The Wold Newton Universe

I’ve barely got into this… but it looks fascinating. Taking an idea from science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer, it takes a fictional meteor strike in 1795 and uses that as a “zero hour” event that led to the creation of basically all pulp adventurers and heroes ever created (sort of a variation on the League of Extraordinary Gentleman – though I’m sure this came before).

From it, Farmer deduced that this new mutant family included all the classics – The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sherlock Homes, Tarzan, Doc Savage and many more. Since then, many fans have added all kinds of convoluted stories that have brought thousands of characters from other fiction, film, television and comics into the same mutant family.

Part shared-universe, part obsessive fanboy epic. Interesting…