jmr 72777 writes:The rest, is minutae. It's not important whether or not he embrace his Kryptonian heritage. That's not who he is. How long did it take for the ORIGINAL SUPERMAN to come to that point? How many years? Not the 30's. Not the 40's. Maybe there was a genesis in the 50's. Maybe it came into it's own in the 60's. And maybe it really became an important part of his character in the 70's. So really, how important is it to his character? If it was that important, SUPERMAN would not have been the iconic character he was for all those years before.
You're right to a certain extent. Ask people all over the world who Superman is and they will list off the "iconic" references, not the minutae we as comic collectors tend to focus on. They will reference the Daily Planet, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Clark Kent, and the other handful of set pieces and characters who survive all the various interpretations on radio, in films and on TV (which, let's not kid ourselves, is how most people know Superman, not through the comics). They will also know he was rocketed from Krypton, though they probably don't know his parents names and they certainly don't care what the architecture looked like or how the government was structured.
But for those of us who want more, who want to go deeper, there are the comics. And I would argue that until the 80s, the building of the mythos was an additive process. Layer upon layer was added to the central mythos, making it richer and more nuanced. Some additions didn't work and were discarded, others did work and were maintained, then added to. But on the whole, nothing new destroyed anything before it. The 40s Superman was still from Krypton, he just didn't know it yet.
Then comes 1986 and it's all out the window. Sure you can argue that the iconic stuff is still there, so why complain? "You've got Clark and Lois and Jimmy and the Planet, you've got the costume and the powers. What are you complaining about?" And maybe all that's enough for some people. But those of us who invested a lot of time and emotion in the old mythos needed convincing. We needed to be shown why it all had to go away. Specifically we need to know that it was sacrificed in favor of something better, or at least equally good. Many of us feel we never got that.
Is it possible to create a Superman who's not interested in Krypton and make him interesting? Probably. But it hasn't happened yet! If I felt for a moment that the post-Crisis Superman was equal in quality to the pre-Crisis model I'd shrug my shoulders and say, "Eh...apples and oranges." But as it is, I'm left thinking, "They got rid of Superman for THIS?"
In fairness, you are dead right: remaking Krypton, or putting "Clark" before "Kal" are not things that "ruin" Superman in and of themselves. The problem is Superman stories have been rotten, on the whole, for a long time now, and when we are left to do our post-mortem and ask "why?" we start analyzing where things might have gone wrong. What we (some of us anyway) have decided is that some wrong decisions may have torpedoed the reboot from Day One.
Understand I was hopeful, even excited about the reboot at the time. I was not running around yelling "they're ruining Krypton!" or whatever. It's only now, years later, that I look back and begin to understand why things worked one way but not so well the other. In fact, in 1986 I may have made some of the same mistakes myself. But I like to think that I would have admitted my mistakes earlier on and reversed some of them.
I'm sure that someone here may find evidence to dispute me. Of course SUPERMAN thought about and talked about Krypton before the 60's. I wouldn't dispute that. I would just say that it became an overriding part of him in the 60's-70's, almost 30 years after he was created. Before then, it was a small part of him.
It's not so much that Krypton's ignored, but that it's been remade. Before, it was a scientific utopia, a dream of what Earth might be in a thousand years. And Superman, the "Man of Tomorrow," was here to guide us toward that bright future. Now, Krypton is a dystopian nightmare world, a place that's remembered only long enough to deliver a cautionary tale. Krypton is the hell we might turn Earth into if we forget our humanity. The new Superman's message, if he has one at all, is "don't go there!"
You can argue that's minutae, and maybe it is, but as the saying goes, little things mean a lot. This subtle shift in the mythos has had lasting and sweeping effects, and for my money it cast a dark cloud over Superman's new adventures from the very beginning. It took something bright and hopeful out of the story and left something dark and dreary in its place. We was robbed!
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