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The last thirty years of X-Men comics just disappeared, and a small pain in the back of my skull went with them. . .

Consider Superman, the daddy of them all. When introduced, he came from a "race of supermen". Everyone on Krypton could do what he did, because they were evolved far beyond humans on Earth. What he could do, of course, was leap an eighth of a mile, run faster than a locomotive, and be effectively invulnerable against anything up a a "bursting shell". No flight, no vision powers, no full invulnerability.

Flight came from the first cartoons -- it was easier to animate. The radio series gave us kryptonite -- the actor playing Superman wanted a vacation. Quite quickly, in fact, Superman's powers got ramped up, until he was flying thru space and even between stars. Which complicated his origin, if everyone on Krypton could do what he did. So the retcons started to slip in. People on Krypton were pretty much like thee and me, except that Krypton had an enormous gravity, which meant that Superman's muscles, evolved to deal with that, gave him superhuman strength here on Earth. Somehow, this also allowed him to fly. Radiation from our "yellow sun" was absorbed by his alien cells and gave him the vision powers and other things.

But all of this constitutes "changing history" to justify the current version of the character. Without this, Superman would still be leaping tall buildings and avoiding artillery ranges. The changes crept in before any of us were born, of course, and as with so many things in comics, "continuity" means "since I started reading".

Then DC did something that REALLY muddied the waters. A delightful little story -- intended as a one-off -- called "The Flash of Two Worlds" established that Jay Garrick, the "Golden Age Flash", actually lived on a parallel Earth. That explained how "our" Flash, Barry Allen, could be seen reading an old FLASH comic in his own first outing. An accident propelled Barry, some time later, into that parallel world, and he and Jay shared an adventure.

Unfortunately, this got some fans thinking. If the Flash existed on that other Earth -- soon to be dubbed, for not quite logical reasons, "Earth 2" -- did Green Lantern? Hawkman? The Atom? All those Golden Age characters whose books had been canceled? Eventually DC answered that question, "Yes".

But that only raised an even more difficult set of questions. What about characters like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Arrow, who had had unbroken runs since their publication began in the Forties. DC tried to dodge that bullet for a while, but eventually the Fans-turned-Pro started to make their presence felt, and those characters also appeared on Earth 2.

Which raised the question "When did the Earth 2 characters 'end" and the Earth 1 characters 'begin'?" That debate raged for a long, long time without any satisfactory answer. (Batman's "new look", introduced in the Sixties, was for a while considered the "beginning" of his Earth 1 adventures -- even tho he had an established career predating the redesigned outfit.)

ALL of these things were cases of changing history to justify the current versions of the characters. And these were the things that led the overly-anal fans and fans-turned-pro to declare that CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS was "necessary" to clean up the mess. And it did that SO successfully, right?

The reality is, American superhero comics had several decades of "history" being rewritten, before the fans started to take over, and not a whole lot of people worried about it. When someone wrote in to ask awkward questions, the editors usually responded by NOT RESPONDING. Only when organized fandom began to form out of the primordial soup did it become increasingly difficult to simply ignore the questions. The fans weren't just asking the editors any more. They were asking EACH OTHER. Which mean everybody knew the questions were being asked.

And questions asked HAD to be answered, right?