Action Comics, #583

Now that I’ve reveled in Superman’s first story, let’s flash-forward forty-eight years later, to 1986 and read the last.

Continuity is the boon and the bane of superhero comics.  There’ll be plenty of occasions for this blog to ruminate on how stories were created, then contradicted or ignored, then attempted to be reconciled only to have those reconciliations be contradicted, ignored, or further reconciled. These revisions and the collateral damage they cause are part and parcel of reading comics, and it can drive you crazy trying to figure it all out. But I think was something elegant in DC’s mandate that, rather than reconcile everything, they would just pretend it never happened. They saw the futility in untying the Gordian knot and decided to simply slice through it.