The DC Comics Alternate Realities We Want to See in the Peacemaker Finale

This post contains spoilers for Peacemaker season 2.

For as different as James Gunn‘s DC Universe has felt to the one that Kevin Feige built at Marvel, they do share one trope unavoidable to modern franchises. They both deal with the multiverse. We’ve had a taste of the multiverse in Peacemaker‘s second season, in which Chris Smith visits Earth-X, a seemingly perfect world that was actually conquered by Nazis.

But according to teases from James Gunn, next week’s finale for Peacemaker season 2 is going to be the real multiverse of madness, as the 11th Street Kids try to assist (or escape) ARGUS by going through doors and hallways that lead to other worlds.

The idea of a Scooby-Doo style romp is appropriate, given that Gunn wrote the screenplays for the two Scooby-Doo movies in the 2000s. It’s also appropriate because, traditionally, alternate realities are more of a DC Comics concept than in Marvel. Marvel didn’t even coin the phrase “Earth-616” until 1983, two years before DC got so overwhelmed with their existing alternate realities that they decided to trash them all in Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Of course, the multiverse came back at DC, most recently fully explained in Grant Morrison‘s Multiversity event from 10 years ago, which may have been incorporated into Peacemaker. In other words, there are still a lot of alternate realities that we want to see when Chris Smith and the 11th Street Kids take walk through in the multiverse.

Earth-0

Earth-0 is the Bizarro Earth, home to the Superman derivation known, appropriately enough, as Bizarro. Earth-0 began as a goofy Silver Age concept, a world in which everything was blocky and backwards, where people said “Goodbye” when they meant “Hello.” From the Bronze Age on, writers have largely ignored Earth-0, reimagining Bizarro not as a Superman from a backward dimension, but as a Lex Luthor-made clone of Superman gone terribly wrong.

Anyone who saw Superman knows that those writers include James Gunn, whose Ultraman sure played a lot like Bizarro. Those people may remember that Ultraman was sent through a black hole at the end of the movie. Could that black hole lead to Earth-0? And could Peacemaker, which was shooting at the same time as Superman and already had a cameo from Nicholas Hoult as Luthor, visit Earth-0 as well?

Earth-2

Even if your DC knowledge goes no further than the Arrowverse on CW, then you know Earth-2. But to fully understand this reality, you need to know a little comic book industry history. DC started the Golden Age of comics with the introduction of Superman in 1938, but superheroes had fallen out of favor by the end of World War II. They became popular again when DC started the Silver Age by reimagining the Flash, Green Lantern, and others in the 1950s. Eventually, DC decided to bring back those Golden Age heroes by establishing that they live on Earth-2, where Jay Garrick is the Flash, Alan Scott is Green Lantern, and so on.

When DC combined the Earths in the Crisis, they established that the Golden Age heroes were predecessors to the Silver Age heroes, and kept them around as older mentors. Superman seemed to suggest that Gunn was following the same model, as the timeline in the movie’s opening leaves room for a long lineage and Golden Age heroes like Wildcat and Starman appear on the mural in the Hall of Justice. However, that doesn’t mean that Gunn can’t give these same heroes a world of their own on Earth-2.

Earth-4

Earth-4 is the world most likely to show up on Peacemaker because it is, in the larger DC Comics cosmology, Christopher Smith’s original home. By this point, most people know that Peacemaker, Judomaster, and others were originally created by Charlton Comics, a publisher that began operation in 1940. Charlton stopped publishing superheroes in 1967 and, in 1983, the characters were acquired by DC Comics.

Although there was briefly talk of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons using the Charlton characters for Watchmen (when the idea was abandoned, Moore and Gibbons created analogues, so Peacemaker became the Comedian, the Question became Rorschach, etc.), they were integrated into the DCU proper with Crisis on Infinite Earths. Earth-4, however, imagines a world where the Charlton characters were the only heroes, albeit with a Watchmen-esque twist.

Earth-5

Like Earth-4, Earth-5 is the original home of characters created by another publisher and acquired by DC Comics later. Namely, this is the home of Captain Marvel (a.k.a. Shazam) and others published by Fawcett Comics. The demise of Fawcett is complicated and litigious; suffice it to say that when DC acquired the rights to those characters, they originally kept them in their own reality, dubbed Earth-S. As with most cases, Earth-S was integrated into the mainline DCU in Crisis, but the reestablishment of Earth-S/Earth-5 means that there’s still a place where Captain Marvel is still the Big Red Cheese.

Yet, this seems like an unlikely stop for the 11th Street Kids. Even if other outlets took Gunn’s comments about the inclusion of the 11th Street Kids in Shazam: Fury of the Gods and Black Adam (shared originally with Den of Geek!) out of context, it sure seems like he’s not going to continue with those versions of the characters. And surely, we would have heard by now if he’s cast someone else as a member of the Captain Marvel family.

Earth-43

The one image that we’ve seen of an alternate Earth in the Peacemaker finale features a giant skull spider. That sure sounds like something that would appear on Earth-43, a nightmare reality where heroes are monsters. The most famous resident of Earth-43 is the Batman from the Elseworlds story Red Reign, in which the Dark Knight became a creature of the night after being bitten by a vampire. But DC has hinted that all of the Justice Leaguers in this reality are bloodsuckers, not just the Caped Crusader.

Beyond the one image leaked already, the best reason for believing that Earth-43 might make an appearance in Peacemaker is the one human hero it still has: Adam Strange. For the uninitiated, Adam Strange is a space-traveling sci-fi hero from the Silver Age, exactly the type of weirdo that Gunn loves to include in his work.

Earth-86

This one is a deep pull for comic book nerds. Earth-86 is the world of a post-apocalyptic future created by Jack Kirby, where a nuclear war has ravaged society, giving animals the power of speech and making Kamandi the last boy on Earth.

Earth-86 is a favorite of people who love weird comics (like Grant Morrison!), and Gunn has already used a variation of that world’s Atomic Knights in Creature Commandos. However, no one has been able to do Kirby concepts as well as King Kirby himself, so Gunn may not be excited about taking on the whole world.

Earth-C

Earth-C is another one that only the big nerds want to see. But guess what, James Gunn is a big nerd, and before he took on The Suicide Squad, Earth-C’s denizens were more recognizable than the Peacemaker.

Earth-C is the home to Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew, in which super-powered anthropomorphic funny animals band together in a Justice League equivalent called the Just a Lotta Animals. Is it silly? Yes! But with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse making Spider-Ham a household name, the time is right for Gunn to do the same with Fastback the turtle, Rubberduck, and Yankee Poodle.

Peacemaker season 2 finale streams October 9 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.