Oolong Island
Does an island count as a city? Possibly not, but as anyone who read DC Comics' 52 knows, Oolong is no ordinary island. Populated almost entirely by mad scientists (and maybe a couple of sane ones, too), Oolong Island is a place where the old laws (of physics) no longer apply, and there's no such thing as a bad scientific breakthrough, only one that needs to be stopped from destroying the world as we know it by resident superteam, the Doom Patrol. But what else could you expect from a place where scientists are encouraged to indulge in mind-altering substances to further free their minds?

Platinum Flats
Whereas the real world has Silicon Valley, former Batgirl Barbara Gordon and her Birds of Prey have Platinum Flats, which proclaims itself as "America's High-Tech Capital" and home to all manner of upstart start-ups like YouSpace, MacroWare, NetCracker, Findster (Well, it is an alternate Earth, after all) and has eradicated problems like crime and urban decay thanks to its well-heeled and inventive inhabitants. Better living through technology indeed.

Haven
What's the quickest way to suddenly have a city full of advanced technology in your backyard? Have an alien spacecraft crash into it. That's what happened in the DC Universe's version of California (As if having Green Lantern's "Coast City" midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles wasn't enough), which suddenly found itself with an extra-terrestrial prison full of political prisoners dumped onto its coast in the early '2000s series Haven. On the plus side, the US Government granted them city status, in exchange for some of their tasty new technology. Let's just work on that whole "retro-engineering so we can use it without tentacles" thing, shall we?

Big Town
In 2000, Marvel Comics wondered what would've happened if, instead of using their genius to fight crime, Reed Richards, Tony Stark and the rest of their superheroic scientist buddies actually invented things to benefit society. According to Fantastic Four: Big Town, the result is a futuristic New York, which quickly becomes the center of civilization, expands to include nearby cities in other states, and destabilizes society as we know it. But, on the plus side, unstable molecules really cut down on your laundry costs.

Atlantis
Whether it's Marvel or DC Comics, there's an undersea city of Atlantis, and they're more technologically advanced than us. Marvel's Atlanteans prefer to travel is super-science submarines while they consider their latest plans to invade the surface world for whatever unconvincing reason they've been duped into believing this week, while DC's undersea dwellers have the distinction of having a civilization that started long before man had even crawled from the sea, and therefore having a head-start on the rest of us. Of course, if they were really that smart, they'd have worked out how to stay out of the water for more than an hour at a time, but apparently they were too busy telepathically communicating with whales to be troubled by such thoughts.

Attilan
Maybe the only people who can deal with the world of tomorrow today are scientifically-advanced themselves... like Marvel Comics' Inhumans, whose millennia-old city is so advanced that it has not only withstood being transported throughout space (literally; for awhile, it existed on the moon) but has also proven capable of physically transforming itself into a spaceship when needs be. See? Humans end up turning scientifically-advanced cultures into disasters, but Inhumans are apparently smart enough to turn change to their advantage.

Electropolis
Dean Motter's most recent take on the idea of the futuristic city (from his 1999 series of the same name) offered a different take on the idea: the retrofuturistic city, founded on decades old ideas about the future that're still ahead of their time. "Cathedral-sized Van Der Graaf generators and towering Strickfadden machines" may sound oddly outdated to us now, but this city still managed to have robot detectives, flying cars and an on-time metro service unlike the modern world we live in.

Metropolis
What better home for the Man of Tomorrow than the self-declared City of Tomorrow? Superman's adopted hometown may be best known for its major metropolitan newspaper, but consider all of the mad scientists that Superman faces on a regular basis, to say nothing of the alien technology, scientific establishments to clean up after superbattles and even the wonderfully-named Science Police, and it's pretty clear that there's more to this forward-thinking city than depending on print media. The city even has a street dedicated to scientific institutions called The Avenue of Tomorrow. What could be more perfect than that?

Marvel Comics are keeping their side of the bargain, admittedly; if you're not interested in the hardcover reprint of poorly-drawn 1980s miniseries Kitty Pryde and Wolverine or the Skrulls! oneshot (pretty much a collection of fact files to bring you up to speed about Secret Invasion's Secret Invaders), then you're pretty much limited to two books: the reprint of the first couple of issues of the Halo: Uprising comic to remind you what happened now that the end is finally nigh, and the far-more-enjoyable-than-it-has-any-right-to-be 500th issue of Uncanny X-Men, where the team moves to San Francisco and parties at the SFMoMA. In other weeks, it'd easily be the must-have book of the week.

Sadly, though, DC are doing their best to claim that title for themselves with the long-long-long awaited return of Ambush Bug in Ambush Bug: Year None, wherein Keith Giffen's fourth-wall breaking snarkfest takes the last five years of DC's output to task for being confusing, depressing and just plain not fun. You know you want to read that. Collections-wise, you can catch up on space religion in the unfortunately-named-but-actually-fun Countdown To Adventure (starring Animal Man, Starfire and Adam Strange from 52), catch up on the joys of matrimony with Green Arrow/Black Canary: The Road To The Altar, and catch up on how the mighty have fallen with Authority: Prime, where superhero comics' one-time most daring title is reduced to generic continuity schlock. If that last sentence made no sense to you, then perhaps you should avoid superheroes altogether and pick up the X-Files Special, instead.

Image Comics are also making a strong showing this week: The next big Witchblade storyline begins in the first issue of Broken Trinity, Mark Millar and Tony Harris get their political satire on with the debut of War Heroes, Mike Allred's Madman questions reality in the first collection of Madman Atomic Comics, and Tori Amos finally becomes the comic character she's always wanted to be in the indie-creator-tastic anthology Comic Book Tattoo.

And just in case none of that is enough for you, consider the two takes on post-Buffy female heroes available in the indie comicsphere this week: Oni Press' The Apocalypstix finally bring their post-nuclear brand of rock, roll and kick-ass to stores at the same time as Cassie Hack of po-mo horror book Hack/Slash teams up with real-life emo pornlets in the Hack/Slash Annual Featuring The Suicide Girls. And, yes, I wish I was joking about that last one as well.

As ever! All of these books and many, many, more are listed here for your perusal and, if you've somehow made it this far without knowing where your local comic book store happens to be, you can find that out by clicking here. It's probably a great week to go to the store, really, because chances are they may be really quiet...

Physicists disagree violently as to whether more than one version of our universe may exist. The usual fantasy of alternate universes comes from shows like Star Trek or Doctor Who, where you visit another universe and everything's the same except evil, and with more eyepatches or different facial hair. Here's the evil Worf from an alternate universe enjoying some fun leash-play with Garak, from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
DC's current weekly comic, Countdown to Final Crisis, featured a long backup feature called "History Of The Multiverse," in which a group of identical men with weird hair tried to summarize every comic in which someone had visited an alternate universe.For some reason, in DC Comics, the only people who are different in the alternate universes are superheroes, so that Batman is married and has kids, or is a pirate, or was around during World War II. We never see an ordinary person who has different versions in different universes, except maybe for the mail-carrier who starred in that weird crossover between the Milestone and DC universes in the 1990s.

So I was super curious to hear what DiDio, who masterminded the return of the multiverse, would say about its appeal. Is there a philosophical background to the obsession with seeing how things could have turned out differently? The first time I asked DiDio, at the DC Nation panel, he said "Good question" and then didn't really answer. I pressed him a bit more, and here's what he said:

The DC Universe has been built on the multiverse concept. We wanted to bring it back to show the strength of that concept and the multiple interpretations of the characters. And now we're going to focus on the current universe and the current versions of the characters.

These answers made sense (especially the part about nostalgia) but they didn't really satisfy me. I wanted to know what it was about alternate timelines that so fascinated a group of writers and editors in their thirties and forties. Was there some intrinsic appeal to the idea of being able to see how your life might have shaped up if you'd made a different set of decisions?

So I cornered DiDio in the hallway a while later, and asked him again what he thought was so intrinsically fascinating about the multiverse. This time, he said it's all about business. He hadn't wanted to give that answer on the panel, because it's boring, but it's also true. DC Comics went on an acquisition binge during the Silver Age, buying up Charlton Comics, Fawcett Comics and a host of other publishers. Because each publisher had its own stable of superhero characters (like Fawcett's Shazam), who barely fit in with the DC characters, it made more sense to pretend that each cast of characters came from a different universe. And then, as the crossovers between the different acquisitions' "universes" became more colorful, they became a fun thing in their own right. As for why DC is revisiting the idea of different universes now, it still seemed to come down to nostalgia, and trying to recharge some old properties.

I never quite got the answer I was hoping for, about the reasons why alternate universes might seem glamorous and exciting to the DC crew. But maybe if I corner Grant Morrison or Dan Jurgens next time, I'll have more luck.