Marvel Comics Just Dropped A Major Piece of Lore About Its Multiverse

Contains Spoilers for Immortal Thor #11!Marvel’s multiverse is vast and complicated, but a new revelation might just explain why its newest form feels so much more hierarchical and ordered than ever before. As one of the most mysterious Asgardians has just revealed, a major Marvel hero had a profound impact on the multiverse when they once put it back together. It’s this influence that now divides magic and science into distinct camps, even if the person responsible perhaps doesn’t know it.

Immortal Thor #11 reveals that Marvel’s new cosmic status quo is a direct result of the multiverse being created by Reed Richards aka Mister Fantastic.

At the end of 2015’s Secret Wars, the Marvel multiverse was reborn into its current incarnation known as the Eighth Cosmos after the destruction of its previous self. It was Reed Richards who pushed the reset button and returned things to the way they were…mostly. As Bragi, the Asgardian God of Poetry, explains in Immortal Thor #11, this new multiverse follows systematic hierarchies because it was created by Reed, a scientist who thinks logically and neatly.

Marvel’s New Cosmic Order is Just That: Ordered

Reed Richards Created a Universe That Made Sense to Him

As seen in the recent series G.O.D.S., the cosmic order of things in the Marvel Universe is in fact different from previously thought. Science and magic are now cosmic opposites, with a body representing each one: the Natural-Order-Of-Things and The-Powers-That-Be, respectively. If Reed created this dichotomy, and the others described by Bragi, then it would give a neat canon reason why this aspect of the universe has been seen before G.O.D.S., because the old multiverse didn’t work that way. However, this doesn’t mean that this order only came into being when Reed recreated the multiverse chronologically. Instead, it has now always been the case.

The important thing about the Eighth Cosmos, is that it’s near identical to its previous incarnation on most levels except in the realm of cosmic entities and their relationships to each other. After Secret Wars, the events leading to the event’s multiversal destruction were reversed so they never happened, with only a few non-cosmic characters like Reed and Doctor Strange remembering what happened. Series like Ultimates (vol 3) explicitly explored how the multiversal fabric changed, but the majority of books and characters acted like nothing had ever happened.

How Honest is Our Narrator Being?

Mister Fantastic May Be Getting Blamed for Something That’s Not His Fault

That said, there’s a chance that Bragi is exaggerating how much Mister Fantastic influenced this multiverse. After all, Bragi is the God of Poetry, and he seems a little displeased at how ordered things are. He describes the shift from the Seventh Cosmos to the Eighth as a move from “poetry to prose,” an implicit dig at his role as poet being made somewhat redundant by Loki, God of Stories. Loki themselves distrusts Bragi, and Bragi, who is also revealed as Immortal Thor’s narrator in #11,could be manipulating things for his own purpose, including decrying this new order.

If Bragi is being either dishonest or biased in his telling of multiversal structures, it would fit right into one of Immortal Thor’s core themes: the telling of stories and how controlling a narrative can magically change the world of the story itself. As the series’ narrator, Bragi clearly has prescient and perhaps metatextual knowledge of the story. Is he trying to mislead his kin? Or is he misleading the readers themselves? As Thor and his family investigate the world of G.O.D.S. in Immortal Thor #11-12, it’s worth keeping an eye on exactly how Bragi frames the story.

Does Reed Know What He’s Done to the Multiverse?

His Subconscious Could Have Created the New Multiversal Structure

One question is whether Mister Fantastic had any conscious decision about how the new multiverse would be ordered. While Reed had to actively work to create parts of the multiverse, at least Earth and other major Marvel fixtures immediately popped back into existence with no obvious interference or changes from Reed. It’s entirely possible that Reed subconsciously ordered the multiverse into its new form without ever realizing he’d done it. However, if this were the case, why would it only be the abstract entities that changed when Reed rebuilt everything, and not the broader world?

Reed Isn’t Exactly Unbiased When It Comes to Magic

Mister Fantastic Had to Be Forced Into Admitting Magic is Real

That said, this new order could reflect how Reed has always thought the multiverse operates. In Fantastic Four vol 3 #68-70 and Fantastic Four vol 1 #500’s story “Unthinkable,” Doctor Doom traps Mister Fantastic. Reed’s only means of escape is to admit that magic is real, and that some things can’t be explained by science.

Reed Richards, before this story, has never believed in magic, even when meeting characters like Doctor Strange, instead attempting to rationalize it as unknown science. With this attitude, it’s no surprise that Reed might still subconsciously put magic and science in mutually exclusive categories.

Reed himself appears in G.O.D.S. #1 as a cameo alongside other scientists allied closer to The-Natural-Order-of-Things and shows no acknowledgment that this new order may be his doing. However, G.O.D.S. isn’t a story about Reed, so it isn’t really an indication of whether he knows what impact he’s had on the multiversal structure. It is, however, a potentially revealing moment for Reed because it’s a reminder that he didn’t put himself, or his precious science, above magic in this new order. This shows him acknowledging magic’s importance to the universe, a far cry from his initial stance in “Unthinkable.”

Jonathan Hickman Laid the Groundwork for a Lot of Marvel’s Multiverse

One of the fun things about laying credit at Reed’s feet for this new multiversal order is how it ties together the stories of writer Jonathan Hickman, who wrote both Secret Wars and G.O.D.S. By tying together the two books, Immortal Thor writer Al Ewing can softly retcon Hickman’s contributions while simultaneously paying respect to him as well. One could even argue that Ewing is metatextually referring not to Reed through Bragi, but to Hickman himself, as Hickman is also obsessed with dichotomies and parallel groups, and is the one who “rebooted” the Marvel Universe in 2015 with Secret Wars.

Hickman himself may already be involved in this retcon as well. Hickman and Ewing have worked closely before, and G.O.D.S., which is still incomplete, has continually referenced the previous incarnation of the multiverse. This sugggests that Hickman is still thinking about how the transition from the Seventh to the Eighth Cosmos works. Ewing could have talked with Hickman before writing a Thor tie-in to G.O.D.S., and this new multiversal lore could partially be a result of their collaboration. As both series reveal more about the multiverse, who knows what else may be revealed about the very fabric of Marvel’s reality?