When I was a wee lad, my Dad took me aside in the backyard in the bamboo forest and told me that the world would be a brighter place as I grew up than it was for him. He marveled at how different it would be for me than for him, perhaps with a bit of envy. After all, the Cold War was over, the liberal social order was enveloping all the world, and the national debt was due to be paid off in a mere handful of years.

That hope seemed an ember then, but it might as well be a raging fire in the torrential downpour the spark in my hands struggles in now. I hear so many folks from my generation and beyond (both younger and older) wish for those days back, the glimmering days of the 90s. When I press the question of why, it usually boils down to the same thing: they miss the hope.

"Don't you miss the hope, Cob?" Of course I do. But do you know what I don't miss? The racial slurs in the streets, the cruelty of authority, the basic cultural understanding that those without must suffer at the hands of those with. "Was that really more in abundance than it is now?" Now as in right now, sure maybe it wasn't this bad. But six months ago was better than a quarter century before that. It took a lot of smart people a lot of hard work to make the world we're smashing to bits right this moment, a lazy work of destruction perpetrated by those of dim conscience and enabled by those of dim mind and orchestrated by dark cunning that would see the days of the emperors warp us toward barbarism. Who among us hasn't wished we could go back and simply... redo it all?

But this isn't about politics, this is about comic books.

During the Silver Age of Comic Books, DC in particular depended upon parallel universes for its various characters, especially those who had existed in the Golden Age (There were at least two Supermen for example). This was due in part to DC acquiring many smaller publishers as DC and Marvel were slowly consolidating into the Big Two. The histories of all the characters across many different timelines and how they were connected (The Flash would often visit alternate worlds with a cosmic treadmill as an example of a crossover) were so confusing that it was difficult to follow. In the 80s, DC came up wth the idea to consolidate all their characters into one shared world with one history and came up with the idea of the cosmic retcon, in which there was a terrible multiversal calamity that resulted in histories being rewritten, certain characters ceasing to ever exist, and everyone being dropped off on one Earth. It was epic, with the tagline "Worlds will live and worlds will die" and it ultimately was a great success.

Until they had to do it again with Zero Hour about a decade later when the continuity had developed some more snags and certain popular characters had developed complicated histories. It was again epic.

Then they did it again in the 2000s with a series of specials culminating in Final Crisis (it was not the last one). Again and again it was just overwritten whenever management was convinced that things were just too complicated, and used that as an opportunity to relaunch the multiverse (actually the second attempt from the short lived Hyper Time concept they tried to come up with explain continuity errors in the 2000s in order to try and avoid more cosmic crisis retcons).

But how could they not be? You have dozens of writers, hundreds of issues released a month. And stories will always develop complications.

But corporations are going to corporate. If they think they might make more money by rewriting the past, they absolutely will. It's annoying, but the characters are mostly still the same characters doing what they've done for the past century.

What really pissed me off is when Marvel started doing it.

It started with One More Day in 2007, whereupon Spider-Man made a deal with the devil to save his Aunt May's life in exchange for cosmically undoing his marriage to Mary-Jane after being married since the 80s. This was pushed by the editor-in-chief at the time, Joe Quesada, who felt that being married had aged Spider-Man, and many speculated that Joe's own nostalgia was directing him to lean into this ultimately clumsy cosmic retcon despite pushback from basically everyone.

After that, the cosmic retcon started showing up everywhere. Even DC tried to completely reboot its entire catalog with the darker and edgier New 52, which was as short lived as it was short sighted. The MCU has recently deployed this in their Spider-Man films, and the idea of parallel universes is making a comeback in order to justify an expanded catalog of heroes to sell without having to dedicate any meticulousness to their histories.

I will say it here: I think it is lazy writing. If you want to write a story in a world and continue its history you have to pay attention to what came before, even if it annoys you, even if it doesn't always make sense. The fact is that when you step into someone else's world with someone else's characters, they are individuals who are expected to fit within a certain framework and personal history.

Grant Morrison, at the end of his run on Animal Man in the 80s told the titular character (long story) that as a fictional individual, he will be whoever his next writer wants him to be. It is definitely reality that the freedom of a writer trumps any autonomy a piece of fiction may possess, if any. I may feel like I am advocating for such autonomy, but in practice due to the constraints of objective reality, it may sound more like I am complaining about authorial overreach. Perhaps I am.

But this isn't about comic books, this is about perseverence.

I wish so much I could go back to the 90s, slurs on the street and all. Back when tomorrow promised so much more than it ended up giving, back when the sun was brighter, the grass was greener, and I could turn to my Dad and he'd say "the world can be whatever you make of it."

Who wouldn't want that? A chance to just kinda... unwrite all those nasty days that came to pass, all the mistakes that felt like the right choice when I made them. Hell, I'd like to go back a few days and undo some of the mistakes of almost literally yesterday.

But that isn't how it works. We are individuals with our own personal histories and much of the time there are things in it that annoy us and piss us off and it doesn't always make a lot of sense, but it is ours.

And most of the time there's always something we'd like to get back just a couple pages back, if only I could reach into that last panel...

The 90s aren't ever coming back. That innocence we possessed has gone, swallowed by the wind that pushes us ever forward. I can wish on every star in the sky and I won't find that bamboo forest again, I won't find that era of peace- even if we all laid down our arms now I'd always know we could pick them up again.

So that's why I say to persevere. Hope isn't an ember to be guarded in the rain, hope is a sword in your hand to hack through the hordes of terror that loom before you- and they will always loom before you.

I say now that if you are to be a hero in your own story you need to power through and to push, sword in hand- because there are no do-overs, no cosmic retcons. The reality we possess now is the one we have to work with.

We write the future and can make anything we want from it, no matter how little sense it makes. So I say write with hope, and wield your sword fearlessly.

Think of how awesome a splash-page that would make.