Saturday, February 28, 2009

New Krypton

In case you haven't been following the Superman books, here's the nickel catch-up.

Brainiac came to Earth, Superman beat him and disabled his ship. In the proces, he freed Kandor, the lost city of Krypton.

What Superman didn't know was just about anything about Krypton or Kryptonians, and its been a rocky ride since. Kandor took to the other side of the solar system with a new world (using that nifty crystal technology you remember from Superman: The Movie and Superman Returns). They've dubbed the world New Krypton.

DC has put together a snazzy video trailer for the upcoming story arc. Here.

6 comments:

Michael Corley said...

How do you feel about Superman when there's a heaping help of Kryptonians?

The League said...

Honestly, one thing I've learned at this point is that its very easy to have certain rules in your head about what should and shouldn't work with Superman, but at the end of the day, its (a) all about if the story makes sense in context, (b) if the story is actually engaging and well written.

Like a lot of Superman fans, I had a lot of ideas about what should and shouldn't happen in Superman based on John Byrne's "Man of Steel", and how Byrne/ Wolfman's vision was the only way for Superman to work for modern readers. I'm very pleased to say that the past three years of Superman comics have proven me wrong. Other things, like "it doesn't work if Lois knows his identity" just doesn't hold water with me.

Would a world with 100,000 Superman's running around be less interesting? Maybe. But that's not the direction they've taken at all. And the writers are aware enough to know what they're doing when they say "now there's 100,000 of you". Just as if 100,000 people from, say, Houston were suddenly gifted with super powers.

The story, as I see it, will serve a few purposes:

a) Demonstrate how Superman, even among super powered folks, is unique.
b) Make it okay again for the DCU to have Kryptonians, while finding a way to make Superman the Last Son of Krypton and Earth's Superman
c) Find a much more logical explanation for why Superman can't ever expand Kandor beyond a captive bottle-size that goes beyond "he can't figure it out".

So far, it's been a fascinating read.

Michael Corley said...

I'll be interested to see how it works out.

Superman is unique among Kryptonians (Zod and crew certianly underline this well).

Still, I can't help remembering a line from the "Smallville" show where a friend says to Clark, "Gee, for your being the Last Son of Krypton, there sure are a lot of you!"

The League said...

Yeah. There was a lot of stress on that "Last Son" bit in the 80's and 90's. Unfortunately, Superman had about 30+ years of mythology in the comics that depended on him NOT being the last Kryptonian.

Jax-Ur, Zod, Faora from the Phantom Zone. Kandor. Supergirl. Argo. Krypto. Beppo. The list goes on.

People obviously took to those concepts and/ or didn't want to see them go away because Byrne and Wolfman decreed that Superman happened to have a nickname of "Last Son of Krypton" that they took seriously. So the 80's and 90's saw all kinds of reinterpretations of old concepts like Kandor, Krypto and Supergirl as writers flailed around to find interpretations that made logical sense (but usually didn't). In my opinion, the "reimagining" of Supergirl, who saw about six different incarnations from 1990 - 2005ish was a terrible failure.

Loeb brought Kara Zor-El back in 2005ish, and then it seemed all bets were off.

It does present a challenge to Superman writers to be able to have other Kryptonians running around and not overuse them, or make the Superman books entirely about rogue Kryptonians. But we'll have to see what happens in the long term. In the meantime, the storyline seems to be working.

NTT said...

Isn't Superman getting sent off to do a walkabout/visionquest sort of thing?

We'll see how everything plays out.

The League said...

DC made some very misleading comments this winter about "Superman leaving Earth for a while". Something in how they phrased it made it sound as if Superman were repeating the forgettable "Exile" storyline from the 90's in which he just puttered about space.

Last week's issue of Superman had him decide to move to New Krypton in order to try to work with the Kandorians and basically keep an eye on them and keep them from invading Earth.

So, for the next several months, year, whatever... Superman will be on New Krypton.