Mopee

Mopee’s story is notable in that it was so thoroughly rejected by fans and creators alike that it was never mentioned again. Not in later issues of The Flash. Not in Secret Origins or a Secret Files book. Not in later re-tellings of the Flash’s origin. Not in books like The Kingdom or Infinite Crisis, which revisted obscure tales.

There are only two subsequent references to Mopee in DC books: The Ambush Bug History of the DC Universe (Ambush Bug #3, 1985) is full of goofy characters and story elements that, like Mopee, have been deliberately ignored by later books. And the Flash II profile in Who’s Who #8 (1985) spares just one sentence: “An account alleging that the accident that gave Allen his powers was actually staged by a being named Mopee is entirely incorrect” (emphasis added).

Actually, that’s not entirely true. There’s an in-joke in The Life Story of the Flash. On the night of the fateful lightning strike, Barry Allen is analyzing a sample of a hallucinogen called monoglycetic peptide enzyme, known on the street as “mopee.”

He has, however, been spotlighted in Oddball Comics.

In fact, the term “Mopee” has become a label for stories that “purport to alter a significant fact in a character’s established history and [are] so universally reviled that mutual amnesia is engaged and the story is ejected from the canon, never to be mentioned again.”

Mopee has been compared to Mr. Mxyzptlk, Bat-Mite... and Woody Allen.