Flash and Substance

Whatever else one might think about Zero Hour, it acknowledged that wrapping up this version of the Legion of Super-Heroes was a moment worth dwelling on, even if the main miniseries did not give the heroes from the future a great deal of face time.  The LSH issues that crossed over with Zero Hour showed the rapid diminishment of the Legion's cosmos, leaving only the group's founders (well, two versions of them--it's complicated) to remember their past adventures and say their farewells. As a story, Zero Hour may not hold together all that well; its plot is not all that coherent, and it depends on an earlier shark-jumping moment of its own (Green Lantern Hal Jordan's sudden transformation into a genocidal madman). But as a reality-altering event, it does the job it set out to do: revising and erasing timelines, changing the status quo, and giving a set of characters a dramatic sendoff.

Which brings me back to Flashpoint. As a story, Flashpoint is much more cohesive, thanks both to the guiding role of writer Geoff Johns and the alternate world setting, which requires planning and worldbuilding. But in setting up The New 52, Flashpoint had to perform the functions of a different type of story.  It had to motivate the reboot and anchor it within the characters' ongoing stories, but instead, Flashpoint was something that simply happened to them.

Like so many alternate timeline stories, Flashpoint is predicated on the importance of choice and causality.  This is quite different from the old DC multiverse, where parallel universes were essentially independent from one another.  Earth One, where most of DC's stories were told throughout the Silver and Bronze Ages, was different from Earth Two (home of the Golden Age heroes), but not because of a the ramifications of a specific event. Flashpoint is an alternate timeline of the type made famous by Ray Bradbury's 1952  "A Sound of Thunder," where a time traveler steps on a butterfly in the Late Cretaceous period, and the reverberations of this seemingly minor change in history fundamentally alter the "present" from which the travelers arrived (the United States is now run by fascists).

Such stories manage to valorize individual choice while also warning against its exercise: everything we do matters, but once we have done it, choosing to undo it leads to inevitable disaster.  While DC had been exploring its multiverse, Marvel had demonstrated a preoccupation with timelines and time paradoxes, even devoting an entire series (What If?) to one-off tales in which pivotal events in the Marvel universe resolved themselves differently ("What if Phoenix Had Lived?" "What If Spider-Man Had Joined the Fantastic Four?"). In the original run of What If?, alternate timelines were almost always worse than the original.  The hook was to imagine the Marvel Universe taking a different course, but the moral was that deviating from Marvel's established continuity was rarely worth it.

The first volume of What If? ceased publication in November 1984, but by that point, it was no longer the most exciting source of alternate Marvel timelines. that honor had already been taken by The Uncanny X-Men. In the first months of 1981, Chris Claremont and John Byrne raised the stakes by creating an alternate future rather than an alternate present or past:  the two-part Days of Future Past (141-142, January-February 1981) introduced a grim future in which mutants were all but exterminated; an adult Kitty Pride projects her consciousness back to her past (our present) in order to change a key event and prevent her dystopian future from ever occurring.  Claremont and his successors returned to this well frequently, primarily by moving the character of Rachel Summers (the adult daughter of Scott Summers and the then-dead Jean Grey) and Nate Summers (the adult son of Scott Summers and Jean Grey's clone, Madelyne Pryor) into the present day. Eventually, the X-Men introduced numerous other future timelines, crossing them with the present and each other with staggering but compelling complexity.

Marvel was productively messing up its timelines while DC was obsessed with tidying up its multiverse

In 1995-1996,  a few years after Claremont's departure from the franchise, the creative teams on the X-books put together the Age of Apocalypse, a  four-month-long event whose structure was later borrowed for Flashpoint:  all eight of the X-titles were suspended and replaced by alternate timeline variations on their characters and themes.  After Charles Xavier's son, Legion, an unstable mutant whose numerous personalities each had their own superpowers, travels back into the past and accidentally kills his own father before he can found the X-Men, the immortal villain Apocalypse decides to embark on world conquest earlier than he attempted in the main timeline. With no X-Men to oppose him, Apocalypse succeeds, and now the only hope for defeating him lies in a different version of the X-Men run by Magneto. For four months, the X-books explore this timeline, creating an extensive backstory while also building to a suitably apocalyptic finale. When the story is over, the Age of Apocalypse has been undone and the normal timeline restored. The only changes to Marvel reality involve the addition of a few characters who manage to escape the destruction of their world and become refugees in Marvel's main continuity (Nate Grey, the Dark Beast, Sugar Man and Holocaust).

Though the ending of the original story was supposed to undo the Age of Apocalypse and deny it any future, Marvel returned to this alternate timeline on a number of occasions, with guest appearances, specials , a miniseries, and even a short-lived ongoing title, while also making one of its characters (Blink) central to a long-running comic about time-lost heroes traveling to alternate Marvel Earths in order to fix them (The Exiles). [1]  As an event, however, the Age of Apocalypse succeeded in making the characters themselves the crucial part to the establishment and dismantling of the alternate timeline. The X-Men knew that Legion's trip to the past could destroy reality as they knew it, and the versions of them living in the Age of Apocalypse actively chose a course of events that would undo their own existence. The rest of the Marvel Universe was oblivious, but, then, the rest of the Marvel Universe was largely unaffected (once the Age of Apocalypse was ended, their lives continued on the same course as before the event began).

What Flashpoint did was something different. And it was a mess.

Note

[1] The Age of Apocalypse also established a template that the X-Men line would use again in Age of X and Age of X-Man.

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