For Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster who, through their super-man, taught us all to be heroes.
Chapter One: Last Son of Krypton
Place: Offices of DC Comics, New York City
Year: 1986
Julius Schwartz pounded his hand on the boardroom table and growled. "No more dilly dallying. We're all here and I say it's time to do this!"
One of the newer writers coughed and looked out the window at the old man's manner. Most others just aside their leftover lunches to reach for folders and review their drawings. Schwartz saw this and nodded his approval. "As we all know, in order to mark our fiftieth anniversary and in order to revitalize our characters we embarked on Crisis. We have it in our power to recreate our DC universe and reimagine our heroes and the hero that we perhaps should most be interested in this respect is Superman.
"He after all is the first and greatest superhero of them all; he is our flagship character and an American icon. As editor of the Superman books, I, sadly, have seen sales on the books begin to lag and that's just not right. I remember when I first came on board that Superman was DC's biggest seller and he had the lead role in six books such as Superman, Action Comics, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olson, Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane, Superboy, and Adventure Comics. And that's not including other appearances in Justice League and World's Finest. Back in the Silver Age, every DC comic had a Superman logo on it because just being in the same universe—the same multiverse, really—as Superman was enough to give you credit.
"Nowadays, he is being outsold by kid sidekicks. Teen Titans is outselling Superman. Nobody has the right to outsell Superman. I love that man and it's somehow appropriate that the last two comics I edited for DC, after having worked on everything else, told the last Superman story. The cover had him flying away forever with all his friends on the Daily Planet building saying goodbye. We saw Lois, Jimmy, Perry, Supergirl, Batman, the Justice League, the Legion of Superheroes… and me, all saying goodbye. The tears in Superman's eyes are my tears.
"But if the Superman and the DCU I helped to create must die, then it need not die without an heir. And it WILL have an heir thanks to Elliot S. Magoon and Cary Bakes." The grand old man of DC comics sat down. "If you two will be so kind as to take the lead?"
The "Bakes" and "Magoon" looked at each other warily before turning to the audience. Maggin said, "Well I never made it a secret when I was working for Schwartz that I wanted to have his job someday and now here I am as Superman editor. My first order of the day is to make Bates my chief writer because the upcoming reboot is his idea and unlike other folks like Marv Wolfman or Frank Miller or John Byrne, his ideas, our ideas, were always meant to work within continuity. That's what Bryne never got; I reviewed his ideas before they were rejected for being too radical. Marvelize Superman by saddling him with postmodernist angst, by making him just another superhero instead of the champion, by getting rid of his powers, by making him and Batman enemies. To this I say, no, no and no.
"Bryne's approach was simply to reduce Superman's powers and see if he could deal better with him that way. That simply doesn't work. The point of Superman is that he's virtually omnipotent and has mishigass anyway. That's what guys like Bryne don't understand about the character, as it happens. His conflict should never be about whether or not he has the power it should be whether or not he has the moral right to even use the power. It should be over dilemmas.
"This is Superman. He has to think differently from us, and when we see into his head, we should be shocked by the clarity and simplicity of his brilliance and compassion. We should also see Superman as the ultimate communicator. Think about it, if he really is Superman, if he really is invulnerable, then he'd need none of the physical defensive postures we take for granted. If he knows he's invulnerable then he can afford to be incredibly relaxed and open—the big smile, the instant handshake, the conviction that everyone he meets is to be regarded as a friend until he proves otherwise.
"He's the man who will take time out from stopping Mongul's plan to crash Alpha Centauri into our solar system just to dry a child's tears. He should be indefatigable and trustworthy. His curiosity and kindness are childlike in their purity but he should also be frighteningly quick and clever. The combination of contradictory qualities adds to his slightly removed air. The eyes go vague when he looks at your electrical field for a second and gets the idea for an oscillating defensive force field based on the rhythms of your pulse rate. Sometimes he seems not all here, but it's only because he's much more here than we can sensibly hope to be.
"He's there to lift us up and we shouldn't bring him down just so we can 'relate' to him. No, he fights on the side of right, confident that he'll win just because he's on the side of right… and winning just because he, in fact, actually is on the side of right. In his heart of hearts, he's not there because he feels guilty or because a sense of duty he fight for truth, justice, and the American way for no other reason than that doing otherwise would simply never occur to him. He's Superman, let him the beacon. Let him be the world's greatest super hero, a forward-looking, intelligent, enthusiastic hero retooled to address the challenges of the next thousand years. The ultimate American icon revitalized for the new millennium as an inspirational figure, a role model for 20th Century global humanity.
"Superman's character is one we all feel we know intimately and to that end, we'd like to balance out his battles with Brainiac and Luthor with stories which thoroughly explore those values, stories allowing him to return to his roots as a champion of the weak and oppressed. Even more so than for Batman, Green Lantern, Flash—all his peers and contemporaries—Superman's job is to fight for and inspire those who cannot fight for themselves. His job is to make this world a better place but perhaps more importantly to show us that yes, he is a superman but that if we just do good to each other, then every man can be a superman.
"This is a god sent to Earth to live and inspire and change the face of the galaxy by his deeds and reputation. He is Roland, he is Galahad, he is Lancelot without the stain. He is an angel come down from Heaven to heal broken world and who earnestly believes that doing what's right is its own rewards. He should be a huge powerful almost Christ-like force for good in the DC Universe. I admit it's strange that I as a Jew should say this but growing up with the Rabbi telling us about King Messiah and what he should be, perhaps it's not so strange.
"And so to that end, Superman: The Movie had its ups and downs but one very excellent thing is having the ghost of Jor-El say that the reason he gave us his only son was to save us. Superman came from a better world, with a greater capacity for good and he came because 'they can be a great Kal-El, they wish to be. They only need the light to show them the way and it is for that reason, for their capacity for good that I give them my only son, for that reason, I give them… you.'
"As to the new direction let us start at the beginning."
Cary Bates smiled. He looked down at his papers and shuffled them and looked at Maggin and smiled some more. He had been more than a Superman fan as a child; he even went so far as to pray to God that He grant him superpowers. Well, even if he couldn't fly, this was the next best thing.
"Well, it comes down to little old me, eh? I suppose if you want to hear my Superman ideas that it would be rude of me to stay silent. Going chronologically, we should start at the beginning and that means Krypton. In recent years, it has been criticized as being stuck in a time warp, as being so much Buck Rodgers. Now when you think about that it makes perfect sense as Siegel and Shuster first sold Superman in 1938. Of course they ideas of space and of other planets would look like Buck Rodgers. The problem is that it stayed that way instead of changing.
"Whether or not Krypton receives a visual redesign is for the artists. Maybe it should be. Byrne said that if he'd designed his Krypton on the movies if he could have. Therein lies the rub; he wanted to create a Krypton that deserved to blow up. He wanted a dead, frozen world so horrible that Superman would have embraced Earth that much more just to reject Krypton. There is some truth to that; early scripts for the movie said that the reason that Jor-El sent his son to earth of all places was that they knew of something called love. Even Maggin here had Jor-El think that Earth had something Krypton didn't in his Superman novels.
"Byrne didn't get it; purity does not mean coldness. I'm not going to throw out the world that previous writers and editors like Julie and Mort Weisinger created. Modified and revitalized, maybe, but not thrown out. The Jewel Mountains, the Gold Volcano, the Scarlet Jungle, and similar things should remain, keep as much of it as we can. Beyond that I have no problem with Krypton being redesigned as being alien and other is long as we can imagine that Superman could have called it home.
"If Jor-El's look is changed so that he doesn't wear a headband or have a sunburst on his chest, then the mark on his chest should be the crest of the house of El. The shield is holy; as it is the symbol of Superman and everything he stands for so it should be more than just a letter S. What it means it Kryptonese, I don't know; perhaps it stands for hope with how Superman stands for being good and trying to make a better world and all that good stuff. I don't know and I'll leave it for a later writer to tell the story. Bryne's sketches for Kryptonian clothes look interesting."
Bates handed out drawings of Lara and Jor-El that imagined them wearing black bodysuits, bodystockings actually that covered them entirely except for their faces and fingers. Over the suits, robes were worn—green for Jor-El and purple for Lara—and on the head of Superman's mother, a gold headpiece. Len Wein in particular looked impressed. "Very nice. If you do incorporate the shield, where will it go?"
"I'm not sure, probably on a clasp though as I said, that's a job for the artist. I'll leave it to them."
Bates reached for his notes to see the next part of the agenda. "Moving on from that, we get to a question. Why is it that when Krypton exploded, there were no survivors? If it were our planet that was destroyed it would be understandable as we have no interstellar space travel or off planet colonies. But if Krypton was so advanced, why were there no Kryptonians off planet? Were they not a space faring race? It was said that Krypton had abandoned its space travel but need it be that?
"To answer that, let us remember Braniac. We should keep Brainiac's capture of Kandor the capital with how removing it lessens a major villain and gets rid of a major part of history. We could even say that General Zod used the chaos from that in an attempt take over Krypton. The movie made General Zod one of Superman's great villains in the mind of most people and we have the chance to make him ours. The post-Kandor Krypton was bereft of a capital and in chaos; Zod quickly rallied support with his demagoguery and even built a new capital called Krytonopolis. He built it using Jor-El's crystal growth technology and it was in the new capital that Kal was born. However, Jor-El worked unwillingly with Zod and ultimately trapped him in the Phantom Zone.
"I should like to say that there was a Kryptonopolis previously and it was here that Kal was born but that just raises the question why was it not the capital? Yes in the old comics it became the capital after the theft of Kandor but that's beside the point. Here we explain it and show the feud between Zod and the son of Jor-El.
"Jor-El only worked for Zod because Zod held the pregnant Lara hostage. But, stained by the association, the Kryptonian council wouldn't believe him when they said that Krypton would explode. We all know what happened next. As for other Kryptonians, let's say that they had been off planet when it exploded. The news spread across the news channels of the galaxy: a Kryptonian student on Thanagar, a Kryptonian merchant on Tamaran all hear this and mourn. This shouldn't be said right away as it would lessen the impact when Krypton explodes.
"Soon enough little Kal arrives on Earth where he is found and adopted by the Kents who are just driving by. Maggin and I will probably get rid of the idea of Clark being left on the doorstep of Smallville orphanage and then coming back to adopt him, too complicated. We'll say that he's a kid of deceased distant relatives or something. Now in the Silver Age, Superman's Kryptonian heritage was so emphasized that the Kents were pushed aside; that has begun to change in recent years with writers saying that his foster parents instilled in him moral values. Silver Age Superboy stories and especially Maggin's novels have the Kents as the nicest, most honest and trusting couple in town, a pair of gentle and innocent souls wherein the husband knows all the ministers and the wife bakes the finest pies. I say we keep going in that direction.
"Thus in our retelling we see a small Kansas farming town where Main Street is the only named street, where the biggest event is the annual county fair, where nobody has to lock their doors at night, where you can indeed raise a family and it's Jonathon Kent's home. Looking back we'll see him as a young all-American boy who married his girlfriend Martha Clark right out of high school and each was the only person that the other ever loved. Alas, this romance would have to wait because when WWII came, Jonathon left his new bride to serve in the Army as was his patriotic duty. He returned and they started their life together.
"For years they were happy but there was one thing they lacked in order to complete their happiness… a child. They feel incomplete and they mourn because they can't have children. At one point we see Ma, thinking God might be punishing her with barrenness, kneeling in church praying for a son. It is when she and pa drive home from church that they find the rocket. It crashes, they stop and inside they find a baby wrapped in blue and red. Not knowing what else to do, they take the child with them but when the child exhibits his strength, they know what they must do.
"They are driving along, asking themselves if they should take the child to an orphanage or not; after all, what was Uncle Sam thinking, putting a baby in a rocket? That all changes when, in imitation, of the movie, the tire blows, Pa goes to fix it, and when the jack snaps, the baby catches the truck and keeps it from crushing Pa. Partly because they want their own son and partly because they're afraid that the feds will put him in a lab and partly because of the responsibility thrust upon them, they take in the child. They remember the story of God giving Samson's parents—themselves a childless couple—a child but on the condition that they raise him to be a champion. Ma and Pa realize the responsibility they have in raising their child and they train him to one day be the world's greatest hero.
"In one of Maggin's novels Superman: Last Son of Krypton, he imagines the Kents on seeing the power their son wields purposefully raise him to be earth's greatest hero. Ma has him read the Bible and plenty of Horatio Alger to form his moral character. Pa trains him in the use of his power. They never bother to ask Clark or even each other about this; they just take it for granted that this is what they have to do. A cynic might say that they planning out their son's life but I say that the thought of raising their son to be anything but a hero simply never occurred to them.
"One very interesting tidbit from Maggin's novels has Superman/Superboy with the power of 'soul vision' for the lack of a better word. In Superman: Miracle Monday, Pa saw how strong his son was and was increasingly terrified that investing an eight-year old with the power of the gods was a cause for disaster. Imagine that episode of the Twilight Zone where a kid uses his reality warping powers to hold all the people in town as his hostages and force them to say over and over that everything he does is good. In fact, Pa Kent has a similar dream wherein his son takes over the world.
"However, the next day when Pa is called to school everything changes. Clark is sobbing uncontrollably and he explains to Pa what happened. Clark saw a dog get run over by the school bus and because of his soul vision he could literally see the dog die. He saw the life force flowing from the dog until it was emptied husk. He can see life itself and feels the pain of every living thing. Pa realizes that he need never fear his son and it was that night that Clark swore an oath never to kill and that failing that oath would renounce his power forever. On the next day, Clark made his debut as Superboy with his father's blessing.
"To this we go into Superboy. We should keep him. Firstly because it would cause too many continuity headaches with how Superboy, in effect, created the Legion of Superheroes and secondly, having our man be Superboy as a teen cements his position as the leader of all other heroes. When 16 year old Barry Alan was trying to get dates in high school; Clark Kent had already been saving the world for eight years straight. Having preceded all other heroes of his generation by about thirteen years automatically grants him the respect that he deserves. If you've noticed, you'll see that I said first hero of his generation.
"Now, up until now, Superman has always been portrayed as the world's first hero. Every story that ever bothered to comment on the subject said the same thing. He'd debuted as Superboy and was alone for over ten years until Batman and the others came along. There were a few exceptions to this such as the Earth-One Wild Cat who debuted in the 1940s and the Shadow whose likeness was licensed to us; both were shown to have been instrumental in the formation of Batman. Another key exception was the Legion of Superheroes; they were in fact created by Mort Weisinger as part of his universe within a universe approach to Superman and DC comics. They would visit the Teen of Steel and go on adventures and sometimes they would take him to their time.
"And that was the point. They would visit… and then they would leave. If you take an in-depth look at Superboy comics you'll see that he lives in a world without super people. To be sure, so-and-so-man might get powers, but he would usually lose them by the end of the story thus restoring the status quo of a world wherein, with the exception of Aquaboy, the Teen of Steel is the only superhero. Yes, there did exist WWII's Justice Society, but they were set in an alternate universe and they had their own Superman so even there Superman was still the first hero. In the post-Crisis DC Universe, things are going to be very different because with Earth-Two and its Justice Society merged into Earth-One and with Earth-Two Superman gone, Superman can no longer be the first hero."
On having said that, Cary Bates grinned from ear to ear. "But why let that get in the way."
He passed out drawings of Superboy standing with the Justice Society. He noticed the looks on the writers and artists' faces as it all began to dawn on them. "Since Superman in post-Crisis continuity can't be the first superhero," said Bates, "we'd like to maintain his prominence by that he was at least trained by the first superheroes. We see Doctor Fate, near the end of his group's life, telling the JSA that their work is all but over. He tells his friends that the first age of heroes was but the prelude because soon, the greatest hero of all will arrive from the stars and it will it will be the task of the entire JSA to find him. This little addition to the past gives Superman a new grandeur, a fresh religious dimension, and ties him more directly into the development of superheroics in the DCU. It also seems mythically right that Superman, if he is a Christ symbol, should, at some point before he dons the cape, meet his predecessors, his John the Baptists, who have awaited his coming and now have a few lessons for the fledgling hero.
"Here is something to consider. It is 1985 right now and if Superman really is 29 like we always say he is then he was born in 1956. (Though we could say he was born in 1938 and that due to his escape rocket's warpgate he only arrived in 1956.) Also, if Pa was twenty in 1956, then he was born in 1936. He was old enough to remember the first age of heroes. It's worth saying that most versions portray Pa as being significantly older than 20 when he finds his adopted son. He might be as old as the JSAers. Maybe he was a fan of the JSA in his youth and hoped to create in his son the heir to the JSA.
"Thus when the old heroes come offering to train him he heartily agrees. Pa watches with joy as Clark eagerly learns flight skills from Hawkman and martial arts from Wildcat. Of course, who else but the Jay Garrick Flash could teach the future Superman how to use his speed? Dr. Fate teaches Superboy about magic and that he's weak against it. Dr. Midnite teaches him first aide, how to treat injuries and diagnose him; a must with all the lives Superman saves. And so on.
"Also, considering how the JSA was disbanded in the fifties, this adds a new dimension, a new wrinkle. When they were first reintroduced in the issues of Flash starting with the Jay Garrick Flash, it was said that they had simply retired. Of course, Gardner Fox who wrote the JSA and the Jay Garrick Flash stories brought them all back for the Justice League story where the JLA and the JSA meet. There we see Fox reassuring readers that their hairs are only slightly grayed and that their powers only slightly dimmed. The JSAers are in their base remembering the good old days when they get tapped by the JSA for a case. It was ultimately revealed that the reason the JSA retired was that a paranoid US government asked the heroes to reveal their secret identities. The JSA heroes, of course, refused.
"We can use that and, through Superboy see the development of superheroes in the DCU. Let's say that in a climate of suspicion and paranoia, the government turned against the JSA and by extension all superheroes, all superhumans. (Though with you know who removed from the picture, we'll call them something else, Mystery Men perhaps.) Previously, the general public was still said to have believed in them but now without the Earth-Two Superman, this never happened. Without that greatest hero, the general public turned against the vigilantes and freaks; it was race hate against super people with signs like no supers allowed or the lynching of anybody with powers. This is worth noting because people kept getting superpowers but they stayed out of the public eye to avoid discrimination. And God forbid that you touch spandex! It gets that bad we are going to see super people having to register with the government."
Having worked over at Marvel, Len Wein raised an eyebrow. "Cary, are you going to turn the DCU into the X-Men?"
Bates sheepishly smiled and scratched the back of his neck. "Well, ha-ha! I… uh, was thinking about a few Chris Claremont stories… but the point is…" He cleared his throat. "The point is that it doesn't stay that way when an eight year old Superboy comes with a costume and powers and saying he's just here to help. His home base is in Smallville and whether it's helping cats from trees or helping people to paint their fences, he really is just there to help. People ask his real name but he's not sure he can give it to them; he's afraid that the bad guys might get his mommy and daddy. The feds see this and they are reluctant to take a stand against a child, especially such a sweet child. With Superboy saving the day and helping people, folks gradually start to lose their suspicion of super people. It takes a while though—thirteen years—before folks learn to trust super people again. Nevertheless, it's thanks to Superman's constant example that, powers aside, superhumans are just regular people, most of whom just want to do the right thing, that there could be a superhero renaissance and that, unlike the Marvel Universe, there is no major discrimination against superhumans."
To be continued…
Author's Notes and Replies: Shout out to Sir Thames! Thanks for reviewing all chapters so far. Ditto to Lillyrose the Dreamer, Kyer and Zakali!
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