Page - 67 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

The Problem of Evil | 67www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 59–74 tive earth, all roles are inverted: Lex Luthor, usually superman’s nemesis, is the leader of the heroes, while superman’s alter ego is the villains’ leader. Luthor is able to travel from one world to another and asks for the Justice League’s help. the superheroes will travel to the parallel earth to put an end to the crime syndicate’s reign of terror. in this conventional plot, based on Crisis on Infinite Earths (2001) by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, one element stands out. Amongst all the super- heroes’ monstrous doubles, Batman’s alter ego, called Owlman, is the most in- triguing character. He discovers the existence of infinite earths, and in particu- lar that of “earth-prime”, the earth from which all other earths originate. After blackmailing the governments of his world with a weapon of mass destruction, he finally decides to use his weapon on Earth-prime, thus erasing all reality. When his mistress asks him why a man of reason (and, like Batman, he seems to be an extremely rational character) would do such a thing, he claims that the discovery of infinite parallel earths made him realize the vanity of his actions, with the actions of his doubles on other earths nullifying the raison d’être of his actions. He justifies his plan at length: Because it is the only action one could take that would have any purpose … every decision we make is meaningless. Because somewhere, on a parallel earth, we have already made the opposite choice. We are nothing, absolutely nothing. [here, we are rich, we are conquerors], and here we are poor, we are slaves, and here, our parents never met so we were never born. here, the World ended in nuclear war, here, no fish was ever brave enough to crawl up on land and humans never evolved, and so on, ad infinitum19. in the character’s mind, the decision to erase all reality means no other version of him will be able to make an alternative choice. One scientific inspiration of DC’s Multiverse could be the Everett Interpreta- tion, or many-worlds interpretation, in quantum mechanics, formulated in the 1960s.20 One can argue that this theory, extremely popular in the United states and reworked in many science-fiction subgenres (most obviously, perhaps, in Uchronia) was the direct influence on the development of the Multiverse narra- tive in DC Comics. the dynamics of evil, a core aspect of this narrative, is better underlined, however, by a philosophical questioning. indeed, the nihilistic assertion noted above by a character confronted with the painful discovery of infinite earths and his subsequent action articulate two 19 Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths (sam Liu/Lauren Montgomery, Us 2010). 20 Many-worlds interpretation, initially suggested by hugh everett, stipulates in short that all alternate worlds and futures are “real” and that every world that could have been possible because of alternate choices or events in the past actually occurred in other worlds considered alternate realities. this theory is illustrated by the schrödinger’s cat theorem.