can read a discussion about Ellis' conversation with Morrison over Hypertime. Ellis was so impressed by Morrison's definition of the concept that he said, "I have seen the glory." While I wouldn't even go that far, here's what Ellis says about the concept, taken from his message board...
"It's one of those things that's difficult to capture on paper if you're not the originator, I suspect. Firstly, it wasn't set up to explain continuity glitches. That's not its point, as described to me. It's...
It's Grant trying to describe a new physics for fictional reality. And it's time considered as a volume. a three-dimensional artifact.
My recall is flawed. We were drinking heavily. There could be crucial mistakes in the following:
Take a glass sphere studded all over with holes, and then drive a long stick right through the middle of it, passing exactly through the center of the volume. That's the base DC timeline. Jab another stick through right next to it, but at a different angle, so that they're touching at one point. That's an Elseworlds story. Another stick, this one rippled, placed close in so that it touches the first stick at two or three points. That's the base Marvel timeline. Perhaps others follow the line of the DC stick for a while before diverging, a slow diagonal collision along it before peeling off. This sphere contains the timeline of all comic-book realities, and they theoretically all have access to each other. In high time, at the top of the sphere, is OUR reality, and we can look down on the totality of Hypertime, the entire volume.
Hypertime is a tool for the consideration of fictional reality.
I think that's what he said, anyway. "
http://web.archive.org/web/20000615...eruniverse.com/newsarama/newsarama010899.html
"We live outside what is known as the DC or Marvel Universes, because we can look into it them imaging those comics are real and all they are doing is telling us a real story. The Marvel universe does exist, the Hulk will still be here when Stan Lee is gone. Batman is here and Bob Kane is dead. So it's a real universe to a certain extent. Those characters have an existence beyond their creators.
The idea of Hypertime is that it's the first time that a character in the DCU understands the universe that he lives in and gets outside and looks back at it, and sees that there's more than one timeline. There's always a timeline, and the main timeline is always the DCU. This current timeline we live in started with the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor causing all these problems, and one universe existed from there. But from outside the DC Universe, as readers, we know that's not the way it happened. From inside, they don't know - they're at the mercy of forces that alter their timeline constantly. Finally, they're getting to see what that is.
Say something like Watchmen exists in its own continuity or timeline...sometimes that timeline will cross the DC Universe timeline, and carry with it something that changes the DCU. For instance, Alan Moore's ideas in Watchmen or Frank Miller's ideas in the Dark Knight impact with the DCU and change it forever, so it suddenly appears as grim for ten years.
Also, suddenly ideas can come back from pre-crisis, and come around in a loop and impact again, which is what we're getting now with slightly brighter superheroes that we haven't seen for a while. We're not going back to the past, the whole idea is to suggest that every single thing that as ever existed in DC and every other comic universe is true, because we know it, and we can buy it and read it. The people who live in it don't know it - they don't know that they've ever had multiple Earths that didn't have superheroes during the war, or did, depending on which timeline they live in.
http://web.archive.org/web/19991004...runiverse.com/newsarama/newsarama012299b.html
While throwing around several ideas, the team finally settled on a story where Superboy visits different Elseworlds. "We thought it'd be great to establish that there was a way - but not necessarily an easy way - to visit these Elseworlds, to say that everything DC publishes fits together and matters in some way or other," explained Kesel. "I wrote up a memo outlining what we wanted to do, convinced it would be shot down in flames. I almost had a heart attack when Mike Carlin gave it a thumbs up! Then he threw in the clincher - that we should work with Grant Morrison, Mark Waid and editor Dan Raspler on this, since they were starting up something very similar." The similar "something" of course was Hypertime. As Raspler would later point out to Kesel, it seemed fitting to everyone to involve Superboy in Hypertime since, in many ways, "he was the character who really got the short end of the stick in Crisis."
http://web.archive.org/web/19991018181652/http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dunes/7637/comics/wiz.html
Ignoring all mentions of Real Life and Marvel Comics, Hypertime is meant to be the story of DC. If it was ever published, it is true, and it is contained in it. Of course, there are levels beyond Hypertime, such as Limbo which is beyond the Story of DC, and in it the entire Story is contained within the Book of Infinite Pages, and further beyond that is the Monitor Sphere, which is a "Self-Assembling Hyper-Story".
It is also worth mentioning that the Monitor-Sphere is the final sphere of creation, separated from the Overvoid solely by the Source Wall. There can't be a larger creation outside of it because it is, by definition, the highest level of creation.