Essay - Daria and the Marvel Universe by DJW

A few people have done fanfic where Daria is crossed over with a comic book character from the Marvel comics Universe, either in the form of Daria becoming a version of that character or encountering characters and it got me thinking on something.

Technically Daria may already exist in the Marvel Universe (MU from now on).

Now I’m sure a few of you are wondering what I mean, but something occurred to me recently, in the last She-Hulk solo series, it was revealed that Marvel comics exist in the MU and are licensed by the heroes meaning they are officially recognised documents in a court of law (although its never explained why the villains never use these to learn the heroes secrets, its assumed the comics in the MU have changes made to protect the heroes identities) now this seems to be nothing to do with Daria at the moment but then I remembered something else.

Marvel Comics published the Beavis and Butthead comics which Daria appeared in, someone could take this and follow a similar plot to Austin Covello’s “Fifteen Minutes of Frame” and assume that B&B somehow landed a deal with Marvel much in the way they landed one with MTV and wound up with their own comic based off their exploits meaning they exist in the MU along with Daria who made several appearances in the comics. The fact the show never makes mention of the other characters could be argued but then, all this stuff happens in NY and most people in this and other cities in the MU go on with life treating it as a regular occurrence so it could be argued that its just a part of daily life to the Lawndale as well, although the prospect of another Skrull invasion could explain Li’s constant security obsession.

There are of course a few flaws in this since B&B would be seen in the comic offering their opinions on a page from a particular comic much like they would with music videos, which could be argued at the fact they exist not in the MU but then again since the comics are licensed this is a grey area, there are other flaws though, in an old issue of Generation X one of the characters is shown watching B&B on TV which unless these two where fortunate to land both a comic and TV deal they are only fictional characters in the MU.

Which is where the existence of the marvel multi-verse can be used, the earth used in the common MU is one of a possibly infinite number of earths from an equally infinite number of dimensions, it is the 616^th of these universes, hence its common term Earth-616 used to describe the regular MU, and since forms of fiction in 616 have been shown as other dimensions in the Marvel Multi-Verse (such as The Doctor of Dr Who) then it could be hypothesised that B&B exist in one (or many) of these alternate earths as actual entities ergo by extension of this theory we can surmise that Daria also lives in this earth, Earth-MTV if you will, perhaps, or Earth-424 (since the letters for MTV are 13-20-22 and if you add the 2 digits of each together, we have the aforementioned number.)

Of course this shows how I have way too much time on my hands, and that’s true since I wound up going more in depth into this, the MU exists in a multi-verse yet the DC multi-verse (before they tried to replace it with one universe and then Hypertime but that’s a bigger mess for another time) existed separately, and so where deemed part of an ‘omniverse’ meaning several multi-verses that where unconnected, yet could cross over in certain circumstance (in other words a company cross-over) and if we wanted we could suggest Daria existed in an omniverse of her own and all of our crossover fanfics and such are a result of a multi-verse on the fringe of the omniverse brushing against another and the two creating a merged universe.

Back to my original point of the MU, we can either use the omniverse or the multi-verse to explain the crossovers and also give reasons for a marvel character turning up in a Daria fic, especially since the MU has a selection of dimension-hopping characters such as Death’s Head the “Freelance Peacekeeping Agent” or the dimension fixing “Exiles” and such and such, with characters like this we can just dump them into the Dariaverse to have an adventure.

In the end this is merely the rambling of a guy with a lot of time on his hands but I hope it has been of interest to some people and even given a few ideas to others.

DJW