DC and Marvel will be throwing a lot of Multiverse your way on the page and screen

DC Infinite Frontier and Marvel Avengers Forever images
💟DC Infinite F🦩rontier and Marvel Avengers Forever images (Image credit: George Marston)

While these days the decades-long rivalry between Marvel Comics and DC is now mostly relegated to nostalgia like the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Comics Code Authority symbol or the ubiquitous Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads, there does seem to be one particular battleground the publishers are still 🐟waging war on.

Both publishers (and their sister Hollywood studios that adapt their stories to live-action and animation) are seemingly going all-in on the Multiverse at 🧸the exact same time. 

The simultaneous pushes by the two biggest US comic book publishers and parent media companies is similar to a phenomenon that is referred to by the term 'twin films.' That's when Hollywood develops and releases very similar projects within a short time with of another, like once u𒉰pon a time when they made 'twin films' about giant meteors threatening the Earth and erupting super-volcanoes. 

More recently we've gotten 'twin' biopics about Christopher Robin (the real-life inspiration for the Winnie🐼 the Pooh character) and🍸 CGI-heavy adaptations of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book in relatively short timespans.

Multiverses will be 'twinned' at Marvel and DC for the foreseeable future in a variety🐼 of projects on the page and on the screen. Here's a look at recent Marvel and DC adventures in their Multiverses an♔d what's coming up in 2022 alone.

The 'Marvel'ous Multiverse

Marvel Comics just recently launched - a new version of the well-regarded that teamed a disparate group of the Earth's Mightiest Heroes plucked throughout their history to combat Immortus, a version of the t🍸ime-traveling tyrant Kang from a variant timeline.  

The new Avengers Forever ongoing by writer Jason Aaron and artist Aaron Kuder deviates from the original's formula a couple🏅 of degrees and instead focuses on various Avengers throughout the Multiverse (the "Multiverse's Mightiest Heroes") including an archeologist Tony Stark who is the "Invincible Ant-Man" rather than Iron Man. 

Marvel is even 'twinning' itself, launching two new separate but similar series 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Spider-Gwen: Gwen-Verse and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:What if...Miles Morales starring multiple Multiverse v💛ersions of Spider-Gwen and man who shares the Spider-Man title with Peter Parker, respectively. 

Marvel is even more Multiverse-preoccupied on the film and TV side. 2019's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Avengers: Endgame was one of the biggest films of all time and after a 2020 COVID-19 pause, 2021 gave us the Disney Plus series Loki (which introduced Kang and a Kang variant He Who Remains to the MCU) and What If…? along with Sony's pandemic-defying monster hit 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Spider-Man: No Way Home

May's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will up the ante and 2023's Ant-Man and the Wasp: Q𓃲uantumania (which will also feature Kang) also seems destined to swim in the waters of variant alternate timeliness and the Multiverse.

In fact, the Multiverse appears to be the leading candidate to serve as a narrative through𓄧line for the MCU for its next phases the same way the Infinity Stones were for the first four phases.

DC won't be left behind

On DC's side, January 2021's finale to gave us an 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Omniverse  - which the publisher describes as a Multive🦋rse of Multiverses - and its new 'Infinite Fro💙ntier' editorial era. 

Over the past year that's begat an special and then by writer Joshua Williamson and his follow-up limited series 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Justice League Incarnate that stars a Jus🔴tice League featuring characters from around its Multiverse, which includes a couple of 'variants' (President Superman, Aquawoman) of core Justice League members Superman and Aquaman and the Flashpoint Batman, a variant Batman who is Bruce Wayne's father fr♒om an alternate timeline in which Bruce and Martha Wayne were killed in Crime Alley.

If Justice League Incarnate sounds like it shares some conceptual DNA with the new Avengers Forever, you'd be right. But to be fair, Justice League Incarnate wa🍌s announced first, but both were almost certainly developed separately and without knowledge of one another.

And not ✅for nothing, Justice League Incarnate also co-stars a new characte🔯r Dr. Multiverse, who is from DC's Earth-8; a multiversal world that's more or less DC's version of the Marvel Universe. 

And Justice League Incarnate is only part of the second act of an 'Infinite Frontier saga' that seems to be headed towards a Darkseid-focused 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new Crisis - the latest offshoot of the granꦕddaddy of all comic book Multiverse stories, . 

But wait, there's still more!

If you act now and pay separate shipping and handling you can also read Flashpoint Beyond, a just-announced follow-up to the 2011 alternate reality series Flashpoint that led to the DC full reboot '' which was undone by the reboot which slowly le🐻d to the series that combined the DC Universe and Watchman Universe's . 

Flashpoint Beyond stars 🐲the aforementioned Thomas Wayne Batman who survived the destruction of his alternate Earth, which he learns in the new series still exists. 

Got all that? 

There will be a quiz. 

For its part, WarnerMedia is also knee-deep in DC-adaptedꦫ Multiverse projects itself. 

The entire CW-DC TV world is based on the Multiverse foundation and given Warners boldly connected the TV world to the feature film world in its event crossover adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths when Ezra Miller's Flash made a cheeky cameo, there's every reason to suspect the CW shows and films co-exist in the same multiverse with its HBO Max streaming series like Titans and Stargirl and newer TV series like Su🃏perman & Lois and Naomi.

And of course, Miller's Barry 🐓Allen/Flash gets his own feature film later this year, which is adapted from the which if you remember from a couple of paragraphs ago was all about an alternate, variant timeline. 

The film will guest star both Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck as their versions of Batman from different film series and ⭕that's likely just the tip of the iceberg of the variant timeline/multiver🌺se shenanigans The Flash will spring on us. 

The Flash promo image

promo image for The Flash (Image credit: Warner Bros.)

Plus there's the animated film adaptation of the popular DC game , which takes place in a variant world in the DC Multiverse in which the Joker tricks Superman into murd🀅ering a pregnant Lois Lane and millions of people in Metropolis, which transforms him into a ruthless tyrant. 

So, yeah...

A Multitude of Multiverses

So for fans and readers who cross boundaries for comics from both publishers and the films and TV shows adapted from their stores, they're going to be seeing a lot of the concept for the foreseeable future. Multiverses are more or less distilled fan service steeped in what 澳洲幸运𝓡5开奖号码历史查询:Stan Lee called the "illusion of change," so it'll be interesting to see how big an appetite for Multiverse꧟s exist while Marvel and DC both serve big heaping portions of it simultaneously. 

Not that the M🍒ultiverse is a Marvel or DC invention. Star Trek's Mirror universe with its bearded, evil Spock was an earlier genre/pop culture breakthrough that proved the mettle of the premise among faওns. 

More recently Sony's highly-regarded animated hit 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse demonstrated critics and even mainstream audiences will embrace the concept, and likewise, Loki was a hit among both hardcore Marvel fans an�🐻�d more casual MCU fans. 

And Spider-Man: No Way Home removed any𒈔 doubt that might have existed that the Multiverse can be a mainstream draw.

The question now isn't 'Will fans dig 🐼the Multiverse?'; it's more like 'How much is too much?' (if that's even a thing).

There are l꧃ikely alternate timelines in which fans embrace it all happily and timelines in which they might get a little exhausted from it all, and we'll find out which is our 'sacred' timeline soon enough because a lot more Multiverse is coming. 

Newsarama explains the Marvel Multiverse and the meaning of Earth-616.

I'm not just the Newsarama founder and editor-in-chief, I'm also a reader. And that reference is just a little bit older than the beginning of my Newsarama journey. I founded what would become the comic book news site in 1996, and except for a brief sojourn at Marvel Comics as its marketing and communications manager in 2003, I'v🦋e been writing about new comic book tit💯les, creative changes, and occasionally offering my perspective on important industry events and developments for the 25 years since. Despite many changes to Newsarama, my passion for the medium of comic books and the characters makes the last quarter-century (it's crazy to see that in writing) time spent doing what I love most.