Category: Notes on a Multiverse

I’ve been looking for a way into a big MCU rewatch for some time now. I think I’ve found it — for a long time the thought was, real, proper essays, real, formal writing. Really sit down and write a psychochronography in spandex. But I’m not an essayist, I’m not that kind of writer, not really.¹Obviously I do excel in the form when asked to do it, but let’s be honest with ourselves. I’m a cartoonist, I write adventure stories meant to be read in three to seven panels a day. I suppose I’m also: A blogger.

And so I’m gonna blog through it, with a series of pre-written, scheduled blogs inspired by this rewatch. Let’s kick that off with a big idea, a concept adjacent to the idea of canon that I’d like to lay out for you.²If this were an essay I might write up a short history of the idea of canon, shared universes, and my relationship to these ideas. But it’s not an essay! Blogs, baby! My assumed audience here already knows about this stuff!

You’ve heard about canon, now get ready for — Psychocanon.

These are the stories of the Zeitgeist, the stories we’re thinking of, and the other stories the people telling us stories want us to be thinking about.

Psychocanon exists at both a macro and a micro level, an entire franchise can have a psychocanon that overlaps with but does not encompass all of what a single, granular instalment of it has floating around it.

The ’92 X-Men cartoon gets so vigorously invoked by every brief appearance of the X-Men in the MCU now that they’re finally allowed to show up that it’s clearly psychocanonical to the MCU — Disney/Marvel Studios want you to be thinking of it every time the theme tune whispers into your ears, they want you to think of it when Charles Xavier shows up in a ’92-style wheelchair, his ’92-style costume, down to the tie. They’re invoking it at least as much as they are the Fox X-Men movies. They’ve also now just straight up brought it back with X-Men ’97.

On the other hand, take something like the Netflix Marvel shows — clearly nobody making Daredevil really wanted you to be thinking about Agents of SHIELD or Agent Carter, or even Guardians of the Galaxy or Ant-Man. When you’re watching those Netflix shows, they’re in their own little bubble — nothing, except maybe the vague idea that there are Avengers out there somewhere, is truly psychocanonical to them. But in the other direction, they are, by their inclusion of characters from Daredevil, psychocanonical to Spider-Man: No Way Home, Hawkeye, She-Hulk, etcetera. And you can pretend all you like, but clearly Helstrom isn’t psychocanonical to anything at all. ³I haven’t even heard a good case for it being the regular ol’ kind of canonical, frankly. Hi Ti.

A rewatch of the MCU psychocanon would include all the movies, including the Sony and Fox ones, all the Disney+ shows, and Green Lantern, the ’92 X-Men but not more than the first few seasons of Agents of SHIELD, and for all that it’s nice to see Jarvis pop up in Endgame, not Agent Carter, either, not really.⁴If Agent Carter is in it’s because of Agents of SHIELD, not because of any of the movies. Inhumans? Doesn’t exist. The Princess Bride? A keystone.

For a Doctor Who example: The original Toymaker story is clearly psychocanonical to Doctor Who 60th anniversary special The Giggle, they show clips of it as a flashback, but The Nightmare Fair and Solitaire clearly aren’t — the whole story of The Giggle is that we’re watching the second round of a best of three. Neither, for all that the specials go out of their way to remind you of the Flux and other major elements from the Chibnall era, is The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos. Nothing that happens in that one matters to the specials, it just doesn’t. The same is true for The Krotons and Planet of Evil and the caveman bits of An Unearthly Child and hundreds of other stories — though Ranskoor av Kolos is clearly just not sticking around in the zeitgeist the way the larger story of Dr Who being adopted is.

Let’s chuck in a second and related idea: Historia.⁵I’m open to a better word for this idea — the one on the original post-it is “chronicanon,” but that’s clunky, awkward.

Where a canon cares about which stories count, and psychocanon cares about what those stories want you to be thinking about, a historia is concerned with the story of something.

No list of which Doctor Who stories “count” would include the Peter Cushing films, or Scream of the Shalka⁶This is how you can tell I wrote this in May., or The Curse of Fatal Death. But if you’re interested not in “watching all of Doctor Who” but in a broader “story of Doctor Who,” these are crucial chapters of that story — the show itself doesn’t capture Dalekmania, most Dalek stories aren’t even that good, but the Daleks were big enough in the culture that they were the main draw of two blockbuster films, Scream of the Shalka was “new Doctor Who” a year and a half before Rose was, and the entire Moffat era is to The Curse of Fatal Death as, in the words of Douglas Adams, “the whole of creation—every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history” is to “one small piece of fairy cake.”

So what’s “the story of the MCU,” what’s its historia? As I write this, on 5 May, 2024, I haven’t really laid down a roadmap for it yet. I will, and it’ll be the subject of a future post, but I haven’t done it yet. But I know where it starts.

Now, you could go further back than I do. Just writing this, I’ve realised there’s at least one thing I should cover from before where I’ve started. There’s nothing stopping you saying, the historia of the MCU starts at the first performed adaptation of a Marvel comic — the 1944 Captain America serial, where Captain America is a District Attorney called Grant Gardner. Nothing in the MCU, no real part of it, really builds on it, but you could probably make the argument for it.

But the argument I’d like to make is this, and I’m gonna keep this simple. It’s March 1990. Having championed the otherwise unsuccessful Pryde of the X-Men pilot, Margaret Loesch, the head of Fox Children’s Network, commissions thirteen episodes of an X-Men cartoon. It does very well, and inspired by its success, Lauren Schuler Donner at 20th Century Fox buys the film rights, and finally, after decades of various attempts by various studios and filmmakers that all ended in development hell, brings the X-Men to the big screen with 2000’s X-Men. The success of that film convinces Sony the Spider-Man concept can carry a film, which it does, in 2002, after Sony buys the rights for a mere $7 million. The success of these films together — and the… different amount of success enjoyed by films like Hulk and Daredevil — is why Avi Arad goes to Marvel and says, let’s do this properly.

So how does a multiverse start? How does a… good multiverse start? Hell, how do you start a universe. Just a regular one seems to be hard to do on purpose. So how does a multiverse start? Definitely not in a board room that sets out to start a multiverse. That can only lead to disaster. It’s more likely to start by accident. For someone to make one thing that… mutates into another thing. Maybe, just maybe… It starts with a girl’s foster parents calling the authorities on her, and with her wondering how she, dressed the most like a main character anyone has ever dressed, could be so different as to warrant it. Maybe, just maybe… It starts with mutants.

(Thanks, Margaret.)

Earths encountered:

• Earth-One — The X-Men ’92 home universe.
  • Earth-One-A — Days of Future Past ’92 — X-Men ’92’s Bishop’s home timeline.⁷Though the Days of Future Past future is usually presented as the future of the universe it’s related to, the story of Days of Future Past is the story of making sure the events we see depicted never happen.
    • Earth-One-A-A — The one Bishop creates by going back to Earth-One from Earth-One-A and saving Senator Kelly, in which Senator Kelly then gets kidnapped, anyway.
      • Earth-One-A-A-A — Only implied so far, Cable’s home timeline, the one Bishop creates by trying again from Earth-One-A-A.

The earliest draft of this post is dated March 8, 2024. 56 words of that first draft have made it to this final 1465-word blog post. It was finished on May 5, 2024, with a final round of edits to prepare it for publication on July 20, 2024.

• 1
  Obviously I do excel in the form when asked to do it, but let’s be honest with ourselves.
• 2
  If this were an essay I might write up a short history of the idea of canon, shared universes, and my relationship to these ideas. But it’s not an essay! Blogs, baby! My assumed audience here already knows about this stuff!
• 3
  I haven’t even heard a good case for it being the regular ol’ kind of canonical, frankly. Hi Ti.
• 4
  If Agent Carter is in it’s because of Agents of SHIELD, not because of any of the movies.
• 5
  I’m open to a better word for this idea — the one on the original post-it is “chronicanon,” but that’s clunky, awkward.
• 6
  This is how you can tell I wrote this in May.
• 7
  Though the Days of Future Past future is usually presented as the future of the universe it’s related to, the story of Days of Future Past is the story of making sure the events we see depicted never happen.