Hypertime

Originally published February 12, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1317

Lots of fans are writing me (mostly via e-mail) asking what I think of hypertime.

Now for most of America, there are various definitions of hypertime. April 15 represents hypertime to many, while for others it’s the last couple of shopping days before Christmas. But for comics fans, hypertime is the concept introduced in the second issue of the excellent Kingdom, Mark Waid’s follow-up to the Kingdom Come limited series.

At the climax of Kingdom, the heroes of the DC universe find themselves confronted with “the greatest secret in creation.” To me, that would have to be the mystery of Pauly Shore’s continued popularity, but instead we learn of the existence of Hypertime: the revelation that “the universe… is actually a part of an unpredictable multiverse, an infinite realm of parallel worlds where reality as you know it has taken different twists and turns. Where fallen allies live on… where tragedies can be turned to triumph.”

This, of course, will come as no shock to anyone who was clued in to the same thing by sources as diverse as Larry Niven’s “All the Myriad Ways” or even the Watcher back in the first issue of What If?

For that matter, I even put forward my own theory several years back in this very column. What I said was:

I think that time is constantly in flux. That there are fault lines in the time stream, and they’re constantly shifting in thousands of little subtle ways, just like tremors rearranging California real estate. Or think of time as telephone lines stretching from the present backwards to infinity (kind of like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and you get line noise that screws the connection up. It’s part of your day to day existence, and you accept it and move on.

Proof? That’s easy.

Ever walk into a room to get something and suddenly you can’t remember what it was you wanted?

Ever put something down, go back and look for it, and it’s not there?

Ever run into someone who greets you like you’re old friends, and you are absolutely clueless as to their identity?

We chalk it off to lapsed memory, but it’s not. It’s Time Burps. You can’t remember what you wanted in the room because time just Burped and suddenly the reason why you went in there ceased to exist. The item you put down has vanished because time Burped and you never put it there in the first place. Your newfound old friend, in his or her past, was a close buddy… but in your own past, you never met.

The thing is, I floated the notion and then did nothing with it. Mark brilliantly (and independently, I’m sure… as if he’s going to remember a passing concept that was part of a BID Time Cop review) expanded upon that same notion.

“Off the central timeline,” we’re told, “events of importance often cause divergent tributaries’ to branch off the main timestream… On occasion, those tributaries return–sometimes feeding back into the central timeline, other times overlapping it briefly before charting an entirely new course. An old friend is suddenly recalled after years of being forgotten. A scrap of history becomes misremembered, even reinvented in the common wisdom.” Mark calls them “hyper-time fluxes,” which is certainly infinitely classier than “time burps.”

What do I think? I think it’s the best scab yet.

The continuity of long-time comic companies invariably creates wounds. The passage of time renders origins and events problematic if you have any intention of trying to keep the characters current. And whenever one of these wounds becomes too big, too gaping, the companies try to do something about it. Try to heal it, scab it over. Sometimes topical references are just thrown out wholesale, origins rebooted with no other explanation than, “We’re the publisher. We say so.”

Other times, the scab is more creative; but what makes a truly creative scab is its simplicity, its elegance. The first great scab was the revelation that the Golden Age DC heroes were alive and well and living on Earth-2. In one shot it solved the problems of fans who were wondering where Jay Garrick, Alan Scott and the rest of the bunch got off to.

The problem is, most comic book creators are kids at heart. And you must remember perfectly well the eternal link between kids and their scabs. You just can’t… resist… picking at it. It sits there, big and inviting, hard and crusty, like nothing else on your skin, and no matter how much you know you shouldn’t, you just keep going back to it and fiddling with it.

Which is why, a mere decade or so after its inception, Earth-1, Earth-2 and its offspring had swollen to such unwieldy proportions that an entire limited series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, was required to get rid of it. But even Crisis couldn’t quite be left alone as people tried to sort out the fallout, and thirty seven incarnations of Hawkman later, we had Zero Hour, and even that’s kind of confusing as fans argue and dispute what counts and what doesn’t count, what’s part of continuity and what’s moot.

Mark Waid, in laying out Hypertime, even seems to fire a broadside at continuity mavens, recasting them as the Linear Men and saying, “They’re too linear. They’re vested in enforcing an inflexible view of reality…They think orderly cataloged continuity is preferable to a kingdom of wonder.” Basically he’s saying, Let the creators alone to tell the best stories we can, and stop obsessing about how it ties in with books published years ago.

Hypertime is the comic book equivalent of the moment in Fiddler on the Roof, where two men are in dispute and Tevye the dairyman allows that both of them are correct in their opposing views.

“He’s right… and he’s right? They can’t both be right,” a villager chides Tevye.

Tevye hesitates only a moment and then says, “You know, you are also right.”

Although Hypertime takes its potshot at fannish obsession with continuity, it is in fact the continuity buff’s dream. It’s the all-purpose explanation. Two stories in conflict? Hypertime. Wait, this character was killed off fifteen years ago… why’s he alive? Hypertime. Subspace is suddenly being called the Negative Zone? Hypertime. Botched continuity has been transformed into Pee Wee Herman catapulting headlong off his bicycle, dusting himself off, and announcing, “I meant to do that.”

It’s great. I love it.

Just one problem.

The moment I read, “The possibilities of hypertime are infinite… and humble the power of any man,” I started getting a queasy feeling. Oh lord. Here we go. Scab picking. Hypertime is the most elegant explanation for snarled continuity ever proffered. Great. Perfect. Now leave it the hell alone! Don’t pick at it! Just tell stories, don’t worry about occasional continuity glitches, and never mention Hypertime again!

Not going to happen. New hypertime stories are already in the works. And for all I know, they’ll be nifty and imaginative and whiz-bang keeno… just like the first JLA/JSA crossovers were after the Earth-1/Earth-2 introduction in Flash.

But…

Pick. Pick. Pick. And ten years down the line…

Crisis on Infinite Hypertimes.

Pass the Bactine, please…

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)