Multiverse Madness

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came out December 14, 2018. It only made $375.5 million, so maybe knowledge about it wasn't pervasive. But Spider-Man: No Way Home is due out December 17, 2021, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will follow on March 25, 2022, and one or both of them is going to make a shit-ton of money. Which means that there will be lots of eyes there.

Meanwhile, The Flash isn't due out until November 4, 2022.

So you know what's going to happen. Assuming it hasn't already happened.

And it's probably already happened.

People are going to conclude that Marvel invented the concept of The Multiverse, and that DC decided to copy it.

And this won't be the first time that that kind of thing will have happened. 

So many times DC has done something innovative, Marvel followed and got more attention, and then it became "Common Knowledge" that the DC folks were a bunch of copy cats. 

This Multiverse business is an easy one, though.

DC writer Robert Kanigher wrote "Wonder Woman's Invisible Twin" (and Harry G. Peter drew it) in Wonder Woman Volume 1 #59, which was cover dated May, 1953. And that, my friends, was when The Multiverse was invented. I've never read the story, I'm sorry to say, but I've read the synopsis, read a couple of its ten pages (and am still trying to hunt down the rest of them), and this panel alone proves that what I'm saying is true:

You know when Marvel did its first Multiverse story? It was What If? Volume 1 #1, which was cover dated February, 1977. Yep--24 years after the Wonder Woman story appeared. (Written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Jim Craig, by the way.) It was, "What If Spider-Man Had Joined the Fantastic Four?" (And I think I could make a good case for this being more along the lines of an "Imaginary Story"... which DC had been doing since Superman #19 (by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), which appeared in December of 1942! But let's not get into that. A 24 year whoopin' seems sufficient to make the point here.)

Of course, there are those who would argue that the first DC Multiverse story was "The Flash of Two Worlds" by Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino (which appeared The Flash Volume 1 #123, September, 1961)...but that's just misogyny speaking. And if that's you, then (1) seek help, and (2) that still puts DC ahead of Marvel by 16 years. 

By the way...along the way to all of this ⬆, I read an article by Scott Shoyer (published September 19, 2020 @  https://www.cbr.com/wonder-woman-invisible-twin-multiverse/) which suggested that you could make a case for All-Star Comics Volume 1 #3 (December 1940) being the first DC Multiverse story, since "Prior to All-Star Comics #3, characters from the different comic books seemingly existed in different, separate worlds." And since many of the heroes met up here to form the All Star Squadron, Mr. Shoyer saw that as a Multiverse story. But I don't buy that, do you? 

Nope. This one goes to Wonder Woman, wherein we clearly see a doppelgänger-ish character from a parallel world interacting with the hero of the story. 

Set and match.

So when The Flash movie comes out and you start hearing people say, "They ripped that idea off of Marvel!" please tell them that they don't know what they're talking about, and that history shouldn't be a mystery.

Thank you.