DC's attitude adjustment and long live the Classic Superman!

[jmr72777]

Super Monkey,

I remember reading that story when it was reprinted in a larger size.  Part of something or other like "The Amazing World of Superman."  My friend had it and let me read it.  Funny how it just all comes back to you, isn't it?

Actually, as much fun as it was to re-read it, I don't see how it makes your point.  Although, I will admit it's subject to interpretation.  I would like to believe that SUPERMAN did not approach an amusement park company with the idea of creating a park based on his life.  To me, that sounds kind of conceited.  I would prefer to think that the company approached him, and SUPERMAN being the man he is said that he would allow them to do that provided they donated all proceeds to charity or something akin to that.

With that in mind, it would be up to the amusement park directors to decide the content, (although one could argue that SUPERMAN himself would insist on what is what.)  Personally, I'm not sure that a man who is concerned that people will try to hurt him through his friends would insist on an entire wing that deals with exactly who his closest friends are.  That I will leave to the innocence of a bygone era and the fact that the story was written for kids.

I see the Krypton exhibit as being an aspect of sensational amusement park work.  The owner of the exhibit would need the kind of content that would stimulate the imagination of the kids.  Scenes from Krypton would certainly do that.  Not to mention, people are aware of his orgins, so like any museum dedicated to a subject, the orgins have to be addressed.  However, if you look at the story as a whole, I think it makes my point more than yours.  Look at how much space was donated to Krypton as opposed to everything else in the story.  It had equal space with the other facets of his life, sure....His powers, his friends, novelties, etc.  But it got no greater space or time than anything else.  It was a part that he knew a lot about.  Not to mention, if he had truly embraced it, wouldn't they have mentioned his Kryptonian name on the tour?  Or maybe some family history?  

I look at stories like the one (I forget the name) where BATMAN shows SUPERMAN what his life would have been like if he had never left Krypton as showing a man who is certainly wondering about his heritage, but not one who has embraced it.  He isn't living his life as a Kryptonian.  He doesn't seem to celebratet their holidays yet or anything like that.  It's certainly a part of him, it's just not the overriding piece of his personality.

[nightwing]

SteamTeck writes:

I would argue the original Byrne stories were actually pretty good and mostly upbeat until we hit the Legion fix stories. The problem is Byrne didn't realize what a mess later writers would make of his changes or the reprocusions of them..

Well, this gets back to the point I was making about the importance of starting things off on the right foot.

Jerry Seigel relegated Krypton to a couple of panels in the first origin story and all we knew was it was an advanced culture in the Flash Gordon mold..something cool and spiffy looking.  It was only years later when other writers (and a returned Seigel) started filling in the blanks, as it were, and tried to flesh out the details; what kind of technology might exist on Krypton?  What would Superman's father have been like as a person? How would an advanced culture deal with crime and punishment? And so on.  What emerged, bit by bit, was an appealing culture we could admire and aspire to.  Was that the objective from the beginning?  Possibly not, but as the legend grew, writers and readers realized this was a cool place.

Byrne recreated Krypton as a dystopia.  Like Seigel, he didn't dwell on it much...it was there, it blew up, end of story.  But in order to get to that moment in "Man of Steel" #6 when Supes says, "I don't care where I'm from, I'm an Earthman now," Byrne stacked the deck and made Krypton the kind of place it was hard to pine for.  Or perhaps more to the point, he tried to make Superman's arrival on Earth an "escape," a gift from father to son, a chance to live life more fully and satisfyingly than he ever would at home.  Fair enough, but again other writers had to follow and in time they, too, would want to flesh out the details.  What was life like on this Krypton?  What kind of man was Jor-El?  And so on.  And the answers they got were very different from the answers pre-Crisis writers got, because the basic building blocks provided by Byrne were totally inverted from those given by Seigel.

So to my mind, there is no such thing as "minutae" when it comes to the Superman mythos, or at least not when it comes to his origin.  However sketchy the details when you start out, they will over time be fleshed out and added to, and they will slop over into other aspects of the book until they are so entwined in the mythos they can't be ignored.  Consider: the portrayal of Krypton post-Crisis affects the way Superman sees himself, the way he interacts with his foster parents, the way other aliens see him, and so on.  It gave us the Eradicator, the Cleric, the new Fortress and tons of other trappings in the new legend.  In various ways, the new Krypton has affected every facet of the new Superman.

Anyway, you're right: I don't think Byrne did consider the repercussions of his stories, which is why he was the wrong man for the job.  He's good at playing with other people's toys...Jerry Seigel's, Stan Lee's, Jack Kirby's...but except for some FF stuff, I've always felt everything he ever did on any character at Marvel or DC should carry an "Elseworlds" label...maybe it's fun to read, but it should never be canon.

[Super Monkey]

It's certainly a part of him, it's just not the overriding piece of his personality.

The simple fact that the comics had story after story about Krypton with many of these stories focusing on and built around the fact that he is Kryptonian makes it impossible to argue that it wasn't suppose to be a big part of him, since if that was true why were there  countless stories about Krypton during the 1950's?

The real life reason of course was because Sci-Fi was HUGE during the 1950's so focusing on Superman's alien side became very important during this time as a way to cash in of the Sci-Fi fad.

So why would this be important now? Well, I think that Nightwing has already put it best.

[Daybreaker]

Thing is, while I don't necessarily think that Byrne's version of Krypton was thematically appropriate for Superman, I do think it looked a lot better and made more sense from a technological point of view.

And some ideas were just plain neat.  Byrne kind of blended the previous two versions of Krypton in certain ways that I don't see people picking up on (so maybe it's just in my imagination).  For example, whereas before Byrne you had stories about Kryptonians that had powers on Krypton, conflicting with the stories where Kryptonians had no powers, Byrne had powerless Kryptonians wearing skintight suits that gave them immense abilities.  This even helped to make sense of why Superman's costume was skintight, not exactly the sort of thing that would have otherwise made sense.

Byrne also got away from the Flash Gordon visuals of previous eras, which was good, and if you don't believe me, check out the early 80s version of Flash Gordon that remains stylistically true to the old serials and tell me that it looked like you want Krypton to look.  While I might find that a gutsy move, I don't know if that's what would put butts in the seats, y'know?

[NotSuper]

I wouldn't suggest making Krypton look Flash Gordon-esque in today's jaded world. Rather, I think Krypton should look like a positive portrayal of the future from a modern perspective. For example, Krypton would be a world where many of the problems that face our world would have been fixed. The only real flaw Krypton should have is that many of its people are overconfident and lazy (Jor-El and Lara are not, however). It is this one flaw that results in their destruction.

This would be a true tragedy, rather than the mercy killing of a civilization long since devoid of feeling. The death of the Kryptonians is something that should’ve been preventable, if not for pride. Krypton should be the place Kal-El longs to return to, but alas, never can. He should be determined to see that Earth and the humans inhabiting it don’t have the same thing happen to them.

[jmr72777]

Super Monkey,

I'm going to restate this point blank, and ask if you agree:

I think you can agree (I may be wrong) that the (for example) Elliot S! Maggin Superman/Kal-El paradigm, their relationship to the whole, and the "Kal-El" persona's prominence is VERY different from how it appears in "Three Supermen From Krypton," "Superman's Big Brother", and "Supergirl."

If so, how would you describe the difference.  If not, please explain.

[Of course, if you'd rather not, that's fine too   ]

[Captain Kal]

Getting back to an earlier point that seems to have been lost, while Superman is clearly 'human' both in characterization and biology, what resonates about the Kryptonian/alien angle is/was the marginalized outsider, the loneliness of the man and his mission.  A lot of struggling adolescents and a fair number of adults can relate to that loneliness and find it quite compelling.  Don Quixote works because he speaks to that in our souls -- and so does classic Superman.  In many ways, he's the ultimate immigrant too, which speaks louder about America since it's largely a nation built upon immigrants.

Byrned Superman did away with that lonely outsider and made him 'just one of the guys like us'.  He didn't suffer for his cause nor was it elevated because it was so difficult for him.  In fact, Byrned Lost Son of Krypton seems to have particularly weak motivations that come closest to being a rip-off of Spider-Man's in MOS #1: He's a hero to atone for abusing his powers on the gridiron.  Making him 'just one of us' loses not only the outsider angle but the immigrant theme.  His Byrned origin basically just paid lip-service to his tradition of being an alien/immigrant but then made it completely irrelevant -- and even a nuisance to be ignored! -- to this Superman.

[jmr72777]

Captain Kal,

I don't think that in MOS #1, Superman was inspired to be a hero to atone for abusing his powers.  If anything, it was a means to an end.  His parents had been teaching him to keep his powers secret and so forth.  For the most part he had been, but not on the field.  He kept them in check, but still used them to his advantage.  The wake-up call (and I think many can relate to this) was really in the disappointment that his father showed.  It served to jolt him.  It's admitedly a stretch that his father had been unaware of what he was doing for so long, but given that, serious parental disappointment can hit people hard.

It was all this that spurred him to re-think his life.  He then traveled the world, where he helped where he could.  In his travels, he was taught the lonliness of what and who he is.  He always helped people anonymously.  He hid his abilities from them, and remained in the shadows.  That's not exactly a cozy way to live.  He was, in effect, an outsider.  Being CLARK KENT is even more of that.  Remember that even if CLARK isn't a bumbling oaf, he still isn't SUPERMAN.  He can't be super strong or super fast.  He still has to hide who he really is and what he can really do.  Keeping secrets like that can also make one lonely.  And even if he can talk to his parents, who can only talk to their parents?  It's still a lonely existence.

I don't think the concept was lost per se, but that its focus was shifted.