Grant Morrison held a Multiversity panel at SDCC on Friday, and there were several details of interest to Flash fans. And today there was also the debut of Morrison’s Multiversity map, a psychadelic guide to the DC universe. The map includes the Speed Force Wall, which is “otherwise known to the denizens of the Orrery as the Speed of Light”. Unfortunately I can’t quite read the rest of the text in full because it’s rather small, but it’ll be interesting to hear more about it.
More after the jump.
Morrison talked about the origin of the multiverse concept, noting that it began with the classic “Flash Of Two Worlds” story in which Barry Allen met Jay Garrick. As CBR reports:
Morrison related how the reason this story existed was because the Barry Allen character took on the Flash identity because he read a comic of the Jay Garrick Flash. If comics and metafiction were a part of the story from the beginning, it made sense to the writer that there would be more such connections all through the multiverse. The pulp generation of issue #2 will be read by the teen cast of a later issue who are bored with their own world, and other small comics connections will bleed into the story through the event.
As we can see, the Flashes are key to the history of this series. So it’s perhaps fitting that Wally West will be in one of the books, “The Multiversity: The Just”. Set in Earth-16, it features the descendents of Batman, Superman, and others, but the teens no longer have any villains to fight. Morrison called it a fun book, and Wally and some other ’90s legacy characters are included, such as Kyle Rayner and Donna Troy. Connor Hawke plays a major role as a harried father trying to stop his daughter from getting involved in the superhero world.
Finally, Morrison talked about what attracted him to the Multiversity concept.
“I’ve always been fascinated by alternate versions of the superhero characters,” he said, recalling his childhood love of Professor Zoom as well as the early Earth 2 stories.
So the roots of the Flashverse run deep in this series, and it’ll obviously be of interest to Flash fans. Who’s planning to pick it up?