Grant Morrison is ascending the Wall in Westeros, the winch elevator shifting and creaking beneath his feet as it slowly ascends the massive, 700-foot barrier of ice from Game of Thrones. But not really. I've convinced the visionary comic book author, known not only for his mind-bending superheroes stories but his ideas about alternate realities and chaos magic, to strap on the Oculus Rift at at a Comic-Con party and immerse himself in a fictional world that feels very real indeed.

“That was quite an experience,” he says when he emerges from the booth, though he confides he's had other virtual reality experiences that were even more intense. I believe him. After all, this is a man who has dedicated himself to dissolving the boundaries between reality and fiction in his work, inserting himself into the pages of his superhero comics, asking his readers to boost his circulation by masturbating to sigils and even recreating our own reality within the DC Universe as an alternate world called Earth Prime.

In his upcoming book The Multiversity, a nine-issue DC Comics miniseries that launches in September, Morrison is bending the "reality" of superheroes—and ourselves—again. The book revolves around a new sort of Justice League: one that comprises not just the greatest heroes in the universe, but the greatest heroes in every parallel universe of the DC Universe—a "Multiverse" that encompasses 52 different worlds, each with their own particular spin on the superheroes we know and love.

The concept of the DC Multiverse isn't a new one—it's been around since the 1960s—but this is the first time it's been fully fleshed out and standardized as a 52-point narrative star. It's a nod to the complex contradictions of telling thousands of stories that have taken place in a shared universe written and illustrated by hundreds of different creators, and the difficulty of both reconciling them and making room for innovation. Rather than one tightly controlled universe where consistency is king, the Multiverse is a more flexible structure; it not only allows creators like Morrison to explore new twists on established characters without contradicting their “real” adventures, but also to integrate seemingly anomalous moments from DC's past into its present.

“In the past, people would just create an evil Batman and he'd get killed at the end [of the story] to make an interesting point,” says Morrison. “But you've just wasted a universe there.” In The Multiversity, that weird, dead evil Batman can be more than just a throwaway plot device; he can be a refugee from another world full of superheroes, one just as “real” as the one we know and love.

Grant Morrison. Ben Rasmussen/WIRED

Indeed, The Multiversity introduces readers to a broad range of what-ifs that now simply are: a universe where Batman and Superman are vampires, a universe where all the characters are gender-swapped, a universe where the Nazis won World War II.

There's another fringe benefit to this narrative experimentation and fluidity: a tremendous amount of cultural diversity in the book's primary characters, something many fans have been increasing demanding from their superhero comics. There's one and only one “straight white guy” on Morrison's super-superteam, which also includes a gender-swapped Aquaman, a gay male Flash analogue called Red Racer, and Thunderer, a storm god inspired by Australian aboriginal mythology. The first (first) issue focuses on Calvin Ellis, a black man who is both the Superman of Earth-23 and its American president; Morrison describes him as “Obama meets Mohammed Ali.”

Even the pages of The Multiversity hold a certain creative magic for Morrison. He promises, for example, that in issue 7, which he describes as a “haunted, cursed comic,” that the reader themselves will “become a superhero being. You become Earth Prime's first genuine superhuman being. This comic makes it possible.” It's hard to tell if he means metaphorically or literally, or even whether the distinction is meaningful.

The idea that all things become possible if you simply broaden your perspective—both in fiction and in “real life”—comes up over and over again in Morrison's work, including his voluminous writing about Batman.

“When I was writing Batman I found that if I tried to rationalize Adam West's Batman in the context of Frank Miller's Batman, suddenly you've got a more dynamic character who at one time in his life was kinda offbeat and crazy, but two years later he's kind of angry and angsty,” says Morrison. “The character himself became more real when you added all the contradictory versions. It's what makes us real. We all have different faces that we show to different people in our lives, and the only way to understand you or me to see all of them at once, all the contending versions of ourselves... In Multiversity, I wanted to do that for the entire DC Universe.”

DC Comics

Morrison has made a habit, over the years, of creating new creative mosaics from the broken pieces of DC Comics history, often by plumbing some of the strangest and most esoteric moments from its voluminous past and resurrecting them. In another miniseries by Morrison, Batman Inc., Morrison reimagined the myth of Batman as a franchise, one that could be exported by billionaire Bruce Wayne to countries all over the world. The Japanese version was based on an obscure 1960s Batman manga by creator Jiro Kuwata that was itself resurrected and republished in a 2008 book called Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan.

For Multiversity, Morrison has returned again to more retro Batman ephemera: a series of 1970s DC comics strips that imagined what sort of hero Bruce Wayne might have become if he'd encountered something besides a bat at that critical moment in his original story. In these hypothetical tales, when he sees a suit of armor after the death of his parents, Wayne becomes the Iron Knight; in other strips, he's inspired to different superhero identities by scorpions, stingrays, owls, and even shooting stars.

“They're all back now,” Morrison tells me. In Multiversity, he's inserted each of these seven hypothetical heroes as the Batman of a different alternate universe, stretching the limits of the Batman myth in every direction to see exactly how far it can go. He pauses for a moment, and asks a question that may or may be rhetorical: “How far can you push [Batman] before it stops being Batman?”

It's a question that faces all myths and icons as they are inevitably changed and reinterpreted for new audiences and new eras. What is essential and inviolable about these stories, and how much can be changed without breaking the concept at its core? It's particularly resonant for comics, a niche medium whose content is now regularly adapted into movies and television for mainstream audiences who almost never make their way back to the source material (and occasionally in ways that infuriate their biggest fans).

DC Comics

Superhero comics is the dominant genre of the comics medium, and one where fans are often deeply invested in—and willing to have extensive arguments about—exactly what is “real”: which stories, histories and characters are canonical, and which ones are to be discarded. Morrison sees it very differently. He is far more interested in the flexibility of myth than the brittleness imposed by those wedded too deeply to their nostalgia. Rather than discarding anything from the complex and contradictory history of superhero comics, he would rather reconcile and unify them all, make them more real by making them whole.

“People have this idea of canon, but there is no canon,” he says. “To me, it's all real. Every comic you ever read is real.” He cites a powerful scene in one of his comics, All-Star Superman, where the Kryptonian hero saves a suicidal girl not by catching her when she jumps, but by convincing her of her own strength and embracing her. “People have said, I didn't kill myself because I read this scene. It's actually saved real people's lives. So to me, this fake superhero, this paper creation actually stopped a kid from killing himself. This is what [Superman] exists for.”

The idea for The Multiversity has been floating around in Morrison's mind since 2007, when the infinite possible universes of the Multiverse were crystallized into 52 specific ones. For the last nine years, Morrison been fleshing all of them out in his mind and populating them with characters. Every issue of Multiversity will be labeled as number one, focus on a different universe, and feature a different artist. (The debut issue, previewed in the gallery above, is illustrated by Ivan Reis and Joe Prado.)

These new universes are intended to be fully-formed enough to sustain their own series, and consequently each is packed with ideas both new and old. As fans might expect, the issues are full of callouts to Morrison's work on world-bending stories Final Crisis and Seven Soldiers, as well as catastrophic, transformative events like Crisis on Infinite Earths, the 1985 tale that first rewrote the DC Universe.

Click to expand. DC Comics

For The Multiversity, Morrison also mapped the Multiverse authoritatively, in an image (above) illustrated by Rian Hughes and inspired by Primus Mobile illustrations of classical astronomy and Buddhist mandalas, as well as the work of UFO-inspired Boston architect Paul Laffoley. (“He does these incredible cabalistic machines," Morrison says. "Visualizations of time machine engines. I think he's doing what Leonardo [da Vinci] did 500 years ago, but the technology hasn't caught up with Paul yet.”)

The Multiverse map places Earth in the middle, but the other structures (including both Heaven and Limbo) “get more and more archetypal the further out you get into the void, and the void is also the white page where things are drawn,” says Morrison. “It's kind of like in Buddhism where there's this pure consciousness that underlies everything, and you can call it god, you can call it the void. It contains everything—all good, all evil, all contradiction, all possibility. Just like the page of a comic. The first mark on the page could become anything. The mark is all possibility.”

So how “real” is any of it, for either the characters or us? Morrison says he isn't sure—and in terms of what's important about superheroes, that it doesn't matter.

“Scientifically, superstring theory says that maybe there are multiple universes, so there may be an actual Superman out there" he says. "But right now, this is what Superman is good for. Comics can have an actual useful function in the world where we actually live. But it's not to pretend that they're real... or pretend there's a world where Superman actually lives. That world is here, and Superman comes in the form of a comic. It's the part of your mind that feels like Batman, this indomitable thing that stands up no matter how dark your life gets, and says no. That's the only useful function of these characters. And in that sense they're absolutely real."