David Kupelian takes readers on tour of upside-down dimension we now inhabit.
As part of my well-rounded childhood, growing up during the 1950s in suburban Washington, D.C., I read Superman comic books.
That’s right. Also Superboy, Batman and Robin, Aquaman, Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern and others – but my favorite was Superman. And one of the most memorable characters in those adventures was a guy named … Bizarro.
Created when the “man of steel” was exposed to a “duplicate ray,” Bizarro was essentially a defective clone of Superman. Although he was ugly, surly and spoke broken English like Tonto in “The Lone Ranger” (“Me hate Superman. Him bad”), Bizarro’s defining characteristic was his total rebellion against everything normal, everything sensible, everything Superman stood for. Indeed, he took pride in being the exact opposite of Superman in every way.
Thus, Bizarro eventually relocated to Bizarro World, a cube-shaped planet called Htrae (“Earth” spelled backwards), which operated according to “Bizarro logic” – meaning it was wrong to do anything right, moral or good. That gave rise to the Bizarro society’s legal system based on the “Bizarro Code,” which meant it was “a crime to do anything well or to make anything perfect or beautiful.”
For example, I remember reading, as a 9- or 10-year-old Superman fan, how on Bizarro World, when the street-sweeping truck came down the road, instead of sweeping up dirt and debris, the Bizarro street-sweeper guy would actually throw dust and dirt onto the streets to make them dirtier! In every area of life, Bizarro folk did the opposite of whatever was logical and normal.
Got the picture?
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