"Good-Bye, Superman!"
Out of action forty years ago today
This post is a continuation of “The Last Superman Story” from two weeks ago.
The comic I’m about to write about obviously isn’t the very last Superman story. Superman guest stars in Supergrrrrl which opens today. Don’t believe the chuds. Idris Elba rocks as the title character. Feel the femininity.
Superman is played by Queen Latifah.
The Chinese market is gonna wuv the new look of the Last Persyn of Krypton. The brevity of xir Chinese Wikipedia entry demonstrates the intense devotion of xir Middle Kingdom fans.
Seriously, I’m sick of modern American comics and their a-dump-tations. Hollywood can’t help but ‘improve’ the source material. Which is never a classic comic book like Action Comics #583 (September 1986 - cover dates were months ahead of the publication date).
That was the last comic featuring the Superman of ‘Earth-One’ of the DC Comics multiverse. DC was going to reboot Superman and jettison decades of history. Years of lore that I had absorbed as a child reading old comics and reprints … all suddenly no longer canon.
Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” was a two-part love letter to all those years. “The Last Superman Story” covers part one. This post covers part two.
It began in the then-future of 1997. A Daily Planet reporter continued to listen to Lois Lane Elliot talk about a man whom her husband Jordan ‘Jordy’ Elliot referred to as “her ex”:
He weren’t nothing special. Us ordinary workin’ slobs, son ... we’re the real heroes.
Years ago, all but one of the not-so-real heroes - Batman and friends - were stuck outside a bubble that encased Superman’s Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic.
Superman and his supporting cast were trapped in that bubble - with Superman’s last remaining foes!
Superman’s childhood friend Lana Lang was sick of hiding in the fortress and doing nothing. As was Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen, who said,
All these years, they’ve called me “Superman’s friend.” I guess here’s where I start paying for the privilege.
Together they reacquired superpowers that they hadn’t used since the ‘sillier’ sixties.1 Lana dipped into a pool of radioactive lake water that temporarily gave her all the powers of Superman without his weakness to Kryptonite. Jimmy used2 the Elastic Lad serum to give himself short-term stretching powers.
Using her new super-hearing, Lana accidentally overheard the love of her life confess that he loved Lois, not … her.
Lana converted her pain into motivation:
We’re only second stringers, Jimmy, but we’ll show ’em … nobody loved him better than us. Nobody!
The duo left the fortress. Jimmy disabled the bubble generator while Lana fought Superman’s enemies. Among them was her former classmate Lex Luthor, now under the control of the alien computer Brainiac attached to his head.
Lex begged Lana to free him from Brainiac’s domination by killing him. Lana snapped his neck with a chop.
Meanwhile, the telepath Saturn Queen probed Lana’s mind and figured out how she got her powers.
Cosmic King nullified those powers by turning the radioactive traces of the lake water in her tissue into “normal body salts”. Lana fell in mid-air.
Lightning Lord offered her his hand -
- and fried her with his electrical power.
Before Jimmy could avenge her, he was shot in the back … by Luthor’s dead body, animated by Brainiac.
And the bubble somehow persisted despite Jimmy’s efforts.
Within it, Brainiac set off a nuclear blast tearing open the fortress.
The Kryptonite Man, an alien glowing with Kryptonite radiation entered:
Come out, Kryptonian. Your rat-hole’s been breached. You can’t escape me now.
He would not exit. Superman’s dog Krypto would defend his master -
- to the death, his irradiated body dying beside the Kryptonite Man’s corpse.
Superman learned what the Legion of Super-Villains - Saturn Queen, Cosmic King, and Lightning Lord - had done.
YOU HURT LANA?
The trio fled back to the future from which they came. They didn’t want him to kill them - and they knew he would die in what was the ancient past to them.
Brainiac couldn’t manipulate Luthor’s corpse for long. Once rigor mortis set in, Brainiac abandoned Luthor and was reduced to a mechanical brain with little tentacle-legs.
Lois recalled,
The disintegrating collection of plates and circuits crawled a couple of inche, propelled by sheer malice, then stopped moving. Brainiac was dead. It was all over …
All of Superman’s villains were gone … save one. The most powerful of them all: Mr. Mxyzptlk, whose magical powers were capable of anything … like setting up this entire scenario.
“Why?” asked Superman.
Don’t be naive, Superman. I’m an immortal, like everyone in the fifth dimension.
The big problem with being immortal is filling your time. For example, I spent the first two thousand years of my existence doing absolutely nothing.
I didn’t move … I didn’t even breathe.
Eventually, simple inertia became tiresome, so I spent the next two thousand years being saintly and benign, doing only good deeds.
When that novelty began to fade, I decided to try being mischievous.
He had just been a pest to Superman, but …
Now, two thousand years later, I’m bored again. I need a change. Starting with your death, I shall spend the next two millennia being evil! After that, who knows? Perhaps I’ll try being guilty for a while.
His plot had already killed so many. How much more carnage could he cause in his true form?
Unless …
Superman finally understood the significance of the statuette of himself that the thirtieth century’s Legion of Super-Heroes had given him in part one.
The statuette held a Phantom Zone projector. When Superman aimed the projector at Mxyzptlk, the extradimensional demon tried to escape by saying his name backwards.
He ended up tearing himself between his home dimension and the Phantom Zone. Killing himself.
But Superman saw himself as a murderer. A violator of his vow never to kill.
Nobody has the right to kill. Not Mxyzptlk, not you, not Superman … especially not Superman!
So Superman had to go … into a chamber with Gold Kryptonite, a substance that irreversibly stripped Kryptonians of their powers … never to be seen again.
At least not as Superman.
Lois and Jordy’s toddler son Jonathan could squeeze coal into a diamond with his bare hand. Just like Superman used to do.
Jordy winked at the reader in the final panel.
The End …
… of the story …
… and the beginning of my commentary. Let me answer Jordy’s closing question. What do I think?
First, the part of the story that touched me most was Lana and Jimmy’s sacrifice. I know what it’s like to never be the main character - to ony be a second stringer. To want to go out in glory.
Second, I never understood American superheroes’ aversion to killing. There is no equivalent in Japanese superhero mythology. Japanese heroes have found a third way between letting killers live to kill again and killing for pleasure. In Japanese heroic fiction, killing is a necessity, not a taboo or turn-on.
As I see it, Lana had to kill Luthor - that genius understood that only death could end his suffering as a host body for an alien AI. Lana had to end Luthor’s suffering. Would Superman have agreed if he had known what Lana had done? No, as he had said, “Nobody has the right to kill.”
I don’t know what Moore’s view on killing is. It doesn’t matter. Moore had no choice but to make Superman act as he did, because Moore had constructed a tribute to Superman as that character had been - including his code against killing.
One could argue that Superman didn’t deserve to punish himself for saving the world from a monster intent on two millennia of homicidal mayhem. One could go even further and argue that by depowering himself, Superman was depriving the universe of a champion - a defense against future threats. How many would die because there was no Superman?
Third, I wonder if the Gold Kryptonite was not so much a punishment as a liberator. By the end of the story, all of Superman’s rogues’ gallery was dead, in prison (as mentioned in part one), or in another time period. Superman may have felt he wasn’t necessary anymore. Depowering himself was a way to give himself ‘me time’ … ironically in disguise as Jordy.
Jordy Elliot, named after Jor-El, Superman’s biological father on Krypton, is Superman’s equivalent of Rick Sanchez’s ‘Ted’ persona on Rick and Morty: mediocrity as relief from the burden of the extraordinary. Lois said to her husband,
You really love it [being Jordy], don’t you? Just going to work every day, taking out the garbage, changing Jonathan’s diapers … all this normal stuff.
Jordy thought his current life couldn’t be “beat”. He didn’t miss his old life:
Superman? He was overrated, and too wrapped up in himself. He thought the world couldn’t get along without him.
And yet by 1997, years after his ‘death’, the world had done just that.
I empathize with Jordy. I have withdrawn from the world, and it gets along without me. And I daydream about my ‘Ted’ persona being an auto mechanic, just like Jordy. I love cars but don’t have the dexterity to work on them. Jordy was working on getting a 1948 Buick running. He has a superpower from my perspective. If I had that superpower, I’d love to resurrect a 1966 Chevrolet Corvair.
Lana Lang and Jimmy Olsen never had superpowers in the seventies and eighties when DC Comics aimed to be more ‘serious’ and ‘realistic’.
I used the word “used” because it’s not clear what Jimmy exactly did with the serum. I had assumed he drank it, but there is no panel depicting that. In one panel, a single drip of serum falls from a flask in his right hand toward his left hand. Maybe he drank it off-panel and poured what was left of it onto his hand.
Working on cars is no where near a dexterity thing? /points at all the tools