Regular readers know I am a comic book aficionado – collecting them since just a few years into the so-called “Silver Age.” (For the Cleveland Browns fans out there, that means I have been collecting since the mid 1960’s.) It is not uncommon when attending a comic book movie to hear some youngster in their 20’s declare themselves an “expert” – I have to work very hard not to laugh out loud. When I attend such a movie with friends not nearly so steeped in the lore it is common for them to ask, “Is that how it really happened?” And then I have to laugh. This is, after all, fiction. I am pretty sure there is no one on the planet that when they get angry, turns green, grows to 15 feet tall and can lift tanks with one hand. There is no “real” involved.

The question is, of course, ingrained in us since film often deviates significantly from its literary roots. But in the case of comic books, which only rise to the level of literature on occasion, the same story gets told hundreds of times over with different variations, making deviations from source material difficult to figure.

In case you are unaware, the internet is plum full of total nerd information – whole groups dedicated to deciding if Bruce Wayne or Dick Grayson is the cooler Batman. (Yes, for the Ohio State Buckeyes fans out there – Dick Grayson is all grown up, no longer Robin and has donned the cape-and-cowl in some stories.) Those fictious hypotheticals the nerds on “Big Bang Theory” used to discuss endlessly are a very real phenomenon. Which is background for why this article (yes an entire article) exists:

Every once in a while, there are these… I guess the best description for them is “thought experiments,” that become popular on social media. You know, like, “What superhero would be the most likely to do X?,” and more stuff like that. What amazes me about them, though, is when you will see fans step in and try to argue against certain picks, because the picks don’t fit their headcanon, and I just think that that is unreasonable.

Headcanon, in case you’re curious, is the term for your personal take on a particular character. Comic book characters, in a lot of cases, have now been around for a LONG TIME. Superman has been around for EIGHTY-SIX YEARS. The Marvel Universe has been around for over SIXTY YEARS. Comic book characters have gone through so many different approaches over the years. It is why I did a piece a while back noting that there inherently is no such thing as a coherent Marvel Universe, because there CAN’T be, as the Marvel Universe has been written by hundreds of different writers, very often writing stories that inherently contradict each other. In other words, they can’t ALL be real, and thus, there is no such thing as a “Marvel Universe,” there’s just the fiction that we create in our minds to keep it all coherent. Because of that, the idea of headcanon is very valuable for comic book readers. If there are multiple different versions of a comic book character, then it is completely logical that you should pick the one that you like the best, and read the comics with that in mind.

I have been sitting on this article for a few days – saving it for today, Saturday, and I was going to make a fun romp through the world of nerdom. But the more I have thought about it, the more it has occurred to me that in a world where the same news story comes out so differently from MSNBC than it does from FOXNews, we live in a very real world where you almost have to form a “reality headcanon.” There are videos on the internet that paint Donald Trump as the greatest man since, at least Reagan, if not Lincoln. And then in the same place, there are people telling us he is “PURE EVIL!” What are we supposed to think?

One thing is for sure – it is not a matter of, as stated above, picking “the one that you like the best.” This is not fiction – we are not reading about politics to be entertained. This is reality and we are deciding who to vote for to run the executive branch of the federal government for the next four years. There is a job to be done and how well, or how poorly, it is executed will have very significant consequences for each of us as individuals and for the world. It is the difference between a mortgage at 3.X% and one at 6.X%. It is the difference between war and peace in the Middle East. While we may have to create a reality headcanon, it better be one about what actually works, not what we like.

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