Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!
"Gallimaufry!
"
by Quentin Long
This time around, Inspiration hath failed me; I just couldn't come up with any topic I deemed worth writing a full essay about. That's why you're all present for a Multiverse 101 first: a semi-random collection of wholly unrelated snippets...
Darkseid and the Omega Effect
The power which may be counted the most fearsome of Darkseid's personal arsenal is a pretty impressive trick, all in all... and it's called the Omega Effect.
It manifests as crimson energy that erupts from Darkseid's eyes. This energy always, but always, strikes Darkseid's chosen target. Sure, the victim-to-be can run, if he likes; but all that does is delay the inevitable a trifle...
When the Omega Effect hits you, you're gone. Not "gone" as in "disintegrated", but rather, "gone" as in "you don't exist; and what's more, you never did"! And that's not all; in addition, the Omega Effect can bring you back from nonexistence any time Darkseid feels like it.
My best guess on how the Omega Effect works: it performs cosmic origami, folding space/time around the target; causing the target to pop out of existence into a private little "pocket universe" unto itself. Yes, that includes all past and future manifestations of the target; past, present, or future, it's all one and the same entity, so it all gets shunted into the pocket universe.
To restore the target, Darkseid uses the same schtick in reverse -- fusing the contents of the pocket universe back into the larger space/time continuum.
Skartaris
For those of you who aren't familiar with the career of artist/writer Mike Grell, Skartaris was the name of the fantasy-world setting of Grell's WARLORD series.
Skartaris was basically the latest incarnation of the old "hollow Earth" notion; that is, the Earth is actually a hollow spherical shell a few hundred miles thick, with openings at either Pole; an interior Sun providing light for the inner surface; and yadda yadda yadda.
The hollow Earth idea is not an unappealing one, but it's got problems. For instance, there is no gravity inside a hollow spherical shell; all the gravitational pulls from all parts of the shell cancel each other out. So if the Earth really were hollow, everything inside it would float around in free-fall. (No, Virginia: the centrifugal force generated by Earth's motion would not be enough to make up for the missing gravity; a circumstance which is doubtless greatly appreciated by everyone on Earth who lives anywhere near the equator.)
As if that weren't enough, the interior sun makes matters even worse, because that undersized star will happily suck in anything that isn't nailed to the ground. Air; water; non-sessile lifeforms of every description: it all ends up getting sucked into the central Sun. And did I mention that this sun-in-shell scenario is intrinsically unstable; with any deviance from a perfect sun-in-center arrangement leading, inevitably, to the shell getting aborbed by the interior sun...?
Here's my best guess on how to make Skartaris (and, by extension, pretty much any "hollow Earth" setting) work: the central star is made of "negative matter", an exotic substance for which gravity is a push, rather than the usual pull.
Negative matter should not be confused with antimatter. Whereas antimatter is the electrical opposite to normal matter, negative matter is the gravitational opposite. Two chunks of negative matter attract each other normally, just as you get a positive number when you multiply a pair of negative numbers; however, negative matter repulses normal matter, and vice versa. Thus, everything on the inner surface stays where it ought; just repulsed away from the interior star, rather than attracted to the ground.
Dualism
There are supertypes who can/do transmute their body into some non-living substance; with said alteration, somehow, never seeming to affect their ability to think.
Then there are all those stories which revolve around someone's mind getting transplanted from one body into another; again, without the affected mind suffering any particular ill effects.
Put it all together, and it's fairly clear: a comicbook universe is a dualist universe. In other words: the substance of this "mind" thingie is something quite separate and distinct from the substance of the body which houses the mind.
Krypton addendum
Back in "Secrets of the Supermetal From the Miracle Planet!," I (initially) proposed that gravity was the external influence that shifted krypton particles between their natural low- and high- -energy states.
I've changed
my mind about this; thanks, in large part, to the various published stories
in which normal, non-superpowered Earthlings (Jimmy Olsen, in particular)
visited Krypton and lived; which implies Krypton's surface gravity was
probably somewhere in the range of 2 to 4 Gs; close enough to Earth's gravity
that Superman should (logically) have to worry about gravity-induced power
loss -- when in space or visiting alien worlds -- a whole lot more than
he ever has.
Rather than gravity, I now think it's neutrinos which cause krypton particles to shift from high- to low- -energy states. Just as each particular spectral class of star emits a characteristic pattern of light-frequencies, so (logically) must each star radiate neutrinos in a characteristic style.
This is why it takes world-class scientific expertise to create a red sun lamp that negates Superman's powers; you're not trying to duplicate the light from a red star, but (rather) the flux of neutrinos therefrom. Merely to generate the damn things at all, in the first place, is no small achievement; when you throw in the requirement that the artificial neutrino flux must be indistinguishable from what a red sun emits, you've got yourself one king-hell mother of a difficult problem.
[UNCA'S SHAME-FACED ADDENDUM: the handsomely-produced faux DC COMICS, INC. cover, directly above, is the conceptual and/or artistic handiwork of our own "Per'fesser" Quentin Long; aided and abetted by none other than that renowned leader of men (and despoiler of women) Jack Selegue -- he of well-merited THE PERIODIC TABLE OF COMIC BOOKS infamy.
[Said artistic milestone had originally been intended to serve as graceful "header" for the Per'fesser's well-explicated (and well-received) "Kryptonite" essay, early on in the course of the Multiverse 101 series of articles...
[...but (sadly), congenital ignorance on the part of this site's blushing host -- coupled with a short-term memory spaan which has been known to elicit derisive hootings of laughter even from mayflies -- kept this from happpening for many, many a white and waxing moon; a repeated (non-)occurance which Per'fesser Long has accepted, time and again, with his fabled patience and good humor, by and large.
[In any event, however: several gently remonstrative phone calls and e-mails to Unca, from The Right Honorable Quentin -- in the course of which the subjects of "bamboo shoots" and "relatives in the old country" only surfaced eighteen or twenty times, max -- served as much-needed impetus, ultimately, for Unca to (at long last) remedy this dreadful and inexplicable error, on his part.
[There, now, Quentin; Jack.
[Happy, ya bums...?] 
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