This is "How Can I Explain?", which is a feature spotlighting inexplicable comic book plots.

Reader Nick F. suggested this bit from the highly underrated 1994 The Ray ongoing series that was written by Christopher Priest. It is a very clever time paradox story that doesn't QUITE connect.

The Ray was a series about a young man named Ray Terrill who had been convinced as a kid that he could not be exposed to the sun. So Ray lived the life of a shut-in until a chance accident revealed that not only could Ray be exposed to the sun, the sun actually charged him up with solar energy and gave him powerful energy abilities. He could fly, shoot energy blasts, all sorts of cool stuff. So Ray became a superhero known as the Ray. However, now that he could go out into the world he had to deal with the fact that he was a young adult with NO experience with the actual world.

The original art team on the series was Howard Porter and Robert Jones, with this being Porter's first major ongoing series for DC Comics. Porter, of course, would soon launch JLA with Grant Morrison and become a star. In The Ray #11 (by Priest, Porter, Jones and Mark Stegbauer, who split inking duties on the issue with Jones), the Ray and Black Canary had been stuck traveling through time. They kept trying to wing back to 1995, but they were stuck in 2016.

Then, in the super-futuristic year of 2016 when people have jet boots (naturally), Ray meets Gaelon, a police officer who apparently became Ray's girlfriend in the future. She gives him a note that he gave her that allows Ray to get himself and Black Canary back to 1995...

They return to their own time, but then this is the really clever part. Since Ray knows that he has to give Gaelon the note at some time, he also knows that so long as he doesn't give her the note, he can't die, because history says that he HAS to give her the note, or else how could she give it to him in the future? So he knows that nothing bad can really happen to him before he meets her.

Priest, though, has a really a great sense of humor, so sure enough, the very same day that he returns home to the past/present (after he and Black Canary sleep together, which was a bit of an odd plot development), he saves a young Gaelon and gives her the note, perpetuating the time circle and making sure that there was no more time paradox...

Or DID he?

What's the problem there?

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I'll let Nick explain it, "But here's the thing: the note was never written. Ray gets it from Gaelon and gives it to Young!Gaelon, creating a theoretically stable time-loop, except that at no point did anyone ever actually write the note."

All it would have needed was a single scene where Ray writes the note, but we didn't get it, so the time paradox remains!

Thanks to Nick for the fascinating (if obscure) suggestion!

If anyone else can think of a good inexplicable comic book plot, write me at brianc@cbr.com!