Superman Through the Ages! Forum

In a seventies issue of LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, Superman, speaking with Mon-El, speculates that Daxam perhaps was a colony world of Krypton. Mon-El, on the other hand, said "I always heard it was the other way around."

Who is right?

As tempting as it might be to make Krypton the colonizer world and Daxam the colony (since after all, Krypton came first and it feels "right" to have it come first chronologically), if EITHER planet is the colonizer, my suspicion is that it is Daxam, which seems like the older society.

Daxam is a world that we see surprisingly little of; the best glimpse that we see of it is in ADVENTURE COMICS #363 (1967), when the planet is threatened by Mantis Morlo's chemical factories (we saw it earlier when Lightning Lad was revived by Proty's sacrifice). From what little we saw of Daxam, it appears to be an urban world, filled with large cities, sophisticated, civilized, with an emphasis on medicine, and technocratic. The big focus is the cities: all of them are connected on Daxam by an underground tube network. It feels very genteel and city-centered, a pattern consistent with long-term settlement.

Krypton on the other hand, is a savage world filled with all sorts of nasties. It has cities, yes, but most of its wonders are natural: jewel mountains, gold volcanoes, etc. In other words, Krypton, despite its history, is very much a "frontier" planet. According to the Krypton Atlas, despite the gigantic size of Krypton, it has its significant cities pockmarked around the planet; this is more like the United States, where Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, the three biggest cities, have enormous distances between them because of how the country was settled. Compare this to say, Europe, where Rome, Berlin, London and Paris are within a few hundred miles of each other. Off the top of my head, I can't even name a single piece of Daxam flora or fauna.

Furthermore, space travel is something that seems to be easier to Daxamites, who have space explorers like Mon-El, as opposed to Krypton, which barely had a space program, and many factors that discourage space travel.

One possible glitch in this theory: in a Green Arrow/Superman team-up, we learn that nine billion people were on Krypton when it exploded. Later on, however, in the Levitz run, we learn that the population of Daxam was three-to-four billion. This may have an explanation:

On the other hand, it may be possible that NEITHER planet is the colonizer, that both are colonies of another world.

Well, setting the colonizing issue aside...

It may be that Krypton wisely set large tracts of land aside to be in a natural state, it makes ecological sense, especially on a planet that no longer has nations with competing interests in land...you can toss in the fact that Kryptonians tend to live in cities with high rises, where 100s of families can live on the same footprint as a large suburban house with a big lawn and the fact that a planet that large with 9 billion people isn't that overcrowded...the space travel thing is a weird anomaly to me, the fact that Krypton could build a complete replica world in space (Krypton II) with its own sun and fill the world with all the buildings and devices they used (often booby trapped) along with android duplicates of the entire population so perfect they fooled even Superman suggests that they had technology far and beyond mere interplanetary travel...

The natural wonders seemed highlighted because it seemed Superman and Lyla needed places to go as romantic destinations, though it would be interesting to know if the Scarlet Jungle ever had any indigenous people.

Had Krypton survived to the 30th century, it's quite possible that it'd turn out like Daxam.  A millenium can make a big difference.  :)

I remember that exchange between Kal and Mon, it gave me a good chuckle.  Of course two proud youngsters would both be boosting their own planet as the "original."  :lol:

I agree with Uncle Mxy that it's perhaps pointless to compare Daxam, which kept moving forward another thousand years, to Krypton, which blew up so much earlier.  The only fair comparison is the one you make about spaceflight (Mon being a part of Daxam's space program in the same time period as Jor-El and Lara lived).  But even there, Krypton wasn't necessarily so far behind.  

Remember that Jax-Ur is sent to the Phantom Zone for destroying Wegthor, a moon of Krypton populated with colonists.  That implies a fairly advanced space program. I also seem to remember some space-based battles between Zod's android (bizarro) armies and government forces in the "Phantom Zone" mini.  I believe Krypton's lack of a space program at the time of Krypton's destruction had to do with a planet-wide ban on space travel and rocketry of any kind.  There seems to have been an indefinite moratorium on such things as a result of abuses and atrocities committed with the technology.  

Not to open a can of worms here, but it's analagous to the current situation with stem cell research.  Just because Europe, etc are making strides in research and the US isn't doesn't mean we don't have the know-how or personnel to make it happen.  Our leaders have decided not to pursue it on "moral grounds."  That's the way I see space travel on Krypton.

Anyway, to answer your question, if we are to believe that Krypton was really begun by an "Adam and Eve" named "Kryp and Tonn" (as purported in a "Tales of Krypton" story on this very site), then either Mon-El is right, and those two were Daxamites, or BOTH planets were "seeded" by a third, as yet unidentified race under similar circumstances.

Maybe my theory is wrong,but after my reading of Starwinds Howl,my thinking was that a hostile planet such as the primitive Krypton can be only a colonized world,i have no idea why they go there for the first time,but the evolution that this "strangers from another planet" have endured, have make them lost their original weakness from lead,since this appear to be the only real difference between a kryptonian and a daxamite.

                                            :s:  :s:  :s:

I always thought of the Krypton-space-program-grounding as akin to the grounding of NASA's space shuttle flights after the Challenger/Columbia disasters---the destruction of Wegthor might've left such a sour note (with all those people killed) that it turned the populace/Krypton's leaders off on space travel...

Any ideas of where Xenon and Thoron fit in?

Well, according to Maggin, Krypton had only been inhabited for 10,000 years or so when it exploded, which is very brief (humanity's history is much longer than that), so it would have to be colonised in order to have attained its high level of civilisation. Cary Bates says that its first settlers were Kryp and Tonn, who both came from different planets and were stranded on its surface; could one of them have been a Daxamite?

I agree with Julian that Daxam seems like an older civilisation somehow, while Krypton does appear to have been an ex nihilo creation. I can't imagine Daxamites, who are pretty peace-loving sorts, going over to Krypton and seeing its struggling fledgling civilisation and saying "Hey, let's colonise them". More likely, they'd find an uninhabited planet and settle there.

A more civilized planet would have less people, not more.

Wasn't the first Green Lantern Kryptonian?

I don't know, depends on the planet's ecology, total size, etc...

I remain unconvinced that Krytpon had to take a back seat to any world in being "advanced", but then I supposed advanced is pretty subjective too... 8)

If Krypton was so advanced, why didn't the rest of the Science Council agree with Jor-El,?  Why didn't Jor-El beam himself and family into the Phantom Zone, then send a Phantom Zone projector to Earth to reassemble them at some far-away place?  Why didn't they know that they were super-powered away from a red sun, or appear to communicate with the other races to help out?  Does Krypton being the most advanced civilization make Superman's story any more complete?  

When the Supergirl movie came out, I thought "hmmm, Krypton being from some other dimension, separated by galaxies and millions of years, could make a lot of sense".  All the Krypton stuff in the immediate vicinity of Earth would be explained by the space warp drive that enabled little Kal-El to make it to Earth, and make it special even to other races that seemed to have equivalent technology in our galaxy.

Because its comics?  Because the science fiction is B-movie quality for the most part...I actually liked that its B-movie quality...actually, I don't care that Krypton wins any "most advanced" prize, just that its all pretty subjective.

From the original post, we know that Daxam had cities connected by underground tubes, and I guess a smaller population.

I believe that there are comics that referenced Jor-El telling Lara of what their son's powers will be on earth...as far as the Phantom Zone, well, it belongs to the universe, so any civilization could have discovered or used it, the Kryptonians obviously didn't see how to use it, I suppose -- other civilizations I guess had yet to be advanced enough to even know about it...

I mean really, when you look at how advanced the 30th century planets really are, its mostly very attractive people with women in short skirts, robots that look like people doing people-like things from the 20th century, folks using flying cars to go to "4-D movies", and a bunch of planets that need their overall defense to be the responsibility of a "clubhouse" of teenagers... 8)