This is the third and final part of our survey of the first issue of future Marvel Executive Editor Mark Gruenwald’s classic fanzine OMNIVERSE, which dealt with the question of consistent reality in comic book stories. Or continuity, as it is more typically thought of. While it didn’t quite reach the heights of a scientific journal, the people working on OMNIVERSE clearly took their task seriously and produced prose that attempted to be scholarly.
The cover feature was this article written by Mark himself and illustrated by Rich Bruning in which Gru postulates the existence of an Earth E, which exists between what we know of as Earth-1 and Earth-2 and which contains all of the adventures of Superman and Batman that don’t quite fit onto teh other two worlds, mostly those that occurred during the no-man’s-land between the end of the Golden Age and the start of the Silver Age. It’s an interesting idea, but very fannish.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
This is fun, and I feel the urge to make some considerations:
– Crisis on I.E. happened around 1986, preventing the Great Disaster to happen, I can’t help thinking the two events are somehow linked (at plot level or editorially)
– Crisis itself basically denies all of the above speculations, stating the multiverse had been created as is at the dawn of times (wich scientifically is quite nonsense, but the story is cool)
– I expected the concept of Haneyverse to be introduced, as all the evidence was there, instead we have this cute Earth-E theory that (to me) finds a place for all the silver-age campy crazyness which I could not place in either Earth One or Two. Thanks, Mark.
– Anyway, I like this a lot more than the computer simulations
– Funny how all the doubts and critical points exposed by Mark and the others could be easily solved by Micheal Keaton’s spaghetti time theory.
– I need to count how many orange triangles show up in COIE.
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