Education Quote by Len Wein

An “ancient legend” is doing sly, heavy lifting here: it’s a pressure valve that lets Len Wein smuggle existential dread into the bright, panel-by-panel logic of comics. The line reads like myth, but it behaves like a threat model. Curiosity isn’t just dangerous; it’s apocalyptic. That’s a neat inversion of the superhero genre’s usual promise that knowledge and revelation lead to power, closure, origin stories. Wein flips the script: the origin is the kill switch.

The intent feels less like theology than narrative engineering. In serialized pop storytelling, origins are currency. Fans demand them, publishers monetize them, characters are rebooted around them. By proposing that “true origin” would annihilate “our universe,” Wein turns the reader’s hunger for canon into a taboo, implicating the audience in the risk. Want the definitive backstory? Fine, but understand the cost: an end to the sandbox where stories keep happening.

Subtextually, it’s a critique of total explanation. “True” suggests there are plenty of workable, comforting origins already in circulation - myths, science, propaganda, continuity - but the final answer would collapse the meaning-making machine itself. The universe here can be read literally (cosmic stakes, classic comic-book grandeur) or metafictionally (the shared fictional universe). Either way, Wein is pointing at the same anxiety: that the hunt for absolute foundations can become a form of self-destruction.

Context matters, too. Wein came of age professionally in an era of expanding, interlocking continuities, when “where it all began” became both fan obsession and corporate strategy. This line winks at that obsession while warning that the definitive origin is less a treasure than a termination event.