I am so about to pop a reality anuerysm here.
- Joe Kelly & Eddie Berganza, Superboy #88

"The Crisis Thus Far"
Superman was never Superboy, but he used to be.

I mention this for a reason. As I've told you before, I treat my blog like a comic book. This is issue #237, if you can believe it.

In my ongoing mission to make this blog as comic like as possible, I try to provide a decent cover when I can. I constantly mark references to previous issues. I try to answer comments like they're a letters page. I was going to do a whole "Grim Vision of the Main Character's Future in a Post-Apocalyptic World" entry, but I was thwarted by my inability to manipulate the blogger date function to post an entry for 37 years in the future and I doubt anybody's gonna buy into the dystopia in 2006.

Well, it's occurred to me that there's another major comic book convention (and here, I'm talking about literary tropes, not a loose gathering of sexless dweebs) that I've yet to tackle in the course of my work, and I want you to understand my motives behind it, and in order for you to do that, you have to understand the following:

Superman was never Superboy, but he used to be.

I was recently asked by an up-and-coming comic book reader what the difference was between Spider-Man and Ultimate Spider-Man. This was my answer:

Spider-Man -- whether it is Amazing, Spectacular, or some other non-Ultimate adjective or other modifier -- is about the same Peter Parker who's been around since Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created him in the early 60's. At this point, he's about 28 years old, he's a teacher and part-time photographer, he's married to Mary Jane Watson, his Aunt knows he's Spider-Man, Harry Osborn's dead, and Spider-Man's now a member of the Avengers. (Don't get me started on this little Bendis debacle.)

Ultimate Spider-Man is a title Marvel started about five years ago where Brian Michael Bendis and mark Bagley have started Spider-Man's story over from scratch. At this point, Ultimate Peter Parker's about 16-years-old, he's still in high school, he's dating Mary Jane but breaks up with her every other week, his aunt doesn't know he's Spider-Man, and he's a bit of a mouthy spaz who whines about the same things month after month.

(Caleb's under the impression that in ten years, Ultimate Spider-Man will supersede Amazing/Spectacular Spider-Man, but I don't think so, which probably means it will because I'm always wrong.)

You see, in comics, you can always start over. If you look back at the Black Panther's life and think that it's a crazy mess of twists and turns -- no matter how underrated and well-written -- apparantly you can always come out with a new #1 issue, claim that none of that other stuff ever happened, and write utter crap that's rather insulting. And you'll sellout on copies.

My understanding is that this reset-button mentality came about in 1986 when DC Comics published a 12-issue story called Crisis on Infinite Earths and actually changed the universe.

This brings us neatly back to that ever important lesson:

Superman was never Superboy, but he used to be.

Superman was created in 1939 by Joe Shuster and Joel Siegel. He joined the Justice Society of America with Batman, Wonder Woman, and a whole bunch of other characters that even I don't know anything about or really care to and they spent World War II fighting Nazi's and slapping Japs. As the decades wore on, young comic book readers learned interesting things about the Man of Steel. One of them being that he's a dick. Another the fact that during his youth in Smallville, he wore a smaller version of his costume and flew around like a dickhead as Superboy. During one of his pre-adolescent adventures, he accidentally caused a young Lex Luthor to lose all of his hair, and l'il Lex swore revenge forever and ever, sparking the infamous rivalry. We also learned that Supes' dad, Jor-El, didn't just save his son from explosive planetary death. He also rocketed Kryptonian animals to earth, including Krypto the Superdog, Streaky the Supercat, Beppo the Supermonkey, and Comet the Superhorse.

Why Jor-El took the time to pack off the livestock, but didn't make a rocket for himself or the wife is beyond me, and I think it's questions like this that eventually led the powers-at-be at DC to come to the following conclusion:

Jesus Christ, this shit is fucking retarded! [Keep in mind, this was 1986. It seemed socially acceptable to defame the differently abled.] Why don't we just pretend we never sank this low?

And that's just what they did.

I've never read Crisis on Infinite Earths. It's an extremely rare thing for me to read a comic published before 1994, so what would compel me to read one published in the 80's? (And let's just leave Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, and The Killing Joke out of this.) I have thumbed through it on occasion, and I know basically what happens:

Supergirl and the Flash get killed and DCU history is altered so that Superman and Batman never joined the Justice Society because they weren't alive during World War II, and the Wonder Woman who did join the JSA was actually the real Wonder Woman's mother. (Don't worry. I won't go into this. You either don't care or already understand.)

Moreover, the superpets never existed -- although they ended up introducing Krypto into what we sexless dweebs lovingly refer to as "post-Crisis continuity" -- and Clark Kent didn't don a superman costume until he was in his twenties. And you know what that means?

It means Superman was never Superboy... but he used to be.

And so, in this grand comic book tradition, I've been giving some serious thought to a "Crisis on Infinite Blogs".

And by that, I mean wiping out my archives and starting over from scratch.

That way, any evidence of my unauthorized posting of some 42 images owned by Marvel Enterprises and/or the Time Warner Super Giant would be that much harder to find, to say nothing of an early draft of a story I'm currently selling to Marvel, and many, many derogatory remarks about their star penman.

Plus, I could go ahead and change things around, effectively rewriting the story thus far to make it even cooler.

I'd retell my secret origin in a grim and gritty "Year One" format where I may or may not have left a girl for dead in the snowblind wastes of the Montana Badlands, change continuity so that my 21st birthday didn't kind of suck, make it so that I'd never been a desk attendant, bring Justin back from the dead (what do you mean he's still alive?), undo that lame "burning of the Berg" storyline that went nowhere, and write unpopular characters like The Rum Bandit and Melissa Maynard out of continuity.

(I am, of course, kidding about this last bit. The Rum Bandit is immensely popular. Not quite Dildo the Drunken Monkey popular, but close.)

Crisis also brought some characters into the DC Universe that'd been acquired from another comic book company that went bankrupt, like Blue Beetle and The Question. Maybe I could use this as an opportunity to acquire characters from other blogs to incorporate into my life, like Jeffries' parents or Jacobs' fiancee.

Of course, in a couple of years, I'll probably miss the way things used to be and end up tossing in the concept of "hypertime" or some such science fantasy so I can go back.

Besides, we all knows what happens when you erase your memories.

You're just free to make the same mistakes all over again.