10 Times Comics Purposefully Lied To Fans‏

1. Not A Hoax! Not A Dream! Not An Imaginary Story!

The Silver Age was a boon time for absolutely ridiculous comic book plots. You couldn't pass the newsstands without seeing some preposterous claim yelling at you in block capitals, surrounded by an explosive word bubble, about how "IN THIS COMIC, BATMAN DIES!". Usually that bold claim would be qualified with a remarkably self-aware assurance that this isn't some hoax, nor dream, nor imaginary story, and that the events of the comic would have real, lasting consequences in the way that so many overs didn't. Now, technically they usually weren't lying. The tales of Superman being raised by apes or The Flash being replaced by a robot weren't dreams, hoaxes or imaginary stories, but were usually explained away as being part of an alternate reality (which is why DC later had to have all those aforementioned continuity-fixing crossover events), or the result of implanted memories by a devious supervillain, or some other total cop-out. Yep, there was a whole period of comic books where readers were lied to pretty much every time they picked up a funnybook. The reason for all these crazy stories was because editors would put together stories based on whatever was big in their rivals' comics (and pop culture as a whole) at that moment, slap together a cover proposal and then leave the creative teams to figure out how to make the story work. And the stories would be so over-the-top that the only way to make them work to have them occur in a different universe. Readers began to twig these reveals, though, so those clever editors started to include those disclaimers on the covers to stop people getting too cynical about tales of Super-Babies and Batman turning into a tiger and eating Robin (both actual things that happened in the Silver Age). It was the Year Zero for comics purposefully lying to fans, and long has it continued.