TF Views

Paste: This issue takes place on Earth-Prime, our own earth, and speaks directly to comic books and their pragmatic effect on readers. In your decades as a creator, do you think comic books have assumed a different relationship in how they effect their readers? One of the most interesting twists here is how online commentary plays into a battle with The Gentry.
Morrison: Yeah. Something very interesting has happened since the dawn of the internet in the sense that the audience can respond immediately, and everything becomes almost like a live performance. And no matter how much we say we don’t care about this stuff and we don’t read this stuff, of course we look at it. It’s influencing everything. I think the dialogue between the creators or the authors and the consumers is now so tight and so close, that it has to be acknowledged as a major part of the experience of creating pop culture in the 21st century. And again, I wanted this comic to go there because I think it’s a fertile field. Nobody’s really talked about it and how we all respond. We listen to what they’re saying, we adapt to stances, we change and they change. Everyone playing this strange game has to be acknowledged at least in a work like this one, particularly, which is about that relationship.

Paste: The Multiversity #2 comes out next month, concluding the story. I think The Gentry has been my favorite aspect of the book—I know each member is an extreme of various villain archetypes, but they also seem to represent something so much more primal. Are we going to discover more about these characters and what separates them from a character like Darkseid?
Morrison: Oh yeah, you definitely find out a lot more about them, but at the same time I think why they work is because everyone can read them in their own way, and make them represent what they want them to represent. I want to keep that little bit of mystery. The finale pretty much explains who they are, and even in Ultra it’s explained that these are really bad ideas. They’re demon ideas and we incubate them and they form. We can feel them, but we don’t quite know how to display them and what they’re doing. It’s been portrayed that our imaginative space has become degraded. Where once we had Star Trek now we have The Walking Dead. We see our civilization as something that’s basically, ultimately doomed. And maybe a generation ago we saw our civilization as something that would naturally be carried into the stars, and have this fantastic utopian future. So Multiverse is all about that, and Ultra is specifically about the idea that we have impoverished a neighborhood, and once you’ve impoverished a neighborhood then you come in to gentrify it. You’ve made it very comfortable for the monsters to cultivate.

Dominic wrote:Somebody at CBR pointed out that the reader comments in "Ultra Comics" mirror Uotan's review from "Multiversity" #1. So, a character that is supposed to represent readers is calling out a character who is supposed to be powered by....the readers.

Dominic wrote:Apparently, Donatello's death in TMNT #44, complete with a character saying they failed to save him, was a ruse. He was just hurt really bad.

Bah.

andersonh1 wrote:"Who can replace Batman?" is one of those ideas that is interesting to explore in just about any era of the character's existence.