RETCON: When you get to that point where you realize that your entire universe is fucked.
“When Cat-Tales began, I would have made very large bets that we would never introduce the idea of an alternate universe,” says creator Chris Dee. “I don’t like them, certainly not for a franchise that’s largely the work of a single writer. It allows you to escape the consequences of your choices, and that opens the door to making very bad choices.
“But when the time came to write String Theory, I went ahead and did it without a second thought. Mostly it was because the time was right: the meta-nature of the series – we are not ‘fan fiction’ we’re meta fiction, and things were starting to happen at DC that required that AU concept for commentary. And then right around that time, I happened upon an interview with Joseph Campbell that opened up the whole thing. I quote the first part at the start of the first chapter:
People think Infinity is a very long time. Infinity has nothing to do with Time.
“The rest I gave to Jason Blood:
Infinity is that dimension of here and now which thinking in ‘time’ cuts out. This is it, if it doesn’t exist in the here and now, it doesn’t exist. And the experience of Infinity right here and now is the function of life.
“So I could evoke those possibilities for just this story, just for those few moments they leap into “here and now” because of the cosmic crisis, but they do not exist outside of that. There is no standing parallel universe where Lex Luthor is twins lecturing at the University of Geneva and Selina was that goggle-wearing East End chick. Just like there’s no standing universe where Dracula came to Gotham as he did in Capes and Bats, those stories exist only as their own complete incarnation–like all fiction does outside of specific fandoms where this connected universe idea has taken over. For the most part, characters are born on page 1 and they die on the last period. The story is. And the state of entertainment would be a lot better if we re-acclimated audiences to accept that.”
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Tags: justice league, superman, wonder woman, dcu, crisis, comic books, retcon