Mostly Lurking

I've never been particularly invested in Atlantis at either Marvel or DC. It's there. It's fine. The standout elseworld interpretation of the thing, though, is hands down the version present in Tangent Comics.

To recap, the premise of Tangent Comics was that in the late 90s, DC took a bunch of the golden age characters who'd been reinvented from the ground up during the 1960s (Green Lantern, The Flash, The Atom etc.) and repeated the process for the 1990s in an alt-history shared universe. Some characters continued the one-upsmanship in present in the shift from the golden age to the Silver age- Tangent Flash being an energy-being who could teleport instead of a speedster- and some of the characters invoked the abandoned core of the original golden age concepts, Green Lantern being a mystical vigilante psychopomp whose lantern allowed her to command ghosts. But how they handled Atlantis was extremely compelling.

Rather than an ancient undersea society, Atlantis and Atlanteans have only existed in the Tangent Comics university since the 1960s, when a botched attempt by The Atom to resolve the Cuban missile crisis resulted in the American Southeast getting nuked out of existence and World War Three kicking off. In what amounts to the Atlantis/Atlanta joke from Futurama played deadly seriously, the Sea Devils- the setting's collective analog for Aquaman- are B-movie nuclear mutants that evolved from sea life exposed to the sunken radioactive remains of Georgia. They're between a rock and a hard place; the coasts have been recolonized by Utopian eugenicists who've identified them as the new Outgroup recipient of that famed Southern Hospitality, and even worse nuclear horrors are constantly pouring out of the deeper waters to attack them in the shallows in which they're fighting for space with the humans.

The Red Axis measures Historical Inertia, how much the existence of superhumans causes the timeline to diverge from our own. A high-red setting represents the standard implausibly-recognizable like-reality-unless-noted world-outside-your-window model. A low-red setting is a total alternate history.

The Gold Axis measures Superhuman Inertia (talent inertia in their internal jargon, but we've all got our own names for these assholes.) This one measures how closely superhumans hew to classic paradigms of heroism and villainy, as opposed to branching out into other societal roles or life outcomes. A high-gold setting is the prototypical endless monthly game of cops and robbers; A low-gold setting would be something like Wild Cards or Top 10, where career superheroes are a rounding error (or even a downright oddity) compared to people with powers.

The Blue Axis measures what they term The Lovely and the Pointless- essentially how much weirdness exists outside the superheroes themselves, or, more practically, how unified the setting's cosmology and power sources are. High-Blue settings are the bizarre and irreconcilable genre kitchen sinks full of aliens, gods, magicians, one million ways to get superpowers and three different kinds of time travel. Low Blue settings would be The Boys, Worm, or Wild Cards- any setting where there's a discrete reason that superhumans happened and nothing supernatural going on outside of that point of origin.

The Black Axis measures Moral Clarity, which is about what it sounds like. High Black Settings are the cartoonishly-clear-cut battles of good and evil, low black settings are omnidirectional amoral clusterfucks where the participants have superpowers.

(The joke, of course, being that if you crank all four colors up all the way, you end up with a full CMYK print, and a reproduction of the aesthetic of classic golden and silver age superhero faire.)

Obviously this isn't a perfect system- it suffers from the perennial, probably inevitable issue that the four of these don't granulate equally well but they feel the need to articulate five nodes for each of them, just to keep it neat- and consequentially it sometimes feels a little like they're struggling to justify why some of the arrangements that they're describing are meaningfully distinct from the nearest tick up or down the axis. I'm also not entirely sure how it integrates this fifth axis I think is pretty important- the question of the degree to which the public is aware of superhumans at all.

Call it the Orange Axis which measures and I struggled to name this, but something like Status Quo permanence an awkward name. Related to the Red axis, but about individuals more than setting though obviously there is a bleed-through. High Orange, would be a sticky status quo, where characters don't stay dead, no one gets married or has a kid. Highest possible Orange would be something like Roadrunner vs Coyote, or old tv shows intended for syndication where you can watch the episodes in any order cause the characters don't change. Low Orange, the stats quo genuinely changes. Adaptions being contained stories are usually lower Orange, Nolan's Batman ends with Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle happily ever after in Italy

Was going to call it continuity but on reflection lots of Big Two continuity snarls are caused by trying to stay high Orange despite that making minimal sense. Like Claremont's original idea for the Dark Phoenix Saga, where Jean Grey dies permanently and Cyclopes as a result retires from the X-men is much simpler than the epicycles we eventually got to keep it in continuity but retcon all it's status quo changes.

Also Orange is the big axis where Astro City differs from the big two, it is High Red and Blue Gold and Black deliberately, but it is very low Orange characters age heroes age, and retire die or get replaced villains sometimes also retire genuinely reform or stay imprisoned.

At least some cape deconstruction are tied into the Orange more than Red, the whole Batman "no kill rule" and stories that focus on it like Red Hood, seems to be rooted in commenting on this High Orange, Joker will always escape from Arkham, Batman will foil him wash and repeat dynamic.....