Board Thread:Policies/@comment-246292-20140502145126/@comment-220364-20140504130812

Stoop Davy Dave wrote: Byfield in the other thread leading up to this one: "As for Earth-10 - It was the post-Infinite Crisis version of Earth-X. There really wasn't a lot done with it, so a full roster of characters was never provided, just that the Freedom Fighters and a Nazi version of the JLA exist." That Nazi version of the JLA, that we saw in that one glimpse, might or might not be native to Earth-(Quality/10/X). An equivalent one-panel peek into (Earth-New52) continuity could just as easily catch the visiting Earth-3 Crime Syndicate. I tend to apply a version of Occam's Razor. Don't WAG, stick to what has been published.

The published information on Earth-10 hits a few high points: The simplest explanation is that the characters shown were native to Earth-10 and that some of them were visually very close to the characters in the continuity of the comics Quality published in the 1940s and 1950s. However, assuming that the Earth-10 characters are the Quality Universe characters is a WAG. More so if the continuities of some of the characters have to be "edited" to fit what was shown of Earth-10.
 * It, along with all of the post-Infinite Crisis universes, started out as a carbon copy of New Earth. When Mister Mind "ate" part of it, its history and denizens changed.
 * Nothing published from its introduction to Flashpoint stated or obviously implied that the Earth-10 characters were immigrants.

This is the same thing I brought up near the top of this thread with regard to the pre-Crisis multiverse.

A safe, minimal assumption is that all of the stuff Quality published is in one continuity. For that continuity to be Earth-X as of 1976, over 10 years worth of stories have to be assumed apocryphal. The simpler solution at that time was the same as comparing Earth-One and Earth-Two: the histories of the Quality Universe and Earth-X were the same up until 1940 or 1944. The question never really addressed was how much of Quality stories published up to 1944 also occurred on Earth-X.

By the time Crisis had been published, DC had published stories that changed that presentation of Earth-X. All of the Earth-X "mystery man" characters shown or mentioned in conjunction with the Freedom Fighters were retconed into residents of Earth-Two that migrated to Earth-X. Thomas also added any of the Quality characters that he had used in All-Star Squadron to that number. That still left them as separate characters from those of the Quality Universe.

At the end of it, the easiest way to handle the bulk of the Quality comics is to treat them as a separate continuity. And that would mean that the bulk of the contents of Category:Earth-X Characters would get moved to Category:Quality Universe Characters.

There are still issues with that, most of them stemming from how the Database handles duplicated characters. The easiest example I can think of is Quality's Jester. At Quality, the character appeared in stories from 1941 through 1949. At DC the character appeared twice prior to Crisis and a few times after. What that breaks down to is, at least for me, 3 characters: Charles Lane (Quality Universe) who had survived WWII but had an unknown fate after 1949, Charles Lane (Earth-Two) who paralleled the QU version until 1942 when he migrated to Earth-X and was then presumed killed prior to 1973, and Charles Lane (New Earth) who incorporated both the Earth-Two and QU versions. Within the Database SOP though it's 2 - the QU version would be subsumed in toto under (New Earth).