Chapter Four: Truth, Justice, and the American Way

Place: Offices of DC Comics, New York City

Year: 1986

"As the new Superman editor, I plan on seeing Lois and Clark marry."

"What!"

"Are you serious?"

"Everyone knows that they can't marry!"

"And that…!" said Maggin as he punched his palm "is why I'm going to do it."

Julius Schwartz raised an eyebrow. This was going to get interesting.

The DC writers and artists looked at Maggin intently. "Now with all my talk about history and continuity, some of you are surprised that I'm saying this. Don't be. We should never be ashamed of the past but we should never be enslaved to it, either." A few were beginning to nod; they saw what he was trying to say and they listened. "We gotta let our characters grow and change instead of freezing them in place and revering them to death. If we do… all we get are rote drivel stories and characters that are so many clichés.

"It's worth saying that his isn't the first time that someone tried to get the love birds married; Jerry Siegel tried to get them hitched as far back is 1940. He wrote a story where Superman told Lois the secret and the two started working together as a team. DC said no." He shot a dirty look at Schwartz. "The editor of that time and every editor since then said that breaking up the love triangle would kill the drama…"

"Shaddup Magoon and get back to work!"

Magoon... His name was Maggin, how hard was that for Julie to understand... He'd been trying to marry off Lois and Clark since the 1970s but a certain DC higher up had stopped his plans cold every time. For his part, Julie wasn't paying one bit of attention and concentrated on his bean soup. No use remaining bitter, though.

"It will be a great story and think of the free publicity we'll get when the New York Times shouts 'Lois and Superman finally getting married!'" Maggin happily said. "But I want to make it clear that Lois has to fall in love with all of him. We've written a lot of stories about Lois only loving Superman but if we go too far in the other direction and have her love only Clark, she'll either marry a lie or, to make it work, we run the risk of turning Superman into a weakling Clark with powers."

Carmine Infantino drummed his figure on the table. "That's the reason that when Broome and I created Elongated Man we gave him no secret identity. It makes marriage a whole lot easier."

Maggin narrowed his eyes. "Well, he isn't Superman, is he?"

Schwartz growled, "I don't want no squabbles. Get back to the story Magoon."

"Yes sir," he sighed. He cleared his throat. "I imagine Lois possibly falling in love with Clark and being shocked to learn that he really is Superman. We did a dry run with that in an Earth Two story that showed how that Superman married his Lois. He lost his memory and with no memory of why he should be a coward lets himself be a manly Clark that steals Lois' heart."

He touched his hand to his chin. "Or she falls in love with Clark and shocks him by saying that she knows he really is Superman. There was one issue of Superman's Girlfriend: Lois Lane that covered this; it was way back in the sixties." He waved his hand to make his point. "The cover shows Lois and Lana gasping as Clark storms into the room where they're in saying he'd never marry a girl so dumb that she couldn't figure out he's Superman."

Maggin heard laughter from the people at the conference. "Alright, Alright! We've had our fun, that's enough!" Belying that he started laughing himself "…Aw man that is funny!" He wiped away a tear. "…Like I was saying, that's how the cover is but when they get to that part of the story we see that the girls gasped because of his opening the door. Annoyed, Lois just rolls her eyes and goes back to playing cards. Lana is confused and says that she and Lois have always known that he's Superman, even if they've never been able to prove it. With that, she and Lois go back to playing cards."

"What!?" exclaimed George Perez. "Are you serious?!"

The Superman editor smiled as he saw the look on Perez' face and on the faces of everyone there. "Serious but back to the topic. We could say that in our new modified continuity, it opens with Lois already knowing that Clark is Superman. Like I said, all through the Silver Age, she always knew the secret, she just never proved it. In recent years, Bates and I played it down but we could bring it back. This time, however, she's not trying to force him out in the open or force him into marrying her. So for example, Lois says 'Superman, Perry has this newspaper assignment for you.' Or, "Clark I just heard that there's a monster on the loose; your Justice League friends needs you.'

"Superman keeps telling her he's not Clark but by then, it's clear to him that he's only fooling himself," Maggin sighed. "Commitment… It's something we men just can't take." He shrugged his shoulders and went back to the story. "Anyways, when our guy tells her that he isn't the big hero, she unbuttons his shirt revealing the costume beneath and he doesn't even try to stop her. By now, he's just trying to keep her from getting close. As to why he's doing that at all, we always said that he was afraid that if his enemies ever found that there was a Mrs. Superman they would target her in revenge." Maggin shook his head and smiled. How he clever he was to put two and two together!

"While that is true, we learn that Superman's mantra is only part of the reason. You see, while getting ready for this meeting, I talked with the copyboy Mark Plaid here." The copyboy was irked by the mispronunciation of his name but didn't let it show. "We were chatting and I figured out that…" Mark Plaid, or whatever his real name was, was even more irked; it had been was his idea… "if Superman's current continuity starts in 1958 with Mort Weisinger's tenure as editor, than it was only a few years after his parent's death when he least identified with his Clark Kent identity and most rejected the idea of a romance with Lois.

"… See, I'm thinking that with his powers Superman will effectively live forever while Lois grows old and dies." The people there were surprised when they saw Maggin's shoulders slump and a haggard look come across his face. "The worst part is that he knows it. By now he's lost Ma and Pa, Perry White, Supergirl, and now New Krypton. He's afraid of what will happen if he marries Lois; he can't bear the thought of grieving like that again. He's lost so much… he's afraid to marry Lois because he doesn't want to lose her too.

"After months worth of stories, or even years with all we can plot from this, he realizes that he's made the same mistake he made when his father died: on seeing fear, he gave in and gave up. Then he remembers what he said when he reached that epiphany; feeling sorry for yourself is a job for Superboy and Superboy isn't coming back. He admits to Lois that it is all true and that he will marry her.

"They both know it won't be easy." Maggin looked away. "…even if they manage to build their lives around his superhero schedule, even if they find a way around the fact that they'll never have children, even if they keep the secret from everyone, even if they live happily ever after, he knows that he will have to remain young and strong will she withers up and dies." The writer turned editor felt a lump in his throat. "He knows for a fact that if he marries her, the day will come when he will once again lose someone he loves and that his heart will be broken.

With a sad voice, Maggin said, "He chooses to let his heart be broken." He looked across at the other writers; they had the same lump in their throats too. "Their love may not be easy but love isn't about being easy. They will find a way."

For a time, everyone was silent; nobody moved, nobody breathed. Someone coughed. For a moment, Maggin worried if he had gone too far in his storytelling but that's when Julius Schwartz got up and clapped, that's when they all got up from their seats and gave their cheers.

"There's nothing that wrong in continuity that can't be fixed by what's right with continuity," said the grand old had been ruthless in demanding perfection from the boy but from this and everything else, he knew his constant testing had worked. He was the one! "They call be B.O. Schwartz, Be Original Schwartz for a reason. Magoon, I once said that if you or Bates ever came up with truly original ideas that I'd be giving you my job." He glanced at the folder next to his chair and smiled as he remembered one story where the punks had him guess star in an issue of Justice League. He still remembered laughing when he saw the "other" Schwartz say those exact words. "Maggin, I'm a man of my word. You're the editor now and I wouldn't want anyone else to be it. Marry those two off Elliot; its time."

Maggin never thought that the old man (old curmudgeon) would say this. Schwarts actually remembered his name! "Wow…" He looked at the blushing Bates and wiped away a tear. "Thanks sir."

Schwartz smirked. "Don't thank me yet. My days at DC are almost over but I still have a few tricks up my sleeve. Do you have anything else to say on your Superman ideas?"

"Yeah…" drawled Denny O'Neil. "What about Superman's power level? Are you gonna take him down a peg?"

"Oy vey…" Maggin couldn't help but purse his lips on hearing that. Way to take a man down from his cloud O'Neil. "In terms of Superman's power, Bates and I don't plan decreasing it." He remembered how O'Neil had tried to that very same thing back in 1971. "He's Superman. He's the biggest hero of them all and that means he should be the most powerful. We've see him picking up planets and outmuscling black holes and I plan on taking it to the next level by saying he breaks the absolute limit. That is to say, his strength is sufficient to move weight and mass equal to all the matter in the universe."

O'Neil groaned. "Then what's the point!?" Here they were trying to retool their old characters and they were just making the same mistakes… "If he's that strong then how can you possibly gave him any kind of challenge?"

Maggin narrowed his eyes and said, "He has that challenge because he's that strong. This isn't anybody else this is Superman! With him we have the chance to do something we can't do with any other hero. Everybody already knows he's stronger than anyone so that means his only limits are self imposed limits.

"C'mon think of it. If he really is that strong and if he really is that good, why then does anything bad happen at all? Wouldn't he try to stop everything bad from happening?" Maggin sheepishly grinned. "…That's not a job for Superman, that's a job for God." He scratched the back of his neck. "We have of course addressed this before but it only makes sense if our guy is in fact so powerful that we really would ask that. His problems shouldn't be about power it should be about dilemmas."

O'Neil laughed. "Ok, ok, I surrender! I see your point."

Jenette Kahn asked, "Bates, Maggin, have you given any thought as to how you'll show Superman using his power."

"I'll take this Elliot!" said a grinning Cary Bates. "The boss here had the ideas for this and I'm the one to make the nitty gritty. I know that with the strength we give Superman, giving him a good fight is tough. If we play it straight and have him go in full power, he'd save the day in fifteen seconds… so the way to give him a good fight is for him not to not use his full power."

Kahn's eyes went wide at that. "… and why would Superman deliberately choose not to use his full power?"

"Because on top of wielding that much power, he still tries to be good. If we really do decide to let Superman be that strong—and we have decided that—then he's a giant trying to live in a dollhouse, a god in full glory trying not to destroy a world made out of soap bubbles." Bates looked at the people there and smiled. "Have you thought about just how many stories that could give us! Think about it! What would it be like to be an ordinary boy and wake up one morning, realizing that he'll to have to spend the rest of your life in a straight jacket because if he loses control even for a second somebody would die? Brilliant!

"Again, he should use full power only rarely; in your average fight with Metallo, he doesn't want to use a planet smasher light speed punch for fear of killing Metallo and the entire population of Metropolis. Thus he gets thrown around a bit to build up drama before finishing the fight." He stroked his chin. "In fact, I was thinking of writing it so that we don't see him use his full power for a few months maybe even the first year so that people might think that we've powered him down. Playing into this, we plan on making Superman the only Kryptonian that strong; for example, in the Zod and New Krypton arc we see that the average Kryptonian can only lift mountains or maybe even just very large buildings.

"Thus when he has to use full power both the readers and the villain he'd been facing are shocked to see just how strong Superman really is…" Bates smiled as images of Superman fighting gods and cosmic beings and universe destroying titans entered his head. If they ever brought back the Anti-Monitor, he knew who was going to challenge him to a planet—no, galaxy smashing!—fight. "Oh, I can't want to write this!"

"…And I think that's pretty much it, right Elliot?" asked Julius Schwartz.

The editor nodded sagely. "That's pretty much it. I was thinking that at the Daily Planet/WGBS, there should be a shakeup. We've had Perry White suffering Alzheimer's so maybe when he retires, Clark asks boss Morgan Edge if he can leave being a TV reporter at WGBS and go back to the Daily Planet full time, maybe as the new editor." He looked away somewhat sadly. "I want to give a proper send off to my character Kirsten Wells AKA Superwoman. With Crisis and what not, I suppose she should give up her name and title to Clark saying only Kara Zor-El, who saved the world, can call herself Superwoman. Superman, motivated by grief and anger, might be slightly more aggressive. I could say that his costume isn't indestructible, merely very durable. It would be a nice visual to see his costume can get torn if he fights a strong enough opponent. Aside from that, that's it."

Schwartz shook and his head and chuckled. "This is going to be a wild ride... Magoon." He heard a groan but he ignored it as he took a sip of water. "Who's next?"

"That's me," said Denny O'Neil.

Author's Notes and Replies: The preferred title is "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" but it couldn't fit into the heading.

Anyways, Superman's is done for now but the universe is only just begun. Next is Batman!

Sir Thames: Once again thank you for your kind words.

"Anonymous": I know we might not agree on everything but I know we can agree on Lex Luthor.

In the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, Luthor was an evil business man, usefulness in terms of creating jobs and prosperity aside, had no redeeming values. This was a stark departure from the pre-Crisis Luthor who, as a young man, only ever wanted to help people but turned to sick jealousy when people rejected him to look at Superboy. Through the Silver Age and Bronze Age, there was always some goodness in Luthor—Maggin wrote him as having never directly killed anyone and even throwing away chances to escape Superman in order to save innocent people. Planet Lexor shows quite clearly what could have been if we had just given Lex a chance.

When the 2000s rolled around, DC started combining the best aspects of both eras to create a hybrid Luthor, something of which I heartily approve. (I just happen to have a soft spot for the space opera Luthor of mid-1980s. )

As for Braniac, I'm just following Marv Wolfman's lead. In the story Wolfman wrote, Braniac had a vision of the "Master Programmer" and declared himself "His" enemy. I mention this because it was a fine story and, with how it so successfully revived Braniac without any retcons, it ties into this story's theme: there is nothing wrong with continuity that can't be fixed by what's right with continuity.