And thus, a little more of the magic is siphoned away. . . .

I have no trouble with Earth-1 and Earth-2. I don't have much affection for the unimaginative saddling on of Earth-X, Earth-S, et al to the concept. Fox and Schwartz came up with something fun and cool. If you actually respected what they did, you'd try doing the same. But no... parallel Earths were established so, "Me, too! Me, too! Me, too!" on and on and on... Unto infinity, apparently... It's unfortunate, but ultimately not actually confusing.

I get where occasional readers might feel cheated by the concept. When Action #484 came out with the marraige of Superman and Lois on the cover to celebrate the title's 40th anniversary, casual and outside readers picked up the book out of curiousity. Superman and Lois Married at long last? History in the making...!

While we in the know (as I was back then at the young age of ten or so) knew the cover "played fair" with us, showing the Daily Star building in the background, letting us all know where the story took place and which Superman and Lois we were seeing, the clerk at my local 7-11 for instance was genuinely puzzled. "Did you know there are two Supermen?" he asked me, "One of them has been around since the 40's...?" He got the basics of the idea just fine.

It just didn't strike him as a particularly good idea. He thought, y'know, Superman and Lois getting married would be... Superman and Lois. Not some older version that only turns up occasionally. He was clearly disappointed. The ol' bait and switch... I tried telling him that in some respects the older Superman was the more genuine of the two, since it was his adventures we were told took place in those earliest issues. He's the original Superman, so his getting married to his Lois was in fact a marraige between the "real" ones, but even I knew I was tap-dancing with that. Extra versions were extraneous versions to his eyes. It was dramatically unsatisfying to have a big change occur that was really no change at all in the monthly titles themselves.

Comics are weird things. I keep coming back to a critic who dismissed "Alice in Wonderland" as nonsense since no one could be expected to reasonably follow a narrative that included "six impossible things before breakfast." Comics ask more than that. It's not just super-science and fantasy, but also mythology and crime fiction and time travel and sorcery and... It's everything everyone's ever thought of, all put together and happening all at once. Any issue of the Avengers or the Justice League requires acceptance of not just wacky physics and super-powers, but also magic, androids, make-believe additions to the periodic table, and so much more. Six impossible things? Casual readers should be so lucky...

I had a friend who only ever read Batman. Batman made sense to her. Superman did not. She was an English teacher. She taught literature. And just the idea that this guy was a super-powered alien was just too much. Couldn't buy into it. She loved Batman though, and did not mind the idea of "rebooting" Jason Todd's origin. It's all just stories. She liked the new one better, and liked the character of Jason Todd. No problem. That some universal "Crisis" was somehow involved was just... awkward. Batman shouldn't do stuff like that. The Batman from her teen years, "her" Batman never would have. Well, yes, he kind of did, I said. He just did so in other titles, like JLA or Worlds Finest.

All well & fine, but she didn't read those books. She remembered the image of him looming over a cadre of street bikers. Or a gothic mansion. That was Batman. Cool. Dark. Mysterious. One Impossible Thing. That's it. Just One. Okay, yeah, allowances would be made for weird villains to exist in his world as well, but once you allowed for Batman, that wasn't really a second step. That was just an embroidering on the first.

The clerk at 7-11 was willing to go farther into the realm of the patently unbelievable but he wanted a "real" story in return, and parallel earth duplicates were not "real." Not the real Superman, anyway. Not to him at any rate. Who knows if he ever came back to the book afterwards. I'd like to think he did and that Earth-2 wasn't some kind of deal-breaker for him.

In that sense, the people behind Crisis had something of a point. But not much of one, since in order to properly address the problem and make the product more appealing to more potential readers, to "simplify the universe" as it were, you'd have to eliminate a lot more than just parallel worlds. You'd have to get rid of Olympian Gods running around with New Gods and Norse Gods and whatever other nonsense the heroes had tied around their necks, albatross-style... Egyptian wizards, for instance... And  so many alien worlds and bottle cities and robot dinosaurs and telepathic communication with fish and emotional androids and... Really, each and every one of these "impossible things" is an outrightly silly contrivance to someone.

Is getting rid of parallel Earths then just maybe a good place to start? I don't think so, not unless you intend to get rid of doppelgangers altogether. What's the point of having the Crime Syndicate come from Qward instead of Earth-3? It's the same gimme. No clever, clever "pocket universes" which do the same thing as parallel ones, but get through on technicalities... Readers supposedly rejected that whole premise, right? Except, no, we really CAN'T stop writing them, so... Same thing, only different... Same result only not the same, see? Hey, play that game and you may as well have not bothered at all... Before you know it, Hypertime, and there y'go... Everything back the way it was before. Why not? It didn't actually change. Exactly the same sort of stories were being written.

Comics simply ARE six impossible things before breakfast. Times 600. And possibly more in any given issue. Kids who love them love all that stuff and have no trouble taking in as much of it as they can, absorbing more and more fuel for their imaginative fires, incorporating the rules of vampire slaying with the rules of time travel along with the code of the Batman and history of strife between Thanagar and Rann and idea that monsters invaded Earth constantly during the 1950's... More! More!

Really, why limit this? Imagination is really a good thing. One of the best we have going for us.

There should be simple crime fiction stories. There should be simple mythology ones as well. Not every issue needs to be Showcase #100 (the single-issue comic that pre-emptively  eliminated the need for crossover books all together. Read that and you don't need any of the others... ) But you can't chop away at the imaginative underpinnings of the industry in a vain attempt to ensure that no Showcase #100 comes up to frighten unwary readers away ever again...

Parallel earths aren't one bit more confusing than the Savage Land. Or Dracula. Or the Skrulls' shape-changing powers. Or any of the other things that someone at one time or another decided HAD to go away and then came back again anyway because, really, they weren't the problem. Imagination is not the problem. It's what makes all this possible. It's what makes all this worthwhile.

Earth-2 Brian is so old that I think he's dead now...