History
The first Time Travel story in a comic book by DC Comics or its predecessors was Strange Adventures of Mr. Weed: "The Time Machine, Part 1" in New Comics #1 (December 1935).
Since that time, hundreds of stories have featured characters and vehicles and devices and potions for accomplishing various forms of time travel.
Three distinct, and irreconcilable, theories regarding time travel have long co-existed, in the DC Universes:
Fixed Time: The past cannot be changed. Events will conspire to prevent any meaningful changes to history.[1][2] In some cases a time traveler is forced to be part of the very event they were to observe and make sure it happens as recorded.[3] In others a person will become a phantom unable to interact with events.[4]
Plastic Time: History can be changed, but there can be consequences of doing so.[5]
Parallel Universes: Time travel to your own actual past or future is impossible, and all time travel does is either shift you into a parallel universe,[6] or into an alternate timeline. In some cases travel to "the" future was actually travel to an parallel Earth with a similar but also different history.[7]
- The concept of hypertime can be viewed as a strange version of Plastic Time.
See Also