Page - 66 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

66 | Toufic El-Khoury www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 59–74 action good if it only generates chaos? this question seems to haunt modern superheroes, since their fight is endless. Despite their efforts and good will, their involvement in the world’s affairs does not restore a lost equilibrium, but instead generates new distortions. Condemned by their chosen actions to a punishment worthy of Sisyphus, they multiply their efforts but appear to ac- knowledge, in the end, the vanity of those efforts. The frequent borrowings of dystopian elements during the iron Age contribute to this growing feeling of fatalism, and of a sense that the modern hero is unable to change anything in the world from what it is condemned to be – or to become.17 this modern superhero inability places the superhero within a long tradition of anti-heroes, initiated by Don Quixote and prevalent in modern literature. Like Cervantes’ hero, the superhero genre protagonists are helplessly willing to fol- low a given ideal or any recognizable paragon of moral rigour. DC COMiCs’ MULtiVerse: AN irONiC iLLUstrAtiON Of LeiBNiZ’s theODiCy? While Marvel sets up its own cosmogony with its layers and hierarchies, DC Comics prefers to create parallel worlds and timelines that can interact thanks to the ability of some protagonists (flash, Lex Luthor) to travel from one world to another. The Multiverse, made up of an infinity of earths that serve as mirrors for one another, was introduced in the 1960s but elaborated in the 1980s. it al- lows the implementation of many versions of the worlds created by DC Comics, and above all of different versions of their iconic characters: DC authors rework and reinvent their origin stories and their profile, restart popular narrative arcs and erase less popular ones.18 in addition to its obvious promotional potential, the Multiverse also enables new and diverse thematic ramifications. in one of the DC Universe animated movies, this story arc is developed sub- stantially. Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths (sam Liu/Lauren Montgomery, US 2010) centres on the conflict between the usual DC heroes, reunited in the Justice League (superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and flash are all mem- bers), and their alter egos from another earth, who compose a group called the “crime syndicate” that spreads terror in the parallel world. in this alterna- 17 in the 21st episode (of 23) of season four of Arrow (Greg Berlanti, Us 2015–2016), an atomic missile launched by the season’s villain explodes in an American town, causing the death of “tens of thousands”. What could have been that season’s high point, or the catastrophe the protagonists of the show tried to prevent for all 23 episodes, becomes the climax of a single episode, and the hero and his allies live it with a strange kind of resignation. the higher stakes of the next episode (the end of the world) might seem to explain the banality to which the event has been reduced, but perhaps the explanation lies in a sort of narrative laziness or, maybe worse, in the fact that in the contemporary superhero universe, an end-of-the-world narrative is not something a superhero tries to fight or avoid: the superhero must ultimately simply accept its inevitability. the superhero is not a shield against the dooming of the world, but just a “beacon of hope”, as the protagonists say, in a doomed world. 18 see Pagello 2013, 2–3.