ANTIMATTER UNIVERSE OF QWARD	ATLAS
Created by John Broome and Gil Kane

INFORMATION

Official Name: Antimatter Universe of Qward
First Appearance: Green Lantern Vol. 2 #2 (September-October 1960): "The Secret of the Golden Thunderbolts!"
Creators: John Broome and Gil Kane

OVERVIEW

The opposite number to our own 'positive matter' universe, accidentally created by the Oan scientist Krona, the Antimatter Universe is primarily known as the home of the planet Qward and the Anti-Monitor.

HISTORY

Billions of years ago, the Oan scientist Krona's evil experiments unleashed entropy in the universe. One of the consequences was the creation of a second universe – a universe that mirrors our own but is made up entirely of anti-matter, matter composed of particles with opposite charge of “normal”, positive matter. In the center of the Antimatter Universe lies the planet Qward, a counterpart to the world of Oa. The Qwardians are long-time enemies of the Guardians of the Universe and their Green Lantern Corps.

Ten billion years ago, the Anti-Monitor was born on the Dark Moon of Qward. He grew to power and took control of the planet. For millennia, he grew stronger until he recently threatened all existence during the event called the Crisis on Infinite Earths. He was defeated by heroes of the positive universe, mainly of Earth.

The Antimatter Universe also includes an Earth where good is evil and vice versa. The 'villainous' Luthor of this Earth tries to do good in a world where evil is standard, and constantly opposes his Earth's 'heroes', the sadistic Crime Syndicate of Amerika, a mirror-version of the Justice League. (Curiously, there was also briefly a similar Crime Syndicate of Qward who also battled the League; as this was a variant on the pre-Crisis Crime Syndicate of Earth-3, this may have been expunged from history due to the effects of the cumulative Crisis events.)

Normally, direct contact between positive and negative matter would cause explosions of enormous force, but for some reason, that has not been the case with several of these encounters. Possibly because inter-dimensional travelers have crossed the border by reversing the atomic properties of their own component matter. An exception from this was the Anti-Matter Man (I), an explorer from the A-M Universe who would involuntarily have destroyed Earth had he reached it. He was prevented by the JLA and the JSA.

There have also been unusual combinations of the matter of two universes. Beings such as Alexander Luthor (I) and Anti-Matter Man (II) of the Vanguard consist of both positive matter and anti-matter, while Wildfire (II) of the 31st century Legion is composed of 'anti-energy'.