What Great Hand Casts the Lightning and Remakes the World?

Hands are an important symbol in the history of DC mythology and have been a staple of Morrison's magicians flourish - reaching through and across panels and pulling the reader in. So it makes sense that they would feature as a recurring motif in The Multiversity.

They appear in a series of homages and references during the primordial retelling of the "story thus far".  The guidebook's All-Star treatment of the story of the Crisisverse starts with Carmine Infantino's surrealist inspired Flash of Two Worlds captioning, bookended with the same captioning trick.

Infantino used his hand captions to add a non-verbal element to help sell his fantastic inquires.  Even the heightened dialog and extreme situations of silver-age DC wasn't enough to contain the excitement of the creation of the Multiverse.  The captions themselves had to evolve and sprout hands to properly convey how thrilling the story you are reading is.

The captioning is an intertextual trick to reinforce what the text is stating. Barry Allen has always been at the core of DC continuity and comics history.  His classic sci-fi origin, his discovery of Earth-2, his sacrifice to save existence, and all of his blue-collar adventuring in-between.  This is the framework on which the connected worlds of DC hang, bound together by The Flash.

The ending panel shows off the level of layering throughout the book.  The captioning color and style appears throughout The Multiversity as the book/story warning us against encroaching threats.  The hand on the caption is expected to close the pages of story as it opened, but it also connects it to another of DC's long running hand images, The Hand of Creation.

The hand in the center of the cosmic swirl of Kirby krackle was witnessed at the beginning of the universe and has appeared many time since it's debut in John Broome's Green Lantern.  It has been claimed by a few, notably The Anti-Monitor and Dr. Manhattan.

To Morrison it represents a sort of razor's edge between creator, creation, and audience.  The line that transforms what a story could be to what a story actually is  In its palm is Morrison's Final Crisis creation, the Orrery of Worlds, the place where everything on 52 Earths and beyond actually happens.

Perched quietly and usually little noticed atop the Map of the Multiverse is The Overvoid. This is Morrison's representation of all consciousness and its eternal witness over all of creation.  In this case it is represented by the robed figure of Destiny, with a massive tome shackled to its wrist and held in its palm.

It's an easy read then, to go from this hand of Destiny cradling all of creation to its opposite, The Empty Hand.  The Empty Hand is the total villain because it is true nothing, an unread book held by no one.  It is every world you do not explore, every moment these fictive creatures are not being thought about, not being written about, not having the story continue.

The Empty Hand is the same as the Hand of Destiny, the Hand at the Beginning of Creation.  It is the hand that sculpts and publishes and reads and remembers the story.  If this hand is empty, it is the end of all stories, the end of the DC Universe, the end of life and existence itself.

The Oblivion Machine: Learning to Love the Pieces of The Multiversity

The Multiversity is nine issues of DC multiverse mayhem, penned by psychoactive shaman and professional Alan Moore irritant, Grant Morrison. In truth, a fairly straightforward story, told through a fractured lense of one goofy variant after another.  Each verse of the epic switching to another world to continue the overarching narrative of an invasion of bad ideas and wrong thinking.

The Gentry's overall goal is to waste your time, running you around in a loop, telling you the same story over and over, until your life is eaten away.  This is The Oblivion Machine.

The book itself is part of this machine, purposefully loaded with intertextual road signs, pulsating narratives, gorgeous artwork, and layer upon layer of meaning and intention.  Even as it beckons you to unravel its innerworkings, it simultaneously begs you to put the book down and stop.

Of course, we don't.  We can't.  The machine has got us!  Its grip is crushing and total.

Over the course of the past few months, I delved into the morass of this multiversal masterpiece, and have come away again and again in awe of it.  It drips of decades of immersion in a world that is not only alive and complex, but grown and sculpted, destroyed and rebuilt, by generations of writers, artists, and editors.

Ignoring the pleas to not overthink it, we are going to overthink it.  Stare hard at the pieces, while trying not to explode the dog.