Old Johnny vowed that he would never, ever end up like the rest

As though I needed night-table reading, I picked up Crisis on Multiple Earths, a collection of Silver Age crossovers between Earth-One and many alternate worlds. I'd never read them as comic books, since I only collected for a couple years in the mid-80s and made an eclectic set mostly of Marvel's New Universe books, which is the comic book guy equivalent of logging your multiple Yugo purchases on both your Coleco Adams.

( So naturally my mind trips on one of the many odd things the Silver Age of DC Superheroes present. Things get a bit involved, and include spoilers for a comic book that came out in 1963 and a TV show that aired in 2002. )

Trivia: The correspondence school art instruction course Charles Schulz took cost approximately $170. Source: Peanuts Jubilee: My Life and Art with Charlie Brown and Others, Charles M Schulz.

Currently Reading: The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History, Peter Lamont. The history turns out to be ridiculous in key parts, with a lot of support for the claims of existence of the Rope Trick given by the British, which kept making me think of Tom Servo's riff in one of those depressing British movies they kept getting for a while there, ``India must be so embarrassed to have been ruled by these guys.'' The endnotes quote a comment from Robert Benchley, though oddly not from his marvelous little essay, ``The Rope Trick Explained''. This is the only trick that everyone explains, as well as the only trick that no one has ever seen. (Now don't write in and say that you have a friend who has seen it. I know your friend and he drinks.) It'd have been rather appropriate.