We can do very little about the first kind of reality. Those of us who do try to change this reality usually end up in an institution, or at least making weekly visits to a head-shrinker.
It is because of the impossibility associated with any attempts in changing this reality, comic books emerged with strength and vitality. We all know the acceptable realities associated with the comic book (or graphic novel) world. Travel to other worlds is possible, aliens exist and live among us, there are mutated humans, and there are huge cities that we can't find on any map, but they out there somewhere. It all started with an alien baby who landed on our planet. He was super strong, had x-ray vision and could fly. Eventually, he moved to Metropolis and was called Superman. That was reality. Readers that needed something closer to their first reality could read about an orphan who trained himself to be the greatest detective and crime fighter in his city (maybe the world), under the guise of a bat. Reality. It has existed for us on the pages of the comics for sixty plus years.
Unlike the first kind of reality (let's call it RR for Real Reality), CBR (for Comic Book Reality), changes. Over the years our hero's powers change. Even origins have changed for some characters, something that you don't find in RR (except in politics). With change comes risk. The risk being, "will the readers accept this change, or will reality have to be altered once again to make things back the way they were?" Usually this change results from a writer not doing his/her comics homework and getting sloppy when writing his/her story. The story is published with certain disparities resulting in a change in reality. Eventually the publishing company has so many of these disparities that it must "clean house" by changing reality to accomodate all versions of CBR history. This house cleaning, aka Zero Hour, Infinite Earth Crisis, etc must be executed with great care, else it will appear to be contrived and not believed. Sometime it works, and sometimes not. The reader is the ultimate judge as to the worth of the effort.
Not all people need their CBR cleaned up for them. Frank Miller's "Dark Knight Returns" didn't match up very neatly with current CBR, but that was due to changes to reality after he wrote his storyline, not because he didn't do his homework. Some readers easily accept that after Jason Todd, Carolyn Keane Kelley was the next Robin; and that Bruce and Dick never reconciled their differences. It may not be logical to accept several realities, but it doesn't have to as long as it falls within the reader's acceptance threshold.
What is your reality? Lucky for us it is a multiple choice question, and comics allow us to choose "E. All the above."