It’s been a hot minute, but my memory is that the situation is as follows:
- Hul is an entire universe which is also a Singular Entity that devours universes and makes them part of Hul.
- xxtz’Hulissh is sort of Hul, but is also a piece of Hul that has been placed in our universe prior to the sealing.
- Anything that xxtz’Hulissh devours becomes part of Hul. The particular nature of Hul and xxtz’Hulissh means that this is a special one-way portal that can punch its way out of the sandwich bag. Hul couldn’t send a new monstrosity into Universe One, but xxtz’Hulissh can still devour it from within.
Also, a minor pair of “Um, Actually” moments for discussions of popular villains…
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While it’s a common misconception that the Joker started existence as a goofy prankster (I think in part due to Grant Morrison playing on that in comics), this isn’t the case. Joker was introduced as a serial killer and thief with a clown motif, and spent his first couple years that way. Then he spent twelve years wobbling between “mass murderer” and “goofy prankster” before becoming fully goofy post-Comics Code. He stayed that way for about twenty years, then returned to his initial portrayal in the 70s and has stayed that way ever since. In broad terms, his goofy period was relatively short!
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Double corrections for Green Goblin! The first minor one is that Norman Osborn was dead for 24 years, not 35 years. Not a big correction, but worth noting.
The larger correction is that the year Norman died, his son Harry immediately picked up the mantle of the Green Goblin, thereby keeping Norman’s story alive in the minds of comics readers. Harry remained the Green Goblin for twenty years before dying in 1994; a couple years after his death, another major storyline dealt with an evil AI he had built that was trying to turn his son into the Green Goblin, and the year after that, Norman came back to life.
So while it’s technically true that Norman was gone for twenty-four years, the Green Goblin never vanished, and the second Green Goblin was directly tied into the first. I imagine that this is, in a big way, what happened with Voss, too: while technically the Grand Warlord went away for decades, we know that this led into several more storylines about would-be replacements, Censor seeking revenge, and so on.