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.
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