Multiple Choice Past / Comic Books

Given that multiple reboots and sliding timelines are so endemic to DC Comics and Marvel Comics in general, almost every legacy comic-book character has this to some extent or another.

The DCU:

• The DCU's Crisis Crossovers (and not just the ones actually bearing the Crisis name) alter reality, changing the pasts and presents of a variety of characters. Legion of Super-Heroes has had four such reality reboots (counting the original Crisis on Infinite Earths). Also, retellings of characters' origins will vastly alter them on occasion, with no Crisis-type justification. As such, most DC characters with a significant amount of history have multiple formerly canonical histories, as well as ones that are equally canonical but completely incompatible. One side-effect of all the Cosmic Retcons has been that since Infinite Crisis, the DCU itself now has multiple pasts which all happened.
• Aquaman: Black Manta, oh Neptune, Black Manta. If DC had no idea what to do with Aquaman for most of his history, you better believe they didn't know what to do with his Arch-Enemy. Pre-New 52, he had at least three wildly different and convoluted backstories and motivations for his feud with Aquaman, not counting the brief period he claimed to be a militant black nationalist. You really have to wonder why it took them until 2011 to come up with "Aquaman killed his dad".
  • Originally, he was kidnapped and enslaved on board a ship, saw a young Aquaman in the distance and called out to him for help, but Arthur didn't hear him and swam away.
  • The 2003 series claimed that he was a severely autistic child who grew up in an asylum and was obsessed with water, breaking out after being subjected to experimental electroshock therapy.
  • Post-Brightest Day, he was a treasure hunter who was exploring the Bermuda Triangle with his pregnant wife, and they were abducted and tortured by Xebelians. His wife died and his unborn child was experimented on and grew up to be Aqualad, and he really hated Mera, not Aquaman.
• Batman:
  • An inconsistent past is almost canon for The Joker, as evidenced by his quote at the top of the page. Many have given him a different origin in the past fifty or sixty years, and all of them are half-canon, because the clown isn't sure himself◊. One constant factor is that he usually wore the Red Hood before he was dumped into that vat of chemicals. It's also unknown whether he was insane even before falling into the vat. As quipped by Batman: "Like any other comedian, he uses whatever material will work."
    • While being the Trope Namer, The Killing Joke ironically has little of this, since it shows flashbacks of a single, consistent Start of Darkness for the Joker. The trope is only suggested by the line about how he remembers multiple versions and prefers a multiple-choice past, but it's a highly plausible reading that what was shown is the real story and he just doesn't remember it. Both the story's artist Brian Bollard and writer Alan Moore have said afterwards that giving the Joker a fixed origin story wasn't such a great idea.
    • Also played with in one issue of Robin (1993) which starts off with a flashback about a green-haired, white-skinned boy in a purple shirt with a pony. "Or was it a bike?" the narration muses. "No, a pony." The little boy did something bad, and then his daddy shot the pony in front of him. Cut to the Joker, narrating, and he's actually weeping real tears. He's in a cell at Arkham, and a speaker on the wall asks him if the story is true, because it's the seventh Freudian Excuse story he's told them.
    • Another variation on the Freudian Excuse theme shows up in the story "Mad Love" from The Batman Adventures (later adapted into an episode of The New Batman Adventures):
      Harley Quinn: Joker told me things, secret things he never told anyone...
      Batman: What did he tell you, Harley? Was it the line about the abusive father, or the one about the alcoholic mom? Of course, the runaway orphan story is particularly moving, too. He's gained a lot of sympathy with that one. What was it he told that one parole officer? Oh, yes... "There was only one time I ever saw dad really happy. He took me to the ice show when I was seven..."
      Harley: [crying] Circus... He told me it was the circus.
      Batman: He's got a million of them, Harley.
    • A 2004 story arc in Batman: Gotham Knights suggests that the Killing Joke version is more or less Joker's real past, since a pre-Riddler Edward Nigma witnessed the murder of "Jack"'s wife and later offered to tell the Joker who did it (although the version told in The Killing Joke has it that his wife was killed in an accident, not murdered). Later writers have pretty much ignored it.
    • In Shadow of the Bat #38, "Tears of a Clown", the Joker celebrates his anniversary of the day he was a still sane, but hapless comedian, and was thrown out of an exclusive Stand-Up Comedy club for an unfunny act. Being desperately poor, this marks his Start of Darkness as he agreed to provide to his family by pulling a job for the Red Hood gang. He kidnaps all the patrons that didn't laugh with him and reenacts his act with control collars that will kill them when they laugh. The funny thing is that the patrons are hardcore Stand-Up Comedy fans, so they have seen so many acts that nobody remembers the act of a bad comedian. The Joker cannot even be sure that this Start of Darkness really happened.
      They throw me out, and I had a wife and an unborn child... or it was two cows and a goat? Sometimes it's so confusing...
    • An issue of The Brave and the Bold written by J. Michael Straczynski suggests that the Joker was a monster even before he fell into the chemicals, showing him as a Self-Made Orphan who killed neighborhood pets before graduating to violent crime as a young adult.
    • The New 52 Joker is probably Red Hood One from Batman: Zero Year... but might also be Alby Stryker from the retelling of "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate" in Detective Comics volume 2 issue #27, both of whom fell in vats of acid during a confrontation with Batman at Ace Chemicals.
    • In Batman: Endgame, the Joker is strongly implied to be a Humanoid Abomination of some sort, who may very well have existed in Gotham in some way since before the city was even built. At the very least he appears to be semi-immortal, which rather well-explains how he always manages to come back despite the horrible damage his body's been put through over the years. Then, at the very end, when Batman is claiming to believe in the Joker's immortality, the Joker is clearly worried that he's about to die. A backup story has the Joker tell different, completely contradictory origins to a doctor and a group of Arkham patients, tricking the former into writing a book by posing as a colleague. That same story has him change his stance on his past (described in the quote at the top of the page), showing that something's changed and that Joker is far more serious than he ever was before.
      The Joker: ...And then that night, over the wine and the candles, and that oh so beautiful music, you showed me your manuscript. I was so sad to see all the blanks you couldn't fill. I couldn't help but lend a hand. I might have been in hiding... but I can't help myself. I just like to make people smile. Hehehehe...
      Maureen: All the work we did...
      The Joker: Oh, it's a good story, isn't it? Not quite as good the one where I'm a secret robot. Beep boop beep. But a good one, nonetheless. I did my best to help come up with the story you wanted. The one you needed. The grim and grimy tale of woe. The one a publisher would lay down six figures for. And heck, all I had to do is pay off a few foster parents. Write a few government documents. It made you soooo happy.
      Maureen: ...Why?
      The Joker: The same reason I visited all of them. You wanted to know who I was. You wanted the truth. The deep down real truth. And here I am... giving it to you.
      Maureen: [handed a revolver] What's this?
      The Joker: Five bullets in the cylinder. Since we're pals, I'm giving you the chance to decide. Which story do you think is the real one? That's the one who gets to live. That's what I said from the beginning.
      Maureen: But... none of them are real, are they?
      The Joker: Hmmm... then here's a sixth. Just in case. Heh...
      Maureen: Where did you go?
      The Joker: Where I always go. To that little corner in the back of your head where all the bad things hide. That's where I'm really from. That's the real truth of it. Hah. Or not. I prefer not to think of it as multiple choice... it's more choose-your-own-adventure.
    • DC outdid themselves when DC Rebirth revealed that the answer to the multiple-choice is: all of the above. There are three Jokers!
  • In the 1980s, an issue of The Question reinvented the Riddler; his real name was Edward Nashton, and he changed it to Edward Nygma when he became the Riddler. His obsession with riddles wasn't born from cheating in a school competition and wanting to prove how clever he was; it was a compulsion to tell the truth due to a violent father. It also claimed that he was never a major Batman villain. Later, Neil Gaiman wrote a Secret Origins story in which Riddler retells his classic origin, before adding "Or maybe I'm a frustrated second-rater called Nashton with a meaningless schtick!" The Riddler's latest origin, post-Infinite Crisis, is largely his classic origin... but his real name is Edward Nashton. It has since been reverted back to Nigma.
  • The Scarecrow's first origin story begins with him frightening birds as a child. Skip forward a few decades to the Post-Crisis version, and in a 180 turn he's frightened by birds — namely, by a trained attack squad of crows in the old chapel which his great-grandmother liked to lock him in. Also, origin stories differ as to whether he was a child bully (i.e., his first episode in Batman: The Animated Series, which has a flashback of him chasing girls with handfuls of snakes) or a bullied child. The New 52 only makes things more complicated since in that aforementioned post-Crisis story, his mother was a teen mom from whom he was taken away at birth, and his dad was Glorified Sperm Donor. Here, his mom is given a (frankly unceremonious) Death by Origin Story, and his father is made into a Mad Scientist who was exactly like him. This was carried over into Gotham and is supposedly still canon to DC Rebirth, going by the official DC website.
  • Lady Shiva started out as a Chinese-American from New York with implied Japanese heritage as well whose well-off parents died in an airplane crash when she was at least in her later teen years. She's since been written as a Chinese national, someone who grew up in the slums of an unspecified South-East Asian country, and a Chinese-American who was orphaned at an early age and grew up homeless. Her sister's murder has happened a couple of different ways with different perpetrators as well.
  • Whatever Happened to The Caped Crusader? uses this trope to prove a point: there must always be a Batman, regardless of retcons and alternate realities. Thus, every time Batman dies, rather than heading to any sort of afterlife, he's reincarnated as another Bruce Wayne in another universe, to relive Batman's origin story and become a slightly different Batman. In another of the stories, a psychologist is sent to interview Poison Ivy and tries to sort out the different origin stories in the files and newspaper reports on her. Ivy bursts out laughing and says that sometimes she just makes stuff up for a joke, and she's surprised people took her seriously.
  • Played with in Batman: Joker's Daughter, which reimagines the character for the New 52; the Joker's Daughter has three entirely incompatible origins which she relives when the Anchorite uses her power on her. The twist is that not only are none of them true, but her big secret (that she can't even admit to herself) is that she never had an origin; she was living a life that was entirely unremarkable in every way, and just decided to become the Joker's Daughter.
  • Tom King's Batman run has an intentional invocation of this technique, as Batman and Catwoman argue about when and where they first met. Batman claims that it was when he caught a disguised Catwoman during a diamond heist (which is how they met in The Golden Age), and Catwoman claims that it was when Bruce Wayne was stabbed by a young Holly Robinson back during Selina's time as a prostitute (which is how they met in Batman: Year One). It's eventually revealed that they actually both remember both events; it's just that Selina thinks their encounter on the street was purely them, before the costumes and codenames, while Bruce thinks they didn't really meet each other until they did so as the Bat and the Cat.
• Parodied in the Annual issue of Blue Devil. The Phantom Stranger and Madame Xanadu narrate two entirely different origin stories for Black Orchid (with Madame Xanadu's spoofing Daredevil's origin story, the Phantom Stranger's parodying the origin of Spider-Man and both involving Black Orchid coming to be from coming into contact with an irradiated orchid); when this is pointed out, they start arguing about whose version is right.
  Madame X: Orchids have no thorns!
  Stranger: These orchids did! They were special!
• In his first appearance, Booster Gold villain Black Beetle claimed to be the Blue Beetle of the 27th century. When revealed as a villain, he claimed to be Jaime Reyes' greatest enemy, who blamed Jaime for a death (and the final issue of Blue Beetle would strongly hint as to who he was) making him from the very near future. In a later appearance, Booster calls him "The Black Beetle, direct from the 22nd century. Or the 27th." to which the Beetle replies, "Or 15th. Whatever I choose to say for the sake of misdirection". Later, he had his first (from Jaime's point of view) encounter with Blue Beetle, in which he initially claimed to be the character the Blue Beetle story hinted at, before saying he wasn't; he killed that character. He follows this up by claiming to be Jaime himself. Blue & Gold #8 finally reveals that (at least in current continuity) he's Booster's Earth-3 counterpart.
• Dark Crisis toys with this premise in its special issue #0. A group of children take a tour through the Hall of Justice, and their guide mentions that the true first meeting of the Justice League is often debated. As this is being said, the kids pass by a display depicting the League's battle against the Appellaxian invaders (their original Silver Age origin) and another showing them fighting Darkseid (the team's rebooted origin from the New 52 run).
• Doom Patrol:
  • Suspecting a traitor among them in the 82nd issue of My Greatest Adventure, the Chief confides to Rita that he's actually an alien. He also confided other origin stories to Cliff and the Negative Man, telling the former that he was raised in a Tibetan monastery and the latter that he was a model student of Cambridge University. It was actually an elaborate ruse to discover the traitor by checking which story got leaked. In the end, it turns out that none of those stories was the real one.
  • John Byrne's run infamously disregarded every preceding Doom Patrol series and started continuity anew with a revamped version of the original roster (The Chief, Robotman, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl) that had new characters Nudge, Grunt, Vortex and Faith added as additional recruits before Geoff Johns took advantage of the Cosmic Retcon caused by Infinite Crisis to reinstate the preceding series as canon while still retaining the roster established in John Byrne's run before Johns used his run on Teen Titans to further distance the Doom Patrol from John Byrne's changes. While the established origins for Robotman, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl were more or less left intact, the John Byrne run identified T'oombala, the shaman of a tribe of natives the Chief once helped out, as the one responsible for crippling the Chief, when before it was General Immortus who gave the Chief his handicap.
• The Flash: Eobard Thawne/Professor Zoom/Reverse-Flash has quite a few different origins. There are five versions of Thawne's origin story, spanning over the various eras of DC:
  • In his pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths origin, he was a crook with a scientific background who discovered Barry Allen's Flash suit in a time capsule sent from the past to his home 25th century. Succeeding in using it to replicate Barry's powers, he then committed crimes with them before Barry arrived in his era and defeated him. Now enraged at Barry, Thawne decided to become the Flash's worst enemy, thus the whole time travel thing. He also developed a desire to replace Barry as Iris' husband and as the Flash.
  • In his post-Crisis origin, written by Mark Waid in the famous "The Return of Barry Allen" storyline, it was changed so that his reason for hating Barry before he met him was that Thawne was a Flash fanboy who even had surgery to look like Barry Allen, along with recreating Barry's accident to give himself powers. He became the Flash of the 25th Century. Thawne traveled back in time to run alongside his hero but missed the date and instead landed in the Wally West Flash era. He then discovers that he would become the Flash's worst villain, and all of this combined with the trauma of time travel made him snap. He impersonates Barry for a while but is eventually defeated by Wally and sent back through time. The experience is erased from his memory, but he holds onto an instinctual hatred of the Flash as well as his Reverse-Flash costume, and it just so happens that he meets Barry "first". This explains how his extensive knowledge of Barry Allen and his desire to replace him came about.
  • His post-The Flash: Rebirth origin is a combination of the above two. Here Eobard was still from the 25th century and was also genetically engineered to be intelligent. He formed an obsession with the heroes of the past, specifically the Flashes. He became his world's foremost leading expert on the Speed Force and head of the Flash Museum. Because of this, he was dubbed "Professor Zoom". Eventually, Thawne figured out how to replicate Flash's powers from a costume from a time capsule and aimed to become a hero like his idol — but in the super-safe 25th century resorted to causing accidents himself that he'd then save people from. He eventually encountered Barry Allen as the Flash, and after Barry "ruined his life", he resolved to ruin Barry's.
  • In the New 52, post-Flashpoint retelling of his origin, Thawne came from a 25th century that idolized the Flash as a god. After witnessing his mother murdered by his father as a child and later gaining time alteration powers, Thawne attempts to conquer Central City but is opposed by the populace who fight against him in the Flash's name, motivating him to travel back in time, gather a group of similarly powered acolytes, and kill the Flash so that he goes down in history as a failure, not as a hero. He also notably never used the name "Reverse-Flash", instead going exclusively by Professor Zoom. This version was undone in The Button, which merged this Thawne with the post-Flash: Rebirth Thawne, with the latter's memories — and his previous origin — now dominant.
  • The DC Rebirth version of Thawne's origin is essentially the post-The Flash: Rebirth origin, but it's expanded upon and there are some changes. Eobard is a child who grew up loving the Flash. Finding Barry's suit in a time capsule, he uses it to replicate Barry's powers in himself, becoming the Flash of the 25th Century. This time, he goes about causing accidents that he can save people from (it's not established if accidents are illegal like in the post The Flash: Rebirth origin). Encountering a time-travelling Barry Allen, the two bonded over their belief that time is valuable, and Thawne considers Barry telling him that "every second is a gift" the happiest day of his life. However, when Barry discovered Thawne's unethical ways of being a hero, he defeated him and turned him over to the authorities. Thawne genuinely repented, becoming curator of the Flash Museum (being dubbed a professor) and eventually donning a new costume based on Kid Flash's (it's basically his Rebirth suit but with the lightning bolt's direction the same as Barry's). However, when he travelled back in time to be with his hero once more, he discovered Barry was already mentoring Wally West. Seeing Barry tell Wally that "every second is a gift" and giving Wally his grandfather's watch with said quote engraved on it, Thawne was heartbroken. An enraged Thawne now believes his "bond" with Barry had all been lies on Barry's part and thus decided to fill Barry's life with the pain he was experiencing and make sure everyone knew what kind of person Barry really was.
• Green Lantern:
  • The only thing for sure about Solomon Grundy's backstory is he was once a man named Cyrus Gold who died and came back as a zombie. The details of how Gold died vary: His debut in All-American Comics Vol. 1, #61 stated that he was mugged and murdered; Batman: Shadow of the Bat #39 stated that a pimp killed him after realizing his attempt to blackmail Gold wasn't working, Seven Soldiers of Victory (2005) stated that he was the victim of a lynch mob who thought he was a child molester; and a self-titled miniseries that led into Grundy's involvement in Blackest Night stated that Gold had in fact killed himself.
  • The Tangent Comics version of Green Lantern (a mystic woman who carries an Asian lantern able to temporarily resurrect the dead) tells three different versions of her origin in the Tales of the Green Lantern one-shot. "Brightest Light" states that she was an archaeologist and adventurer named Lois Lane who returned from the dead to get even with billionaire playboy Booster Gold after he had her killed in retribution for her refusal to aid in robbing the Sea Devils of their treasure, "Darkest Light" establishes that she was the twin sister of a sorceress with power over the dead called Darkside who was accidentally killed by Manhunter and obtained her enchanted lantern after helping Manhunter kill the real Darkside, and "Know Evil" gives the origin of the Green Lantern being a necromancer named Zatanna who intended to take the lantern in order to join an occult organization called the Dark Circle, only to become the new Green Lantern after agreeing to take the place of the lantern's previous owner Jason Blood. After the end of each take on her origin, Green Lantern admits that not even she knows which, if any, is her true backstory. It is later stated in the "History Lesson" back-up story of Superman's Reign that these three are just the most well-known of countless speculations regarding her backstory.
• Hawkman's past has so many embedded possibilities that it's become a Continuity Snarl. He was originally established in the Golden Age to be a man named Carter Hall who was the latest reincarnation of Prince Khufu, the interpretation of the Silver Age made him a Thanagarian cop named Katar Hol who came to Earth after creating a battle suit made of Nth metal, both Hawkmen briefly coexisted Post-Crisis before the Golden Age incarnation was cast into Limbo during Last Days of the Justice Society of America and both Hawkmen were established as the same individual during New 52 and Rebirth (the former making Carter Hall an alias assumed by Katar Hol and the latter making Katar Hol one of Carter Hall's past lives).
• Hellblazer: In the Secret Origins issue looking at the New 52 version of John Constantine, the Framing Story is that a bunch of magic-happy idiots summon a creature to tell them Constantine's history. The creature simultaneously tells them three entirely contradictory stories, with the only points of similarity being that whatever John's childhood was like, he attracted the attention of a powerful blindfolded figure (probably Tannarak?) who taught him enough magic to (accidentally?) kill his family, and of course the Newcastle Incident (and even then, there are three possibilities of how John got involved in the Incident and what happened to him as a result — and they could easily be mixed-and-matched). In the end, John turns up to rescue the acolytes from their summoning, which has been feeding on them the more involved they become in the stories and points out there's no reason to believe any of it.
• In Justice League Dark Vol. 2, Jason Woodrue claims to be remembering multiple contradictory pasts, including being an extradimensional being (his Silver Age "Plant-Master" incarnation), teaching Alec Holland and "a girl... Isley" in college (Neil Gaiman's Poison Ivy origin) and eating Swamp Thing as "the Seeder" (his New 52 origin). Confusing things further, having usurped the position of the King of Petals, he also remembers Oleander Sorrel's origin story (from the JLD annual) as if it happened to him. Papa Midnite just thinks he's crazy.
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • DC's writers still have no idea what to do with Mon-El/Valor. His initial origin was that he was a Daxamite with amnesia who encountered Clark in his days as Superboy and was initially believed to be Superboy's brother before his memory was jogged when Clark inadvertently exposed him to lead, afterwards Clark sent him to the Phantom Zone until he could be cured of the lead poisoning, eventually being freed periodically from the Phantom Zone by the Legion in the 30th century and given a temporary antidote for his lead poisoning each time. Every continuity in succession has since vastly altered the details of his origin except for the broad strokes of being trapped in the Phantom Zone before eventually being freed by the Legion in the 30th century, with the origin of the name Mon-El even being inconsistent^note The original origin had it formed from assuming he was part of the House of El and his arrival to Earth happening on a Monday, while the post-Zero Hour version spelled the name as "M'Onel" and established it to be Martian for "He Who Wanders". The Brian Michael Bendis run ended up completely disregarding what was established before and went with making Mon-El a legitimate Kryptonian and Superman's descendant.
  • The Time Trapper has at various points been a Controller, a future version of their own sidekick, a future version of Cosmic Boy, a future version of Lori Morning, and a future version of Superboy-Prime. Following that last revelation, Brainiac 5 hypothesized that the Trapper is the Anthropomorphic Personification of failed timelines, and exactly what history leads to someone at the End of Time wearing a purple cloak and fighting the Legion changes every time the Trapper does anything.
• In the Lois Lane maxiseries, Renee Montoya remembers the whole thing with teaming up with Vic Sage during 52, including his death, and also remembers that none of it happened. Meeting a Vic who somehow came back from the dead doesn't exactly help. (While it's not explicitly stated, this takes place after DC Rebirth, which restored significant elements of DC's pre-Flashpoint past.) The same goes for Sister Clarice, who remembers being the Radiant and dying in Final Crisis, and Jessica Midnight, who has the misfortune to suddenly remember being a Checkmate agent, just as everyone connected to Checkmate is being hunted down in Event Leviathan.
• The Phantom Stranger: One issue of Secret Origins gave four different, mutually exclusive origins for the mysterious Phantom Stranger. Either he was a man named Isaac who was cursed to wander the Earth for eternity as penance for having a hand in the flagellation of Jesus Christ, a man who lived during Biblical times and became the Stranger when he was Barred from the Afterlife after committing suicide and left with no memory of his mortal existence, he's part of a Stable Time Loop where he created himself by possessing a scientist and going back to the Big Bang to thwart an effort to prevent it from happening or a fallen angel whose eternal journey is the result of refusing to take a side during Lucifer's rebellion. According to the Word of God, they're all true.
  • When a Black Lantern tried to eat the Phantom Stranger's heart during Blackest Night, it saw three of those backstories, leaving it stunned long enough for the Stranger to spring a trap. The Stranger's response? "You have seen everything and you have seen nothing."
  • Then the New 52 reboot happened, and he actually does have a concrete origin now — he's heavily implied to be Judas Iscariot.
• Plastic Man:
  • The 1966 comic book had a story in the second issue where Plastic Man's archenemy Dr. Dome tried to find out Plastic Man's origin so he could go back in time and prevent the hero from getting his powers. Dr. Dome has his daughter Lynx split into three women wearing different disguises to consult Captain McSniffe, Mrs. De Lute and Gordon K. Trueblood. All three give a contradictory origin for Plastic Man where the only elements in common were that Plastic Man obtained his stretching powers while confronting a supervillain (McSniffe stating that Plastic Man was a crook known as the Eel who got his powers after the villain the Spider knocked him into a vat of putty^note Which is actually very close to Plastic Man's standard origin., Mrs. De Lute claiming that Plastic Man was a Romani fiddler who gained stretching abilities from being exposed to acid and milk at the same time while chasing after the Japanese Beetle and Trueblood giving an account of Plastic Man being a yogurt farmer who got his powers from being accidentally injected with yogurt made from the milk of a goat that had diptheria while confronted by the Frog when Trueblood was a Boy Scout). The end of the story reveals Plastic Man made up all the origins to throw Dr. Dome off (his actual origin would later be revealed in issue seven, where he was established to be the son of the original Plastic Man and that he got his powers from drinking a bottle of the same acid that gave his dad his powers).
  • Plastic Man's sidekick Woozy Winks has had three different origins. The original Quality Comics continuity established that he gained the power to be immune to injury as a reward for saving a sorcerer from drowning and turned to crime until he encountered Plastic Man and was convinced to go straight, the 1988 miniseries by Phil Foglio made it so that Woozy was a former inmate of Arkham Asylum who became Plastic Man's sidekick by distracting him before he could jump off a bridge and a 1999 one-shot by Ty Templeton gave an origin where Woozy was once a physically fit secret agent named Green Cobra who became the dimwit we know him as today when he was stuffed in a locker with a bleeding Plastic Man by a supervillain called the Dart and had his brain damaged from inhaling the fumes of Plastic Man's airplane glue-like blood.
• Power Girl has a particularly interesting Multiple-Choice Past. Originally, she was Supergirl's equivalent from Earth-2. After Crisis on Infinite Earths retconned all the alternate Earths out of existence, Power Girl was kept around, but now lacked an origin or even a defined species, as Superman was now the only Kryptonian around. Over the years, different writers tried different takes, giving her a magical Atlantean past, an alien Daxamite heritage, and so on. With the return of the multiverse in Infinite Crisis, Power Girl's history has now become her origin: she was from Earth-2, but after it ceased to exist the universe spent years trying to make her fit, but her true Kryptonian heritage has now been re-established. (This doesn't apply to the New 52's first Power Girl, who's simply Supergirl's analogue from the new multiverse's Earth-2.)
• Shazam!:
  • Freddy Freeman in particular. His age at onset of disability ranges from "young enough that his voice still hasn't shown the slightest tendency towards deepening yet, some time (maybe years) after leaving inpatient therapy" in Justice League: War to "old enough to have been a high school football star pre-injury" in Trials of Shazam. And since they were decoupled in one of those reboots, his age at onset of superpowers is even more complicated. And that's not even getting into his superhero name.
  • Mary Bromfield has at various times been Billy Batson's biological sister or unrelated foster sister and was originally his twin but has been both younger and older than Billy in different reboots.
• King Shark was introduced in Karl Kesel's Superboy (1994) as possibly the son of a Hawaiian shark-god and a mortal woman. Later in the same run, Kesel introduced circumstantial evidence suggesting he was actually one of the mutated animals from the Wild Lands. Later still, Kesel's run of Aquaman confirmed the shark-god story.
• Supergirl: The Post-Crisis has this in spades. When she first appeared, her backstory was simple — she was sent to Earth at the same time as Superman and was his older cousin and she was supposed to look after him when they got there, but she was trapped in Kryptonite and in suspended animation for years and didn't emerge until Superman was a full-grown adult. Then it was revealed that this origin might be partly false, that her whole side of the El family was evil, and that she was sent to kill her cousin. Then it was revealed that while she was sent to kill Kal-El, it was because there was a curse which he inherited that would break down the barrier to the Phantom Zone which Jor-El, Superman's father, had invented (this too would later be ignored), and that eventually Phantom Zone monsters would start crossing over to the real world unless Kal-El was killed. This origin was even verified as being correct by a Monitor... but then Supergirl's parents showed up and it turned out that her real origin was a modified version of her Silver Age origin (that a chunk of Krypton survived the destruction), and that everything else was the effects of Kryptonite poisoning making Supergirl crazy.
• Superman:
  • Superman has a canonical multiple-choice past: one time, he was given the choice between two of his innumerable origin stories, and he picked the one that he liked more (and, incidentally, made more sense), while another time, someone travelled through his many origins while observing him. Two notable alternating discrepancies in his origin are whether he started out as Superboy in his youth before becoming Superman as he grew older or if he waited until he was an adult to use his powers to help people.
  • Bizarro, although in this case it's a Justified Trope because, technically, Superman has been cloned more than once, and not always perfectly, and more than one of those imperfect clones have been named Bizarro.
  • Brainiac has not been able to keep his backstory consistent for more than a few years, not even getting into various adaptations.
    • From 1958 to 1964, he was an alien scientist from the planet Bryak who wanted to shrink and bottle cities so that he could create his own empire to rule. From 1964 to 1986, he was retconned as an alien android from the planet Yod (or Colu, depending on the story) out to dominate or destroy (depending on the story) the universe. He was absent for a couple years until 1988 declared that Post-Crisis, he was an (organic) alien scientist from the planet Colu who (via an accident) transferred his mind onto a swarm of nanites that then possessed various bodies both mechanical and organic. He went insane and went on killing sprees on Earth (though his motivation and scope was variable, going from an Earth-restricted serial killer who just wanted to hassle Superman to a Multiversal Conqueror). He was totally organic from 1988 to 1998 (possessing first human psychic Milton Fine, then a newly-created body resembling his Coluan one complete with green skin, Super-Intelligence, and Psychic Powers, then finally stealing Doomsday's body), totally mechanical bar the origin of his mind from 1998 to 2008 (in his Brainiac 2.5, Brainiac 13, and nanoswarm forms), and took a couple breaks in both these periods to possess or build a cyborg form (such as Brainiac 6, who was a version of him from the future... long story).
    • The 2008 story Superman: Brainiac decisively retconned all previous versions of him as being robotic or cloned probes sent by the real Brainiac, who was definitively established as an originally organic, now cybernetic alien scientist from the planet Yod-Colu who was born the most intelligent member of a super-intelligent race, and used his inventions and various powers to go rogue and become a planet-destroying, civilization-stealing Galactic Conqueror. His motivation was now to obtain all knowledge in the universe (his standard MO being stealing all knowledge from a planet and then destroying it with his nigh-invincible custom-built ship so no one else could have the knowledge) and use it and his collection of stolen shrunken cities to remake the universe in his own image, with him "becoming everything." This was then interrupted in 2011 by the New 52 continuity rebooting his backstory again: it kept him as an organic turned cyborg scientist from Colu, but changed his motivation and made him a Tragic Villain and a Well-Intentioned Extremist instead of the cold greedy monster he always was, while also giving him a wife and kid in his backstory which no previous version had. (The previous continuity's version of Vril Dox II was a clone, and not one Brainiac felt affection for.) After the New 52 was soft-rebooted with 2016's DC Rebirth, he's back to more-or-less the 2008 version. Time will tell how long this will stick.
• Teen Titans: The original Joker's Daughter, Duela Dent, claimed to be the daughter of several supervillains^note The Joker, Catwoman, the Scarecrow, the Riddler, the Penguin, Two-Face, Doomsday, Dr. Light, Punch and Jewelee before revealing herself as the daughter of Two-Face and Gilda Dent. Sometime later, Dick Grayson realized that this couldn't be true because Duela is too old to be Two-Face's daughter, and Duela chides him for taking so long to figure that out. Post-Crisis, nobody was sure who she really was because her backstory kept changing, and not even she seemed to know who her dad was. It eventually turned out that she is the Joker's daughter... and Two-Face's... and the Riddler's. Duela originally came from Earth-3, where her biological parents were the Jokester and Three-Face, heroic versions of the Joker and (in this case, a female version of) Two-Face. Her stepfather was a heroic version of the Riddler. Duela somehow kept shifting between Earth-3 and the main DC Universe, explaining her confusion as a result of being shifted from universe to universe.
• Wonder Girl: Donna Troy's past is so complicated that writers are more likely to spend more time attempting to clean it up rather than chronicling her current adventures. To sum it up as briefly as possible:
  • After she spent the first 21 issues of the original Teen Titans series with no backstory, Marv Wolfman would establish that she was an orphan rescued from a burning apartment building by Wonder Woman. He would later expand upon the story in New Teen Titans, revealing that the couple that died weren't Donna's biological parents and that her mother had died after giving her up for adoption.
  • After Crisis on Infinite Earths rewrote continuity, Wonder Woman became a newcomer to the DC Universe. Since this meant Donna would predate her as a superhero, Wolfman and Perez then revised Donna's backstory to state that she was rescued by the Titans of Myth and sent back to Earth at age 13 (with her memories wiped). She would then base her Wonder Girl costume off of the American flag.
  • In the late '90s, John Byrne decided to apply his own retcon: Donna was actually a magical twin of Diana, created from a mirror and kidnapped by Dark Angel, who would then curse her to live multiple lives of tragedy. Byrne would also reveal that Donna based her "Wonder Girl" identity off of Hippolyta's Golden Age stint as Wonder Woman (via a time-traveling paradox).
  • Allan Heinberg would finally use the mirror origin in stating that she was "born of magic" but would add that Wonder Woman rescued her and that the Amazons and Titans of Myth trained her.
  • Lampshaded by Stjepan Sejic in this one-off picture◊ showing Wonder Girl signing copies of her new autobiography, "Your Guess Is as Good as Mine";
    Reader: Holy hell, this thing reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure!
    Donna: Yeah, pretty much...
  • Meredith Finch and Dan Abnett then created their brand new versions of Donna's backstory, wherein she's now a clay golem created by a group of Amazons to serve as a weapon. Under Finch's time as writer of Wonder Woman, Donna was never Wonder Girl and was created by the Amazon witch Derinoe to purge the island of the Amazon sons and usurp Diana as queen. Under Abnett's time as writer of Titans, Donna was indeed Wonder Girl at some point, and given fake memories by the Amazons to make her believe she'd been an abandoned orphan discovered by Wonder Woman.

Marvel Universe:

• Marvel Comics' Hell Lords have one mutual origin, but most also have their own versions. It doesn't help that they are demons, so everything they say can be a lie and each story has set arguments and events that either supports or deny it.
  • The mutual story connects them to the Elder Gods, the first generation of Earth gods. When evil god Set found out that he could steal the power of other gods by killing them, he caused the first war between gods. Gaea gave birth to Atum, who promised to destroy all evil gods. But their evil energy corrupted him, and he turned into the monstrous Demogorge, the God-Eater. Demogorge killed all gods who didn't escape to another dimension. Then he released all power he couldn't contain. This power has been consciously or unconsciously shaped by young humanity into the form of their fears, creating Hell-Lords, the first demons.
  • Mephisto told his own version during The Infinity Gauntlet — in his version, an abstract-equal being called Nemesis was lonely, so she created companions from her own essence, but forgot to give them good nature. When they all turned evil, she destroyed them and committed suicide. But her creations have somehow been reborn and become the first demons in the universe. Mephisto claims to be one of them.
  • Marduk Kurios claims to be both the real Satan and the Babylonian god Marduk, having degenerated into a demon after realizing that he could gain much more power from human souls than their belief.
  • Satannish believes that he is the son of Dormammu, the Master of the Dark Dimension.
  • Lucifer has his classic biblical origin of the Fallen Angel and denies any connection between him and other Hell Lords, but he's not different from them at all.
  • Chthon has also claimed to be the first Demon.
• Daredevil: Bullseye has multiple tales about his past life: he is either a CIA agent, a baseball star... he makes up so many stories that no one knows who he really is. The only thing that remains consistent in his claims is that he had Abusive Parents and that he killed them.
• Deadpool has a large number of competing origins for his past. There's also some disagreement as to whether Wade Wilson is his real name or a name which he stole from someone else. Pretty much the only thing all the origin stories have in common is that his Healing Factor is the result of time spent as a Weapon X test subject. Like the Joker, Deadpool is insane enough that he probably has no idea himself which one is correct. He does seem fairly certain that Wade Wilson is his real name, however.
  • It's also somewhat ambiguous whether or not he really has an actual Multiple-Choice Past or not. The only person that ever brought up the possibility does so during a Mind Screw.
  • T-Ray even hints that 'Pool may not be Wade Wilson at all — instead, T-Ray himself would be Wade Wilson, and Deadpool stole the name from him. The comics seem to keep disproving this story but given how nuts DP is and in light of what's been exposed in this bullet point, the jury's still out.
  • Cable & Deadpool stated that Wade's father was an abusive military officer who was shot and killed by one of Wade's friends, while a later run seemed to imply that has father had walked out on him as a child and started a new family elsewhere.
  • The Marvel NOW! run eventually clarifies Deadpool's origin, as well as the various Plot Holes and retcons. It turns out the stuff with T-Ray being the real Wade, as well as all the conflicting stuff about his family, were the result of a scientist named Butler putting Deadpool in advanced hallucinations while he harvested his DNA over the years.
• Fantastic Four: A minor example is Doctor Doom, specifically what caused the machine he made to scar his face. Did Reed Richards mess with it, the resulting explosion scarring Doom's face? Or did Doom simply miscalculate? Was Reed involved at all? Did Ben Grimm fuck with the machine? Did it actually work, only for him to be disfigured from being attacked by Mephisto? Hell, how scarred was his face from the explosion — in some versions, it was a minor scar and Doom put on his mask before it cooled and that burned his face.
• Iron Man: The Mandarin was originally said to be the child of a British noblewoman and a wealthy descendant of Genghis Khan, with his youth spent receiving the finest education money could buy. Matt Fraction's run, however, would later suggest that the Mandarin was actually the son of an opium den prostitute, and that he'd been a gangster and smuggler before he lucked out and found his trademark Rings of Power. However, he could easily still be a descendant of Genghis Khan, since his descendants are about 10% of the population of Asia.
• The Mighty Thor: The Asgardians' stories can also contradict themselves, which is generally Hand Waved by either claiming that it happened that way in a different Ragnarok cycle or going the Loki route and saying that they are living myth and metaphor, complete with invoking the Fiction Identity Postulate. (Loki claims this about almost all Marvel gods and demons, by the way, but he is not exactly trustworthy.)
• Runaways: Did Chase kill someone because of/with his van? Even he's not sure — he later admits that he made up stories to attempt to justify his father's abuse of him, and eventually started believing some of them. At one point, he seems extremely certain that he didn't; later on, he seems totally certain that he did.
  Nico: You've told a few different versions of that story.
  Chase: Right, well, in this one...
• Heavily used in regard to The Sentry, especially the relationship between him, his civilian identity Robert Reynolds and his Superpowered Evil Side the Void: is the Void the result of a "mind virus" implanted by Mastermind? Are Sentry and the Void the good and evil nature that exist in every person given form by the serum Reynolds took? Is the Void a Split Personality formed by Reynolds' repression of his past as a thief and junkie? Is the Void Reynolds' real personality and the Sentry is the fake one? Or is the serum a Red Herring and the Sentry is actually something else entirely like the Angel of Death? All of these were presented as equally likely. Which is pretty appropriate since Sentry is quite crazy. In fact, given that Sentry is crazy and is a Reality Warper, it's strongly suggested that the "true" version is whatever he believes at the time.
• Spider-Man: Carnage, being Marvel's resident Practically Joker. Unlike a lot of examples, Carnage's backstories never have a Freudian Excuse, and he always insists that he doesn't need one.
  Carnage: I remember things wrong sometimes, but it all works if it feels right.
• In Supreme Power, Zarda gives three conflicting origin stories that involve both her and Hyperion when he asks her where she came from. Since Zarda's demonstrably insane, it's safe to say none of them are even close to true.
• Wolverine:
  • Wolverine is especially susceptible to this; his amnesia about his past is a common plot driver in early-'90s stories, and what we know keeps getting retconned. Even after it was made so that he could remember every single thing that ever happened to him, the series Wolverine: Origins still managed to milk the concept — remembering everything meant that his real memories were no stronger or more distinct than his Fake Memories.
  • Wolverine's arch-enemy Victor Creed, a.k.a. Sabretooth, likewise has multiple possible pasts. He was part of the same Weapon X program as Wolverine, which included false memory implants, so that's no surprise. A notable example is his mother: she was initially thought to have sacrificed her own life to protect Victor from his abusive father, only for a later one-shot to show a young Victor killing her himself for failing to stop the abuse. Then, years later, it turned out she was still alive and in a nursing home, and that Victor actually had a very close and loving relationship with her.
• X-Men:
  • Arcade, the Amusement Park of Doom-themed Professional Killer who has menaced the X-Men on numerous occasions, has told a number of different versions of his origin story, although they all involve him murdering his rich dad for his money. Since Arcade's real name is unknown, it could all be lies.
  • The Phoenix is either Jean Grey's Superpowered Evil Side or a variation on Grand Theft Me who duplicated her rather than possessing her.

Other:

• Archie Comics: Is Veronica from Massachusetts or New York? Early comics have her from Boston but later on this was retconned to New York and has mostly stayed that way since.
• In Astro City, Crackerjack's origins are whatever fanciful yarn he can tell at the spur of the moment. At different times he's claimed to be from a circus family that got abducted and trained by aliens, an Olympic hopeful who was sabotaged by a competitor, a determined survivor of polio, a genetically-engineered member of a spy cult... Even his long-time girlfriend Quarrel has no idea which — if any — is the truth.
• Blake and Mortimer: The villain, Olrik, is an unusual case of this being done out-of-universe. The former head of State Sec for an Asian despot, the books never give him any past other than his name, his rank (colonel), his relationship with his country of birth (he's a "renegade"), and his heritage in a very vague and general sense (European/Westerner of some sort). Word of God has suggested several possible stories, saying that Olrik might have originated in the secret polices of Nazi Germany, the USSR, or Miklos' Horthy's Hungary. However, he never actually picked an origin as the definitive one.
• Played for Laughs in The DNAgents with guest hero Lancer, the setting's most powerful superhuman, who would never tell the same story of where his powers came from twice.
• King Mob from The Invisibles has a self-constructed multiple-choice past, the point being to stop enemies with telepathic powers from prying information about him and his group. If they try, they can't be sure which memories are true and which are part of a fake past.
• Teddy "Red" Herring of Red Herring is said to have an obviously false right eye (though the art depicts it identically to his left), and always has a different explanation for it: a childhood accident, shrapnel from a grenade in Iraq, a flesh-eating virus, the heel of a jealous ex-girlfriend... In all likelihood, none of these are true.
• Played with in Alan Moore's first twelve issues of Supreme, in which the retcons are part of the in-story universe, and the multiple past Supremes exist in their own dimension.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage) (and later the movies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003)), Splinter was originally the beloved pet rat of Hamato Yoshi, who saw his master's assassination and then later was mutated into a humanoid intelligent rat-being. In the '80s cartoon series and the spinoff comic books, Splinter is Hamato Yoshi himself, forced into exile and living in the sewer when he first encountered the mutagen. Having recently been in contact with sewer rats, the mutagen turned him into a humanoid rat. In his profile on the DVD of the first live-action movie, it's said that Splinter's origins are "shrouded in mystery" and that either one of them is possible.
• The trope is played absolutely literally in The Unwritten, in which the origin of Lizzie Hexam is structured like a Gamebook comic: Is Lizzie Hexam actually a character who emerged from out of a Dickens novel, is she a victim of child abuse who gave up her body to a fictional construct, or simply a delusional girl? Did Wilson Taylor treat her like a daughter, like a prisoner, or like a science experiment? Interestingly, while the reader can choose multiple paths for Lizzie, they all end with her at the press conference from issue #1. The subtext of this meshes very closely with Tom's words to Lizzie in the hospital: which story you decide to follow is more important than which one is true.
• Vampirella has two conflicting origin stories. Originally, she was a Human Alien from the planet Drakulon which, you guessed it, is a world inhabited by vampires. When her character was resurrected in the 90s she was made into the daughter of Lilith, who still ruled in Hell and birthed Vampirella so she could hunt down evil on Earth. The circumstances of her conception are also up in the air, with some stories presenting Cain as Vampirella's blood father, while others offer that Vampirella has no father and was created by Lilith through Blood Magic. The 2010 Dynamite series includes a blurb with every issue lampshading this Continuity Snarl, implying that both the Drakulon and Hell origins may be true. Eventually the two sort of mashed together, with Drakulon sometimes being presented as a corner of Hell, or Lilith as a native from the planet Drakulon.
• XIII: The amnesiac main character's search for his real identity provides the bulk of the drama in the series, and the hero spends most of it discovering an identity only to later find that it was either fake or not entirely accurate. He first believes he's Steve Rowland, a special forces veteran and extreme-right terrorist responsible for the assassination of a U.S. president. Then Jason Fly, son of a progressive journalist murdered by The Klan during the Red Scare. Then Kelly Brian, IRA terrorist turned celebrated revolutionary folk hero in Central America. And finally Jason Mullway, child of an Irish immigrant family in New York that was almost entirely wiped out after ending up on the wrong side of The Mafia. As it turns out, the last one is in fact his original name. He was adopted by reporter Jonathan Fly soon after birth at his mother's request to keep him away from the wrath of the Mafia, hence "Jason Fly." "Kelly Brian" was a friend of his, unknown to him a member of the IRA, who was indeed on his way to Central America to fight alongside a revolutionary movement; after the CIA assassinate him, they blackmail Jason into taking his identity and going in his place as their spy, though he quickly Becomes The Mask. Finally, after he's captured by the regime, another U.S. agency has him extradited to the United States, where he's forced to take on the identity of "Steve Rowland," whom he physically resembles, in order to infiltrate the far-right conspiracy of which Rowland was a member before it has a chance to carry out a coup and take over America.
• The entire setting of Y: The Last Man has a Multiple-Choice Past. Throughout the series, we're given various theories about the Gendercide and what caused it, but none of these theories are ever proven true. The story ends with no real explanation and it's left up to the reader to decide which, if any, of the origin stories were correct.^note According to writer Brian K. Vaughan, he did put the actual reason for the gendercide in the story, he just didn't point directly at it and refuses to specify, literally leaving it up to the reader to decide which one is the actual cause.

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