This is usually the time of day on a Sunday afternoon when you’d see the latest episode of THN pop up in various places online. Sadly, due to personal and professional commitments, there will NOT be a new episode of THN this week, nor will there be an Answer of the Week. We were prepared to record a fun show this week, one that included a great interview with webcomics legend Dave Kellett, but life got in the way. We’re sorry we’re not able to bring you a new episode today, but let’s try to make something fun out of it.
We’re going to post this week’s Question right here, and we want you dudes and ladydudes to leave your answers in the comments section! Respond to one another, engage in healthy debate, and have some fun! This is a safe place, so be excellent to each other, and be mindful of others if you’re posting super-spoilerz.
The Dave Kellett interview will appear in our September 1st episode. We hope to be back on track before too long, but in the meantime, let’s all enjoy this fancy website that Max made so lovingly for us!
QUESTION OF THE WEEK: what is your favorite alternate reality/parallel universe story and why? Is it a really cool issue of What If? A Justice-League-gone-wrong tale like Squadron Supreme? You don’t have to limit yourself to comics, so feel free to cite TV shows, movies, novels, WHATEVA!
Leave your answers in the comment section below!
Avengers Forever. While it wasn’t a single alternate reality and more of a giant collage of realities and timelines, it’s a story of top quality. This one was an ocean of Avengers lore and not for the casual Marvel fan, but it’s Kurt Busiek at his best, and I still love it muy mucho.
Planet of the Apes. Hands down. I cannot get enough of that universe. The movies, tv shows, you name it. I tried to get into the comics before and am going to re-dive in. It has got great creatures and like all sci-fi it makes us ask what truly makes us human.
I’m going to cheat a bit and claim that all of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen counts as one long alternate reality story, since the universe it presents is different than the universes of each of the novels from which its main characters originate.
The reason it’s my favorite is because more takes a pretty simple why-didn’t-I-think-of-that concept, what would history have been like if all (or at least many) fictional stories actually happened and uses that as a launching board for some pretty astoundingly inventive stories. Moore has a knack for taking elements from unrelated stories and combining them in ways that make so much sense. Every level of the book, from major plot points (having Doctor Moreau create the virus that destroys the Martians from War of the Worlds), to offhand comments (Mr Hyde being a suspect in Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue) and even background details (Tracy Jordan’s Who Dat Ninja 2 playing in theaters in modern times) is filled with these brilliant ideas and almost as if to show us that he could do this for years and years if he wanted, Moore has an exhaustively researched and detailed almanac of this world in Volume 2, which is filled with even more of these moments such as linking the Creature from the Black Lagoon to the Doctor Who Mythos and having Captain Nemo encounter the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. The world is so detailed and well thought out that what should feel like a gimmick instead feels like a place with as complex a history as you would find in Star Wars or Lord of the Rings.
Granted, Moore started to lose me a little with the Black Dossier, and Century, both of which felt like Moore might have had secret collaborators in the form of Grant Morrison and a big old bag of shrooms, but the latest book, Heart of Ice cut back on the weirdness (relatively speaking) and seems to have gotten back to what I loved about the first two volumes.
Is it superlame to say the Ultimate universe? I remember reading the first trafr of the Ultimates and telling people for weeks and weeks that HULK EATS PEOPLE!
I still love the Ultimate universe and clearly Whedon does too, so I must have great taste.