Welcome back to Strange Times & Places, where we’re continuing our Multiversal tour with a look at DC’s Earth 13! Not the original plan for this week, but Spooky Town got me thinking “Halloween”.
How’s It Different?
A Royale With Cheese, same as last week. This is a world of 13 hour days of perpetual twilight throughout the 13 month year, where the dark and gothic side of the DC Universe represents the shining ideal. The League of Shadows, lead by the valiant Superdemon, protects this world from that which would do it harm.
What’s The Story?
The most major appearance of this world was in The Multiversity #2, in which they fought off an invasion of their reality by the vampiric Blood League of Earth 43! Fate, based on the 90s version of the character, quickly slayed the vampiric Dr. Sivana mind-controlling his world’s “heroes” while his teammate Annataz (a less showy version of Zatanna) changes the target of the Blood League’s thirst from blood to coffee.
Best of Differences
- Superdemon, whose human alter ego is a priest named Jason Blood, was rocketed to Earth from the dying mystical world of Kamelot! Etrigan posses a lot of the traditional Superman powers as well as “Hellfire Vision”, a version of heat vision weirdly close to that of the angelic version of Supergirl.
- Hellblazer is a much more wholesome, cockney version of John Constantine. He’s based on a superhero version of the character created by Grant Morrison for Doom Patrol #53, though he has little in common with him beyond “Superhero Constantine”.
- Fate is the Jared Stevens version from the 90s, a treasure hunter who re-forged the artifacts of Nabu into much more obviously offensive weapons (specifically, a knife and throwing darts). His quick takedown of Vampire Sivana implies that he’s something of a monster hunter, which is perfect.
- The rest of the League of Shadows is made up of either Vertigo-tinged versions of regular DC mystics (Klarion the Witch Boy as Witch Boy, a glowing humanoid Enchantress, a mummy-esque Ragman, and a zombie version of Deadman) and conventionalized versions of Vertigo heroes (the aforementioned Hellblazer as well as a Swamp Man based on Swamp Thing).
