Issue 18: Superhero Information Initiative
By Amdnarg Toh

Existential Entanglement -or- “We’ve Not Maintained Story Line Consistency So We Must Now Resolve Discontinuities in a 12-Issue Spacetime-Spanning Cataclysmic Event”

We all know that the biggest source of the Super-angst that Kal-El, Man of Steel, often experiences is his titillating romantic tension with Lois Lane. When he’s Superman, Lois gives him puppy eyes, but as Clark Kent, he’s basically ignored. What’s a poor super hero to do? Millions of fans were hanging onto the hope that one day they would turn the page, Superman would finally tell Lois his secret, and they would live happily ever after. Alas, most of us were continually disapointed, as our hopes were never realized. Until one fateful day…On the way home from the 7-Eleven, with the latest issue of Superman in my grubby fifth grade hands, I was ready for my monthly update of the goings-on in Metropolis. I was salivating over the image on the cover – Clark Kent kissing Lois Lane and confessing, (finally), “I am Superman!” What? Can this possibly be? My mind was racing with possibilities!

The story I read introduced me to the alternate universe called Earth-2, where Superman and Lois Lane are married, where the Green Lantern is not Hal Jordan, where the Flash wears a pie-tin hat, and looks like a brawny construction worker instead of Barry Allen, the Fastest Man Alive… What I was to learn in later issues was that Earth-2 was essentially composed of the heroes of the “Golden Age” – basically versions of the familiar heroes we all know and love, only as they would be in modern times if they started their careers in the 1940’s instead of in the then-modern, (to me), 1970’s. Thus Superman was older, and had finally grown a set and confessed his love to Lois. As time progressed, more of the mainline series started to publish stories that were tied to this new world, and stories involving Earth-2 heroes were exposed to a much wider audience. The modern heroes, as I had come to know them, lived on Earth-1, with Hal Jordan as the Green Lantern, a younger Superman, etc. These heroes came to be known as the “Silver Age” heroes. Their timeline was more consistent with modern events, political realities, and popular culture. I found my attention now focused not on one story, or one hero, but now between two entirely different self-contained universes. In fact, in honor of the plot device that every science fiction series containing multiple universes has used, there were even a couple of not-so-clever stories involving crossovers between the two worlds, with the heroes from Earth-1 meeting heroes from Earth-2.

Although I was intrigued by the possibilities of multiple universes, as I read stories set in these alternate realities – yes, there were more than two – it started to get confusing. These “what-if” scenarios would sometimes grow and evolve into a self-sustaining story line, which left some readers expecting the story line to continue. Demand from fans for follow up on these separate storylines drove writers to spend more and more energy and precious page space on continuing the story of an increasingly more complicated multiverse.

Most of us like some sense of consistency in the fiction we read. In fact, that is often what draws most of us into these make-believe worlds. A little bit of fantasy to escape to, but something that makes sense. Set the story up, tell us about the characters, define some of the parameters about how their world operates, wind it up, and let it go. But with the multiples of possible realities, chaos ensues. Fracture our make-believe world too much and we’ll lose interest.

This is exactly what happened to DC Comics. There were simply too many different story lines to maintain. In business terms, they lost focus on their core competencies and diversified too much. By 1985, with sales lagging, Crisis on Infinite Earths was used by DC as an opportunity to wipe much of its slate clean and make major changes to many of their highest revenue-generating comic book series. What they did was essentially set up the following story, which spanned twelve issues and involved almost every DC comic hero from every alternate universe:

• Introduce a really bad guy from the antimatter universe that wants to destroy our universe and all of the associated parallel universes.
• Heroes from several universes combine their might to stop the really bad guy
• During the conflict, most of the parallel universes are destroyed by the really bad guy
• The heroes from the remaining five universes combine one last time and defeat the really bad guy
• During the final battle, the remaining five universes are effectively combined into one, combining heroes and features from all five worlds.
• Many heroes that were unique to certain universes died during the crisis, and during the merging of the universes

New comic book lines, detailing the “new” universe and its heroes were introduced, and DC comics’ lagging sales, (in comparison to Marvel comics, which was doing quite well), took a turn for the better. With the reboot complete, DC could focus on the more popular, and thus, revenue generating story lines and characters. Twenty years later in 2005, due in part to the dark tone of many of the new story lines, DC decided to attempt another reset, and ran a series called Infinite Crisis, which set some of the elements of the new universe more in line with fan demand.

Hmmm. Let me get this straight… Whenever the creative juices run dry, and you want to write outside of the known set of realities, you can simply invent another universe for your story to be set in? Just borrow the most popular elements of a familiar story line, measure out a cup of “What-If,” (industrial strength), mix liberally with a few egg whites, and you’ve got an awesome alternate-universe pie. Just don’t serve me a slice and expect me to say “Mmmm… Good – can I please have another?”

And… No more “do-overs” please. The only folks that still do those in the real world are golfers and I’m not too sure about the mental stability of folks with sticks chasing a small white ball around a nice park…