I'm an odd person to advocate for the DC Multiverse, because I hate multiverses, and my golden period as a DC reader was the fairly rigid Post-Crisis... "monoverse"? "Multiverse" is just bad English, beacuse a "universe" is definitially all-inclusive. And let's be honest, there are no fully realized alternatives to the DC Universe within itself. They're all tangents of the DCU. There isn't an entire universe of "Batman, but make it vampire." And I do like "imaginary stories." What If...? was a favorite one-off read as a kid, because it would take a key moment in Marvel continuity and pivot in a different direction to play out the consequences of a resolution that deviated from accepted history. Again, "X-Men, but make it vampire" is a fascinating notion to explore for the length of a single comic book. As things like back-up features and anthology titles faded away in the '80s, those kind of specultive stories were among the only forms of robust short subject narratives to survive in mainstream comics. Plus, the only way for a Marvel character to ever stay dead is if the entire reality in which the death occured also terminates. Some of the greatest DC stories of all time were retroactively "Elseworlds," and every single time they were not left as such, it diminished the original work. Was your life enriched by The Dark Knight Strikes Again or Before Watchmen? Did Doomsday Clock add anything but a qualifying asterick upon a once purer experience?
And yet, the DC Universe itself is an arbitrary construct. A handful of talent crafted the Marvel Universe to be interconnected from the earliest days, which allowed it fundamental structure for co-existence. The DC Universe happened because the different publishing houses that would eventually merge into DC Comics found it financially beneficial to mingle a selection of their properties, like various All-American characters forming the Justice Society of America. Would it even have been "...of America" without the synergistic branding? And within the JSA, Spectre and Dr. Fate were on the team for about five minutes before they had to be shipped off or have their powers dimminished to function on a super-team. Captain Marvel can't be the World's Mightiest Mortal if he's a vassal from a defeated and disbanded publisher sued out of existence by the Superman comics house, then licensed and purchased by them decades past his prime. For that character to fully shine, you need an Earth-S upon which The Marvel Family can be their best selves, and in a place considerably more fanciful than DC Earth. Heck, Superman has to make himself small to fit in a shared continuity where he can't push planets out of orbit or fly fast enough to break the time barrier.
For the first time in my life, DC Comics is the sustained and undisputed industry leader in market share, overall sales, and in audience reception. That's almost entirely on the back of the Absolute line, a parallel "universe" to the core DCU. I honestly think part of the problem is that Marvel finally ruined their "illusion of change" by insisting on having 19 simultanous versions of Spider-Man, Wolverine, Ghost Rider and so on to while also fostering an ersatz multiverse. Marvel was built to be intertwined and grounded. There's a world of difference between having a "Red Band" subsection for extra gory super-hero adjacent horror, and having to find a place where Captain Carrot, Angel Love, Morpheus the Dream King, and Batman's exposed penis have to find common ground. Pre-Crisis DC titles didn't have enough internal tension to sustain attention, because too much of that material was just wash-rince-repeat formula with no true stakes. Krypton was always going to blow up, and Superman was never going to stay married to anyone, because all the basics had to be reset for the next issue. With something like Absolute, their versions of the characters and continuity can reighn for an extended period, "matter" in the way DKR mattered, but also end and allow the readership to embrace a radical contemporary vision of the next DC continuity. That's just DC playing to its strengths, which is not in pretending that you can and should have everything in perfect alignment within a singular expensive framework. Thanks to the Multiverse, DC is finally cooking, even if I personally don't want a seat on the bench at this barbecue. I'll just stick to my niche buys, like how they've been picking up from the Donner and Burton movie canon. I'm at an age where I don't want to keep up with an entire "univers" anymore, but I do wish for those who do to have the best version of such a thing possible.
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