Fenris:
Just wanted to say thanks for the updates. I started reading comic books a few years before Crisis on Infinite Earths came out, and what I read really wasn’t in the mainstream anyway (or affected by any of that nonsense). Anyway, I lived through those stories and didn’t understand them then!
For me, screwing with all the stories for the titles I did enjoy (Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Firestorm) turned me off in a big way for a long time.
That’s mostly the case, yes. In the late 80’s Marvel tried creating what they called the New Universe which was supposed to be a more adult oriented, realistic universe but it never really caught on. It was a completely distinct universe with all new characters. The only other comparable thing is the current Ultimate Universe with again, has no connection to the standard Marvel Universe really. It was an excuse to take existing characters and completely rewrite their histories so as to avoid retconning the Marvel Universe. Both universes currently exist but don’t cross over and the Ultimate Universe is pretty popular now.
Bizarro World was contemporaneous with all this stuff! 
The reason for the New Universe is that Marvel (probably wrongly, as it turns out) was terrified that Jack Kirby would sue them.
They wanted Kirby to sign over all rights to his characters and when he refused, they wouldn’t return artwork they held, started badmouthing him in the press (which was dumb and probably not corporate-sanctioned) and diminishing his contributions.
For about a 5 year period, Marvel was systematically replacing every! single! character that Kirby had a hand in creating with a “back-up” character with a different costume and secret identity.
Spider-Man: Kirby designed the costume (not Ditko!) so Spidey got the black costume.
Iron Man: Tony Stark red/gold armor got replaced by Rhodey in the black/grey war-machine armor.
X-Men: all the original X-Men got written out of the main (best selling) title and shunted over to X-Factor which could then be cancelled without upsetting X-Men.
FF: new costumes followed by ditching Reed and Sue. Then the Thing radically changed appearance and She-Thing was created just in case. Human Torch wasn’t created by Kirby so remained untouched.
Thor: Thunderstrike (dumb name–lighting strikes, not thunder)
Captain America: Replaced by John Walker and Cap’s uniform was given a black and white variant.
Hulk: replaced by Rick Jones as a hippie Hulk.
Note that all these changes happened within like a 4 year period and non-Kirby characters (Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Human Torch, Sub Mariner) were untouched.
Apparently the theory was that IF Kirby sued and won, they could ditch all the Kirby characters and replace them with the revamps. If that didn’t fly in court (and I doubt it would have), they would have the New Universe to fall back on so they could keep publishing something. No cites–but creators like Doug Moench (IIRC) and Steve Englehart have pretty much said that’s what was going on.
Also, the New Universe crosses over occasionally: it crossed over in Quasar a few times and I think it crossed over once or twice beyond that.
The Ultimate universe crossed over with both the Squadron Supreme’s world and the Supreme Powers world, so could conceivably cross-over with regular Marvel.
Daredevil was a Kirby character.
This is not my understanding.
Daredevil was created by Bill Everett and Stan Lee and later worked on by Wally Wood. Per Mark Evanier Kirby may have designed the costume (which was changed by Wally Wood in issue 7) or billy club or both…maybe. And even then, Kirby never discussed it and Everett gave a wide variety of answers–it depended on what day you asked him. So even if Kirby did design the original costume, it was replaced 7 issues later and Kirby had no major part in the creation or design of the character of Matt Murdock and so wouldn’t have been affected by a Kirby lawsuit…
Fair enough.
What about Hank Pym and the Wasp? They were both fairly active in the Avengers (one on one coast, one on the other) during that time period.
My prediction? The mainstream Marvel Universe gets turned into a zombie world and the Ultimate Universe becomes the new mainstream.
You can, however, be thunderstruck.
Anyway, Marvel’s multiverse is every bit as convoluted as DC’s ever was - worse, in fact, since time travel canonically creates new universes, one with events changed by the time traveller, one where they’re not… So you get many universes with very minor changes - for example, Earths 715 (home of Thundra), and 8809 (home of Lyra…the daughter of Thundra, by the Hulk).
Except when it doesn’t, so you get things like Age of Apocalypse, House of M, or 1602 overwriting 616, then becoming proper universes in their own right after 616 is restored.
Most of their major continuities have had major multiversal interaction.
Earth-616 (the main universe) has interacted with the multiverse majorly in Fantastic Four, Excalibur, Exiles (which tied in strongly with the X-Men for a while) and Avengers.
Earth-715 (the home of the original Squadron Supreme), save for the 12 issue LS from the 80s, EVERY appearance has been multiversal - their first several appearances were conflicts/teamups with the Avengers, as was their first post-LS appearance, and their most recent appearance was when Power Princess was recruited into the Exiles.
Earth-1610 (Ultimate Universe) has interacted with the multiverse primarily in Ultimate Fantastic Four (zombies and Godwar arcs), though also in the Ultimate Power crossover with Earth-31916 (Supreme Power), which resulted in 31916 gaining Ultimate Nick Fury, and 1610 gaining Zarda.
Which was the only major multiversal interaction for 31916, but it was a nail in the coffin for a universe whose only title was already limping along.
Marvel Zombies (initial shown reality Earth-2149) is entirely multiversal, as is Exiles. (Marvel Zombies is also a time-loop - Earth-2149 was infected by the Sentry of Earth-Z, which was infected by the Giant Man and Wolverine of Earth-2149.)
Nemo, have you seen the current state of the Ultimate Universe - the Mutant side of the universe (always a big deal) has been decimated, as have the interesting villains (Doom and Magneto are both dead), the Thing has become a coldblooded murderer (he crushed Doom’s head with his bare hands)… They’ve been making full use of the fact that the Ultimate Universe will never be anywhere near the main continuity.
Kirby (and Stan’s brother Larry, IIRC) created Hank Pym in Tales To Astonish #27. The Wasp was (IIRC again) a Don Heck creation. Hank was off in jail or running around as “Dr. Pym” (with the power to make things shrink and grow) as a second-banana character in West Coast Avengers. Ant-Man had Scott Lang as a backup and the Yellowjacket costume (later appropriated by a woman bad-guy) as an outfit for Scott to wear.
If Wasp (who was much, MUCH more active during that period 1984-87ish) was Kirby and not Don Heck, then I dunno. That doesn’t fit. Maybe she wasn’t thought to be critical enough to have a backup–she never had (and still hasn’t, IIRC) her own title. You could yank her out of the Avengers and the book could keep being published whereas if you yanked Tony and the Iron Man suit out of the Iron Man book, you’d be in deep doo-doo without a backup.
Actually even that 12 part LS was multiversial. There was a one-issue crossover with 616’s Captain America where a bunch of Nighthawk’s bad-guys came to 616 to recruit Cap. They fought on a giant typewriter. 
Oh, yeah, I completely forgot that issue…danke.
(BTW, I mistyped the number - SS is in 712, not 715, which is, as noted earlier in my post, Thundra’s home universe.)
Marvel’s multiverse is so active, actually, that Earth-616 currently has an agency devoted entirely to dealing with cross-universal incursions (primarily used in Marvel Zombies 3 and 4, and All New Savage She-Hulk (whence Lyra)), called ARMOR (which has the best expansion of any of the SHIELD/SWORD/ARMOR cycle - Alternate Reality Monitoring and Operational Response).
I initially read this as “Replaced by John Waters…”
Yeah, DC’s multiverse was always pretty clear, if you just ignored Bob Haney stories. (And Gerry Conway stories to a point–he’s the “Hate Earth-Prime 'cause it’s not Earth-Real” guy–he also hated the manditory summer crossover. It’s weird: he was/is such a good writer on solo books and so very, very bad on team books).
I mean: 1/2/3/S/X/Prime and, had the Crisis not happened, 4 (which should have had a letter designation as there was no Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman analogues…Earth “C” was taken by Captain Carrot, so maybe Earth “G” as a tribute to Dick Giordano who ran Charleton before he came to DC and ended up as a VP) were about it. And they were all pretty distinct. The only two that even the most casual reader could even possibly mix up were Earth-1 and 2. And even then, once they changed the E2 Superman’s chest logo (and gave him grey hair) and the E2 Wonder Woman was given grey hair and wrinkles, it would have taken a lot of effort to mix them up.
Marvel’s multiverse is a mess by comparison.
That’s what I meant. Cap’s sidekick “Bucky” was played by Divine.
I have never read that before. It was Jim Shooter that started New Universe. Ostensibly to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Marvel. Anyway, you are correct that there were crossovers but that was only after the New Universe failed and they tried to keep a couple semi-successful titles going (like Star Brand for instance) in the mid 90’s (which is about when I started to lose track of comics in general). Your comic acumen seems deeper than mine though, so I’ll take your word for it.
That barely scratches the surface! There are hundreds of universes if you include all the What If’s, dozens without them (the Exiles series seems to have over a dozen by itself). Then you have the Counter Earth, which was a world created by Franklin Richards as a by product of the end of the Onslaught event which was originally a separate universe with rebooted characters (Heroes Reborn) and is now circling on the far side of the son in the main 616 universe.
Actually, Counter-Earth was created by the High Evolutionary, quite a while ago…it played a big role in the original Warlock series.
Hmm, it seems there are actually three counter-earths, the one created by the High Evolutionary which is one micro second out of synch and therefore its own universe (Earth-1123), the one that is on the opposite side of the sun that Franklin Richards from Earth 616 created, and one in the Ultimate universe that is ruled by Dinosaurs.
Yep, and considering how long the quoted post, my followup, and the extra details you and Fenris added…and that’s STILL only barely scratching the surface…
WELL over a dozen…between the three (post-1995) iterations, there were 124 issues of Exiles. No one world that they visited had more than 4 or 5 issues. No more than a handful (I’d guess no more than a dozen) issues were entirely in the Panoptichron (technically a universe in and of itself), plus the source universes of most of the characters - only a handful major characters - Blink*, Sabertooth*, Beak**, Power Princess, Longshot**, Sage**, and Psilocke** - come from established universes…so we’re looking at at least 3 or 4 dozen. Probably closer to 5 or 6, once one-off characters in the various Exiles teams, and one-issue stories are counted.
Power Princess is, of course, from Earth-712.
Spider-Man is from Earth-6375, which is one of those ‘very minor change’ universes, a variant of Earth-928 (home of the original 2099 line) where Proteus seriously screwed up the origin of Halloween Jack (among other things), creating a variant universe just before they recruited Miguel.