The year is 2040. World war three, another large scale pandemic and several localized catastrophes have happened. None of that really matters though. Who cares about president what’s his name or how due to the lack of military volunteers America had to reinstate the draft. The billion dead meant radical changes to policies and conglomerates were torn apart and highly regulated.
One company wouldn’t be able to hold heavy control over pharmaceuticals charging an arm and a leg so you wouldn’t die from the super flu. Several of the larger conglomerates were completely dismantled during this time and one of them happened to be disney. With the years of financial mistakes and them publicly decrying the war they were torn apart ruthlessly afterwards.
As a result marvel became available and while the movie franchise was far too expensive the comic characters were up for grabs. Miraculously DC managed to gain the comic rights for marvel in 2030 and thus began the true golden age of comics. Dozens of writers came together and started writing the golden rules that must be followed if they were to avoid the same huge problems comics and movies have had in the past.
The three strict rules they had to follow were thus called the comic commandments because breaking any would be sacrilege. Death had to matter, no time travel and no alternate dimensions. There couldn’t be any blips or lazarus pits infinitely reviving characters making death meaningless. Time travel to solve problems would often result in gigantic plotholes and were deemed lazy writing. Alternate universes had become even more troupelike in the future when the third ant man movie came out copying spider verse it bombed so hard it played a part in disney’s downfall.
They began to write and for the first four years comic sales doubled every year. People began to buy comics in case the power had to be rationed like it did in the war. Four years of Batman vs the Punisher or Batman and the Punisher. Spiderman meets Superman, Thor challenges Superman, Wonder woman loves Stark, Brainiac vs Ultron, Captain marvel saves Shazam. No series created did poorly and many one off comics succeeded as well.
Stories well boiled down and perfected. The Mutants, Inhumans and Meta humans were rolled into one and the inhumans were changed to be the eternal races mutants that fled their homeworld. Most people would call people with special abilities Meta humans and the word Mutant became a slur. Some of the more wacky villains tied to the Xmen were toned down like Sublime being one of the first mutants who could mind transfer instead of him being a bacteria.
Fathers would talk to their daughters about the new Black cats team up comic and mothers would talk to sons about the Supers high comic. It wasn’t until the fourth year before sales started to fall. Brainstorming a solution they would have universal changes every fifth year to keep the stories interesting. Thus began the first universal shakeup with the death of gods series in the comics.
Not many gods were mentioned in the stories so far. Only a handful of deaths but this soon changed with several gods or entities of godlike strength fought. Thanos fights Darkseid and loses badly, crippling himself on the avatar of Darkseid which only held a portion of his true strength.
Trigon fought Mephisto and while neither of them were killed both were injured with Mephisto severely weakened and losing many of his contracts. Superman, Thor and Wonder woman stopped a plan from Ares. Highfather slain Galactus. The final big series ended with new gods vs old gods. Zeus and Odin teamed up together to kill Darkseid, while he would be reborn as it is impossible to kill a god it would take hundreds if not thousands of years.
The fight was so intense it started tearing the fabric of the world. In order to stop the destruction of the universe all gods had to lock themselves away in domains or pocket dimensions. Only demigods and avatars could exist in the universe after that point. Many, many side characters were written out of the story through deaths at this point as well.
Many of the villains also began to fight which led to some pretty interesting stories being told. Kingpin managed to come out on top in the villain world of New York city even beating out the Joker. Batman's catalog of villains fought against Spiderman’s leading to deaths on both sides. Rhino had his suit destroyed and head crushed by the Kingpin. Twoface was killed in a fight against the sinister six where the Penguin killed Flint Marco’s daughter. That same fight left the Riddler paralyzed by Electro.
Almost every city had fights similar to that as the world slowly stabilized itself to what was called the Crush in the comics. The merging of the two worlds was mostly unnoticed except by gods and cosmic entities one of which was Superman who ended up telling the Justice league. Superman would obviously notice that the Justice league roster had suddenly expanded to over double its original size.
No one was sure what caused it but with previous knowledge gained through fake memories the vast majority of people didn’t know about it until Iron man let it slip during pillow talk with a reporter. The next four years of comics people slowly started to fall off, still selling better than the previous thirty years but slowing down steadily.
There were talks about bringing back the cinematic universe since so many years had passed and they had a decade of fresh comics to steal from. The big tenth year anniversary event drew near and no one could imagine what would come next in the comics.