PREVIEW: DC Universe: Rebirth #1

[GlennSimpson]

I think it might also be accurate to say that in the "grabbing of cities from dying timelines" that Brainiac was doing, whatever Dr. Manhattan did qualified from Brainiac's point of view. Thus he grabbed cities from the "pre-Flashpoint" world, even if we're learning now that the changes from pre-Flashpoint to new52 have a different mechanism behind them.

[Buried Alien]

Parallax Hal has been appearing in the GL books ....

I'm not sure about Pre-Crisis Kara and Barry. I think it's been implied they met their original COIE fates once again.

Kind of hard to reconcile how they succeeded in preventing COIE from happpening, but still ended up dying in COIE.

Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)

[Lee Stone]

Kind of hard to reconcile how they succeeded in preventing COIE from happpening, but still ended up dying in COIE.

Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)

They could have still died in battle but the Earths were spared.
It's possible that the only Earth that died was the first one (Earth-3, IIRC) that signaled the start of Crisis.

Parallax could have been instrumental in keeping the Earths from merging, but the fight with the Anti-Monitor could have played out much the same.

[The Shredder]

Kind of hard to reconcile how they succeeded in preventing COIE from happpening, but still ended up dying in COIE.

Best guess: They perished (maybe), but thanks to Brainiac perhaps giving them a head start, they succeeded in stopping the Ant-Monitor from destroying Earth's/universes to the extent seen in COIE.

[GlennSimpson]

Yeah, my understanding was that the only thing that changed was that the multiverse still existed in some form. I rather assumed the a single merged Earth was still created, and basically everything happened the way we saw it "on screen" the first time, it's just that the multiverse got hidden away (rather than destroyed) in the process.

[Dataweaver]

Parallax Hal has been appearing in the GL books ....

I'm not sure about Pre-Crisis Kara and Barry. I think it's been implied they met their original COIE fates once again.

No. Lois & Clark gave us a super-condensed summary of what happened: they fought the Anti-Monitor, beat him, and then went their separate ways. So pre-Crisis Barry and Kara ended up surviving. Presumably, they were reinserted into their world, which (along with the rest of the pre-Crisis Multiverse) also survived.

I'll be posting my thoughts on how this dilemma might be resolved shortly.

[The Shredder]

No. Lois & Clark gave us a super-condensed summary of what happened: they fought the Anti-Monitor, beat him, and then went their separate ways. So pre-Crisis Barry and Kara ended up surviving. Presumably, they were reinserted into their world, which (along with the rest of the pre-Crisis Multiverse) also survived.

I'll be posting my thoughts on how this dilemma might be resolved shortly.

Great. Do you remember what issue of L&C this is stated in?

[Kyer]

Wet-faced Kyer blindly pushes away Barry from Wally long enough to hold her hero in an octopus hug.
Wally.
Oh....Wally!

[Dataweaver]

The problem is that if Barry survived, then would Wally have become the Flash? And if Kara survived, what of the long, long timeframe where she was written out of the timeline and we got the Matrix Supergirl? Some possibilities:

1. Barry and Kara were reinserted into the timeline, but not when they left. Barry was still presumed dead, and Wally went on with his career as the Flash until Barry was reinserted during the events of Final Crisis. Kara's reinsertion point was in the early 2000s, when Superman/Batman introduced Kara to the post-Crisis DCU. This option still has a few hiccups in it; but it's cleaner than most of the alternatives I can think of.

2. Barry was reinserted into the timeline right after the Crisis, where he went back to the 31st century and retired with his wife. Wally's time as the Flash is more or less unchanged up until Bart, who's story depends on Iris Allen being a widow and needing to take Bart back in time to find a Flash to help her grandson. Not sure about Kara.

3. Barry was reinserted into the timeline right after the Crisis, and came out of retirement. This alternate post-Crisis Earth-One developed very differently from how it did the first time around, with most of the original history being wiped away. Instead, something like that history existed on another of the Earths that survived the Crisis: what Johns dubbed “Earth 8” in Infinite Crisis, and which eventually transformed into Morrison's Earth-16. Presumably, that Earth was (retroactively) the one that was featured in Convergence as the Zero Hour Earth.

4. Barry and Kara haven't been reinserted yet.

[Dataweaver]

Great. Do you remember what issue of L&C this is stated in?

#1, I believe. IIRC, it was one of the first things L&C addressed, right after their arrival on Prime Earth.

[The Shredder]

Appreciate it, thanks.

[Buried Alien]

Parallax could have been instrumental in keeping the Earths from merging, but the fight with the Anti-Monitor could have played out much the same.

Considering how powerful Hal was as Parallax during ZERO HOUR, if he teams up with the other heroes, don't they flat out BEAT the Anti-Monitor and win?

Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)

[Potanical Pardon]

At the midnight release waiting in line. They already passed out copies to all of us in line as we wait for doors to open to buy.

I honestly don't know why Variant C is like $50-$110.

Anyone else at some special event midnight thing? What freebies are you guys getting?

[Lee Stone]

Considering how powerful Hal was as Parallax during ZERO HOUR, if he teams up with the other heroes, don't they flat out BEAT the Anti-Monitor and win?

Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)

That is a very likely possibility.

[Dataweaver]

It's not just a possibility; it's what happened.