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What do you think of Society of Superheroes : Conquerors of the Counter-world ?

While my favorite of the alternate Earths pitched in Multiversity would actually be Earth 13, Earth 20 I think could have easily sustained a strong ongoing if they ever come back to it. It approaches it's "pulp" aspect not nearly as over-the-top as it could have (and that's a compliment), especially considering how over-the-top the rest of Multiversity and Grant Morrison's work can get, instead it's just exaggerated enough to align up with what you'd expect from comic book superheroes reinterpreted through pulp hero lenses.

I love that the main cast here is not comprised of Justice League analogues. I'm fairly sure that if you asked most people, most writers or artists, to create a "pulp take on the DC universe", you'd end up centering around the story around "retro" recreations of the Justice League, like Superman as a Doc Savage adventurer or Batman as a gun-toting vigilante, but here you have these characters from much more varied sources that only required the smallest of tweaking to be convincingly genuine pulp heroes, still following along some of the general archetypes but solid enough to stand on their own, even if you remove the entirety of the DCU around them, even if you somehow transported them back into a 1930s time period. I really gotta give it credit for how genuine it's characters feel even if they weren't designed to last. Doc Fate in particular I'm pretty sure could easily work as a stand-alone character in the DCU, if not the outright replacement for Dr Fate. He definitely seems more popular.

Something that I particularly like about it is also that a substantial part of the story is devoted to the heroes grappling with the changes being brought about their world, as a result of the invasion both from the neighboring supervillains as well as the general story of Multiversity. Doc Fate is forced to hook up a character to a torture brainwashing device (a reference to Doc Savage's own brainwashing programs), and he remarks of his own fears towards his growing lack of humanity. The Mighty Atom, the team's youngest and most innocent member, briefly despairs over the fact that he's had to kill someone. And Vandal Savage's final line is his remarking that he's won by turning the heroes into killers, as it's his murder that calls forth Niczhuotan, The Destroyer of Worlds, who looms menacingly over the final page.

While I'd hardly call it a "debate", it's an interesting perspective to explore the "superheroes who kill" aspect that's pervaded so many discussions of superheroes and pulp heroes alike. The DCU's superheroes are mostly defined by their refusal to kill, it's the one thing it's two major icons have in common above all else, and of course, it's something that a lot of the more famous pulp heroes didn't have a problem with. Here, the fact that these superheroes are being forced to kill and resort to desperate tactics to combat the growing menace is framed as one of the many ways in which everything is going to hell in the multiverse. None of these guys wanted to kill or injure anyone when they signed up for the Society, of course they don't, they are old school DC superheroes. But they don't live in a DC superhero world, they live in a pulp hero world where they've spent the last 5 years desperately fighting off the invasion of pirates that only wish to spread, in Savage's own words, "rape and cruelty", and lacking the superpowers and great moral high ground and perpetual safety of status quo of the DCU proper, and when their science and superpowers fail, they must resort to that oldest and most barbaric of tools, here best embodied through the stone and spear that the two immortals wield in their final duel. I would very much like to read a story about the fallout and rebuilding of society in the aftermath.

Earth 40 is another concept I would like to see explored more in-depth. Like with Earth 20, I very much appreciate the choices of supervillains in this, and particularly the fact that it's Vandal Savage here leading the pack. I retract my statement of Ra's al Ghul as the DCU's premier Pulp Supervillain, because in retrospective, Vandal Savage has always been the most qualified for that position and the only one who's actually been used in that specific capacity. They do a good job as a great menace able to shake up the foundations of the world they are opposite to.

However, while I don't think this could have been dwelved into in the span of just one issue, the premise of "A DC world but ruled by pulp villains" actually does have more potential than was ever suggested by what these issues brought, and Earth 40 does come across to me as a bit of wasted potential. As I've argued before, pulp supervillains have a long and fascinating history, and supervillains in itself are a concept that's really evolved and grown (and possibly born alltogether) in the pulps, long before comic books and their superheroes. Superman may be considered the first superhero with only some dispute, but long before him, we had supervillains with a capital S like Fantomas and Fu Manchu and Zenith and Dr Jack Quartz running rampant, and supervillains from even before the American pulps proper like Count Fosco, Father Rodin and The Black Coats, characters that were indisputably supervillains by every definition.

The real life history of the supervillain as a concept, it's biggest players from before comics, and the decades by which the supervillain predates the superhero, have never factored into The Big Two's superhero universes (or even any superhero universes I can think of) in the ways that the superhero's history has, so having an alternate Earth to explore that I think could be a very interesting idea and would allow Earth 40 to work even separately from it's conflict with Earth 20.