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To be honest, just about every superhero story plot sounds stupid if you try to explain it. The same goes for most movies and books that are fun.

The old multiverse made more sense (pre-COIE). But at least no one has made a deal with the devil to rid themselves of a marriage yet. So DC still wins.

*So* stupid. Best to give up and start reading sensible stories about a Canadian rockstar who fights telekinetic vegans so he can date a girl with a glowing head. That doesn't sound stupid at all.

See, if comics didn't need to keep explaining everything, it wouldn't sound so stupid.

I don't think there's ever been an official explanation for Marvel's alternate earths, other than the occasional reference to Reed Richards' theory that you can't change the past. There just ARE alternate Earths.

I tend to agree that most TV/movie plots also sound stupid when they are merely told, rather than viewed as intended. If you try to explain them with a lot of detail, it usually starts to sound ridiculously complicated, but if you leave too much out, it just sounds boring.

This is why I find it very hard to read things like the Marvel handbooks and indices, and to a lesser extent the free "sagas" Marvel puts out occasionally. Any attempt to explain years and years of continuity invariably skims over the stuff that made the story compelling to begin with, and features plot point after (often ridiculous) plot point that makes even a seasoned superhero veteran like myself roll his eyes and give up.

Agreed. To tie in with the other sentiments here: try explaining the last 5 seasons of Smallville (I take the view that after season 3 it became unexplainable) to anyone and keep a straight face. It's just insane...

" To be honest, just about every superhero story plot sounds stupid if you try to explain it. The same goes for most movies and books that are fun. "

There's still an important distinction to be made between the kind of stupid that sounds entertaining ( " Hulk comes back from his exile in space, takes it out on the heroes that sent him there " ) and the kind of stupid that just sounds frustrating and underwhelming ( Josh's description of Final Crisis' backstory ).

I find that when describing stories to other people, the key is the length; the longer you take to tell them the basics, the greater the risk of losing their interest. Which is why the best superhero comics tend not to be the ones which go out of their way to explain continuity, but the ones which just streamline it and get to the story at hand. A pleasant surprise from the writer in question ( Grant Morrison ) was when his and Quitely's issue of the new Batman and Robin hit last week, and the exposition required was very minimal and didn't get in the way of the story at all.

While true that many stories sound bizarre when vocalized, Final Crisis will always hold a place in my heart (head?) as the most convoluted mess I have ever read in 40 years of reading comics. I greatly regret spending my money and my time on it. (It was so bad that it made Secret Invasion look good.... and that is really bad....)

But he didn't even get to the giant time-eating moth!

The multiverse 2.0 created by Infinite Crisis has been one hell of a wet firecracker. Its creation and revelation in Infinite Crisis was exciting for nostalgia-geeks in spite of ourselves. The Mr. Mind differentiation of them in 52 was way more fun than it had any right to be.

But then they got linked up with the Multiple Monitors and with Countdown, and they turned out to be mainly made up of familiar 10-to-15-year-old Elseworlds that started to seem a lot more mundane when they were stripped out of the stories that created them. By the time we were at Countdown: Arena, even those of us who'd waited 20 years for the return of the multiverse were well and truly ready to see it destroyed again.

Except for Legion of Three Worlds and Superman Beyond, there's been almost nothing readable done with the DC multiverse since its recreation. Even JSA, which you would think would be the title most energized by the return of the multiverse, just saw its OYL momentum destroyed by the Earth-2 and Earth-Kingdom Come stories.

This was totally funny. But why would you need backstory on the parallel Earths in the first place? Parallel Earths are not a bizarre idea; all the story asks, essentially, is that the reader except that for whateve reason there are 52 of them, and they're part of an overall structure.

It's fairly sad that Batman: Brave and the Bold's take on the Multiverse is already more understandable and more interesting than the Post-Infinite Crisis Multiverse.

Of course, that's partially because Batman: Brave and the Bold was willing to just tell a Multiverse tale and not wait for some magnum opus by Morrison.

I wonder what this is about.

http://comiccritics.com/2009/06/08/wse-8/

As much as I didn't like the story-telling mechanics of Final Crisis (convoluted yet fun) I was still able to enjoy it hell of a lot more than Infinite Crisis or Identity Crisis (just convoluted).

agree with the people saying that there is no reason to give a backstory for multiple earths. It's not a necessity at all. Explaining to someone about multiple earths would be like doing a re-origin story for every character involved. It might help a first time reader, but it's not necessary once they accept the concept of super heroes.

While I agree you don't need to explain how the multiverse came to be, I was unaware DC actually had an origin for it. But now that I do, I actually think the origin as explained in the fourth panel is simple and kind of clever.

I think there should be infinite Earths again and be done with it. I really see no reason for 52 at all. Since it is broken already, break it already.

There are many different hypotheses regarding multiple universes out there - I can only think of two reasons to explain parallel universes in a story:
1) because other elements in your plot somehow hinge on the nature of the multiverse
2) because the nature of the multiverse is actually interesting in-and-of itself

I think the standard explanation for all the DC 'Crisis' stories is #1. But that only makes sense if you don't consider the individual issues or even trades to be stories - you consider the overall DCU to be the story.

Which is how I believe DC management treats things, and how many fans react. That's why they won't read a good book that 'doesn't count', but will happily plunk down cash for a crappy book that does. It's not the individual books that matter in the DCU anymore.

Which is cool and all, but not my thing, so I don't read any DC books anymore.

HI-larious.

But all I could think was... Final Crisis is out already? Vaughn ranks with Morrison or Ellis? Do I really need to know about the other Crises to read Final Crisis?

when is Josh just gonna smash marissa at the comic shop and wipe her off with a ASM comic?

You can say "all superhero comic stories sound stupid when you explain them" but in fact some of them don't and the Crisis stories definitely do.

To be fair, Josh isn't the least describing a comic plot and is in reality unnecessarily (except that he was asked) explaining DC cosmology. The proper answer is "there's a lot of different dimensions...now go read the story". Over-explaining is an "occupational hazard" among the nerds.

"*So* stupid. Best to give up and start reading sensible stories about a Canadian rockstar who fights telekinetic vegans so he can date a girl with a glowing head. That doesn’t sound stupid at all."

Don't foget that it's also set in a video game.

Chris

I haven't read Infinite Crisis, so when I read Final Crisis, it didn't make much sense to me that there are 52 parallel Earths... Why 52? What's the signifigance of that number? To me it would be much more logical that there are either an infinite amount of parallel universes (because of the infinite different courses history could take), or that there is only one universe (where the parallel universe theory is simply false). Is there some extra- or intra-story explanation why the parallel universes are limited to 52?

Vaughan's more consistent than Ellis, and he's produced quite a body of work in the last 10 years.

Vaughan’s more consistent than Ellis, and he’s produced quite a body of work in the last 10 years.

Consistent doesn't mean as good as.
When Ellis is on, he is really on, and produces ground breakingly good comics.
Vaughn has done some solid, popular stuff - better than Ellis when he's off - but nothing approaching Ellis' levels.

You totally don't need to get into the uber-stupid stuff about Krona and the Monitors to explain DC's multiverse, even the current version. It's pure masochism on the character's part to try to include any of that part of the story.

@Tuomas

The 52 worlds weren't introduced in Infinite Crisis but rather, curiously enough, in 52. I won't explain why there are 52, but basically the alternate worlds were created through time travel, not through any quantum many-worlds theory.

thinking about real parallel universes is even more difficult to comprehend than the history of the multiverse.

... Does it really sound stupid? It's just mythology. Compare it to any creational myth. Geez, even the Greek myths had Earth be formed and destroyed on a whim a few times.