Lorendiac
06-05-2009, 07:09 AM
Before the transition to Post-COIE continuity, the Earth-1 version of Clark Kent (as Superboy and later as Superman) could travel through time at the drop of a hat, whenever the mood struck him. (Superboy mostly used this ability to jump back and forth a thousand years at a stretch so he could have regular team-ups with his good buddies in the Legion of Super-Heroes.) And as I recall, along the way Clark had discovered at least a couple of "natural laws" of time travel which he said couldn't be broken, even when he desperately wanted to. (Or at least that's the way he was describing the rules of the game by the time I started reading some of DC's comic books regularly in the early 1980s.)
Natural Law #1. "You can travel to the past; you can travel to the future; you can interact with people; but you can't 'change the past' from whatever has already become cold historical fact. You can try as hard as you like, but it's all wasted effort!"
[For instance, there was a Silver Age story in which Superman found himself on the surface of Krypton, probably a couple of years before it exploded. He became friends with Jor-El and Lara, but without telling them who he really was. He tried hard to help Jor-El push forward with his space travel research so that perhaps all or much of the Kryptonian population could be evacuated in large ships before the big explosion which almost no one else believed was bound to occur one of these days. But despite his sincere best efforts, Superman failed to "change the past."]
Natural Law #2. "Two versions of the same person at different points in his life cannot both exist as visible, tangible persons 'at the same time.' If you travel back in time to a moment when you were already present in the flesh, then the version of you that's last to arrive will become an insubstantial and invisible phantom. In that condition, you can still observe what's happening in the physical world around you, but you can't do anything to affect the people and things you are observing!"
The thing is: I'm not sure how seriously those rules were taken outside of the Superman-centric comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages. I'm not even sure they were used consistently within the Superman-centric stories!
One reason this is on my mind is that just recently, for the first time in many years, I reread "Crisis on Earth-Prime!" It was the first annual JLA/JSA team-up which I ever read, back in 1982 when I was just a schoolboy starting to buy comic books on a regular basis. I now know it was an exceptionally large crossover epic for its day -- three issues of "Justice League of America" alternating with two issues of "All-Star Squadron" to make a five-part epic. Since then, I think I've read all of the previous JLA/JSA team-ups, some in back issues and some in reprint volumes, and I gather that in the Pre-COIE era, it was standard to just use a couple of issues of the old JLA title for such a team-up. Using two titles and a total of five issues, for a story arc involving characters from four different parallel Earths, must have struck veteran fans in the early 1980s as "a much bigger deal" than it would seem if it were all happening today!
Early on in the arc, five members of the JLA discover that the Earth-2 of 1982 has retroactively become a dictatorship under the control of the time-traveling red-headed scientist known as Per Degaton -- who has been in power for the past 40 years! Meanwhile, 5 members of the JSA have ended up on the world of Earth-Prime, also in 1982 (that was our world, if you didn't remember), and they discover that it has become a radioactive wasteland in which most of the surviving people are deformed mutants (because Per Degaton's meddling caused the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 to escalate into all-out nuclear war). Both of those heroic quintets end up traveling back in time to 1942 (on Earth-2) to team up with 5 members of the All-Star Squadron to foil Per Degaton's evil scheme, etc., but the other details don't matter right now.
As I was rereading this arc, it occurred to me that on the face of it, these "drastic changes in history" in two different parallel universes appeared to contradict the rule from the Superman-centric stories which I labeled "Natural Law #1" above. Although that's debatable, because in the final issue of the arc, Per Degaton's meddling in the Cuban Missile Crisis was undone by time-traveling heroes and this erased all the changes I mentioned a moment ago, which incidentally erased most of the last five issues' worth of storytelling so that as we hit the final few pages, we discover that no one (including Degaton and the Crime Syndicate of America from Earth-3) remembered that any such dimension-crossing, time-travelling, nuke-using events had ever occurred in the first place!
So perhaps Superman's rule of thumb should be modified to something along these lines? "You can't go back in time and change the past and see it stick in the long run. Even if you have 'rewritten history' for a little while, someone else will inevitably 'reverse-change it' right back to where it was to begin with! The universe somehow makes sure these things will all get straightened out in the end, no matter what you or I or anyone tries to do to derail what has already been written in the history books!"
But as I said, I don't think every single Pre-COIE time travel story to be published by DC was based on the same Natural Laws which the Superman titles had accepted as basic doctrine. Other writers and editors would have other ideas for what sort of stories they wanted to tell, using some form of time travel as a convenient plot device.
So here are my questions:
1. Were there other Pre-COIE stories, preferably involving "Earth-1" characters, which established other "natural laws" of time travel besides the two I just mentioned?
(Remember: I'm not talking about "arbitrary man-made rules for how a time traveller ought to behave." I'm talking about universal laws which couldn't be broken no matter how hard you tried!)
2. Can anyone remember other Pre-COIE stories (again, preferably set in the "Earth-1" reality), in which one or both of the "Natural Laws" I mentioned above were apparently broken successfully? A character shaking hands with "himself" from the "past" or the "future," for instance?
(Possibly because the writer (and/or the editor) on another title didn't really care about respecting any ideas which were currently in use in the Superman-centric comic books? But remember, such things as the Superman of Earth-1 shaking hands with the much older "Golden Age Superman" of Earth-2 did not violate "Natural Law #2," because they were not the same guy at different ages in his life. They were analogs from different timelines!)
Natural Law #1. "You can travel to the past; you can travel to the future; you can interact with people; but you can't 'change the past' from whatever has already become cold historical fact. You can try as hard as you like, but it's all wasted effort!"
[For instance, there was a Silver Age story in which Superman found himself on the surface of Krypton, probably a couple of years before it exploded. He became friends with Jor-El and Lara, but without telling them who he really was. He tried hard to help Jor-El push forward with his space travel research so that perhaps all or much of the Kryptonian population could be evacuated in large ships before the big explosion which almost no one else believed was bound to occur one of these days. But despite his sincere best efforts, Superman failed to "change the past."]
Natural Law #2. "Two versions of the same person at different points in his life cannot both exist as visible, tangible persons 'at the same time.' If you travel back in time to a moment when you were already present in the flesh, then the version of you that's last to arrive will become an insubstantial and invisible phantom. In that condition, you can still observe what's happening in the physical world around you, but you can't do anything to affect the people and things you are observing!"
The thing is: I'm not sure how seriously those rules were taken outside of the Superman-centric comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages. I'm not even sure they were used consistently within the Superman-centric stories!
One reason this is on my mind is that just recently, for the first time in many years, I reread "Crisis on Earth-Prime!" It was the first annual JLA/JSA team-up which I ever read, back in 1982 when I was just a schoolboy starting to buy comic books on a regular basis. I now know it was an exceptionally large crossover epic for its day -- three issues of "Justice League of America" alternating with two issues of "All-Star Squadron" to make a five-part epic. Since then, I think I've read all of the previous JLA/JSA team-ups, some in back issues and some in reprint volumes, and I gather that in the Pre-COIE era, it was standard to just use a couple of issues of the old JLA title for such a team-up. Using two titles and a total of five issues, for a story arc involving characters from four different parallel Earths, must have struck veteran fans in the early 1980s as "a much bigger deal" than it would seem if it were all happening today!
Early on in the arc, five members of the JLA discover that the Earth-2 of 1982 has retroactively become a dictatorship under the control of the time-traveling red-headed scientist known as Per Degaton -- who has been in power for the past 40 years! Meanwhile, 5 members of the JSA have ended up on the world of Earth-Prime, also in 1982 (that was our world, if you didn't remember), and they discover that it has become a radioactive wasteland in which most of the surviving people are deformed mutants (because Per Degaton's meddling caused the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 to escalate into all-out nuclear war). Both of those heroic quintets end up traveling back in time to 1942 (on Earth-2) to team up with 5 members of the All-Star Squadron to foil Per Degaton's evil scheme, etc., but the other details don't matter right now.
As I was rereading this arc, it occurred to me that on the face of it, these "drastic changes in history" in two different parallel universes appeared to contradict the rule from the Superman-centric stories which I labeled "Natural Law #1" above. Although that's debatable, because in the final issue of the arc, Per Degaton's meddling in the Cuban Missile Crisis was undone by time-traveling heroes and this erased all the changes I mentioned a moment ago, which incidentally erased most of the last five issues' worth of storytelling so that as we hit the final few pages, we discover that no one (including Degaton and the Crime Syndicate of America from Earth-3) remembered that any such dimension-crossing, time-travelling, nuke-using events had ever occurred in the first place!
So perhaps Superman's rule of thumb should be modified to something along these lines? "You can't go back in time and change the past and see it stick in the long run. Even if you have 'rewritten history' for a little while, someone else will inevitably 'reverse-change it' right back to where it was to begin with! The universe somehow makes sure these things will all get straightened out in the end, no matter what you or I or anyone tries to do to derail what has already been written in the history books!"
But as I said, I don't think every single Pre-COIE time travel story to be published by DC was based on the same Natural Laws which the Superman titles had accepted as basic doctrine. Other writers and editors would have other ideas for what sort of stories they wanted to tell, using some form of time travel as a convenient plot device.
So here are my questions:
1. Were there other Pre-COIE stories, preferably involving "Earth-1" characters, which established other "natural laws" of time travel besides the two I just mentioned?
(Remember: I'm not talking about "arbitrary man-made rules for how a time traveller ought to behave." I'm talking about universal laws which couldn't be broken no matter how hard you tried!)
2. Can anyone remember other Pre-COIE stories (again, preferably set in the "Earth-1" reality), in which one or both of the "Natural Laws" I mentioned above were apparently broken successfully? A character shaking hands with "himself" from the "past" or the "future," for instance?
(Possibly because the writer (and/or the editor) on another title didn't really care about respecting any ideas which were currently in use in the Superman-centric comic books? But remember, such things as the Superman of Earth-1 shaking hands with the much older "Golden Age Superman" of Earth-2 did not violate "Natural Law #2," because they were not the same guy at different ages in his life. They were analogs from different timelines!)