Scans: World of Krypton (1/2)

[mithen]

John Byrne's influence on the Superman character and mythos is deep and far-reaching. After Crisis of Infinite Earths, he was tapped to re-make Superman, and he took the character in very different directions. There had been, in the late pre-Crisis, a tendency to see Clark Kent as the real persona and Superman as the "mask"--Byrne's envisioning of

Comments

[liarashadowsong]

Interesting... I both do and do not like this re-envisioning of Krypton. On one hand, the detail is spectacular. The clothing is fabulous. The characters seem so three-dimensional. On the other, it is cold and sterile. It is not just that Kal-El grew up on Earth as Clark Kent, but also that it was probably distinctly in his best interests to do so, considering that even if Jor-El was a lot like him he wasn't really happy except for falling in love with Lara.

Still... cool idea. I like that Lara has such a cool, important job, rather than it being only about Jor-El, though he obviously is still very important here. It's also a nice concept that Kal/Clark is basically human, even if he is of non-terrestrial ethnic origin. Like... he's not another species, just a meta-human from very, very far away. I guess that would make any children he and Lois might have just bi-racial and not some sort of OMG-alien-species-hybrid-of-dubious-plausibility-due-to-genetic-differences? Hm... I guess in this world, there may be something to the conspiracy theory of alien origins of the human race? :P

[mithen]

I totally agree about the detail! Byrne sees this world so clearly, and the characters and the setting...it's so impressive. I just don't like it, lol.

Hm, I do wonder about the alien origins thing! I've never really heard anyone in canon (that I can remember) positing it, but it would be kind of cool if there was a common ancestor between humans and Kryptonians...

[liarashadowsong]

Sooo much detail, I know! I don't like his details much, though. I want this kind of detail from canons that I like better, instead.

And as for the common ancestor... there kind of would have to be. I've seen examples of convergent evolution in my current biology class (it's about evolution), and while the similarities can be impressive, it happens usually when the species fill the same ecological niche in two geographically separate but similar environments.

Like the marsupial mole in Australia and the placental mole everywhere else that has moles. They're not related, but they converged to looking very alike because they do the same things.

On a crystal planet, there aren't going to be enough similarities to Earth for this - the differences between Kryptonians and Terrans if they had no recent common ancestor would almost certainly be much (,much,much) greater than those amongst Terrans from different geographical regions.

If this is the case, Kal-El would not be able to pass himself off as a mixed-race Terran (to explain features common to different regions of Earth being found in a single person, this is why I personally like that Dean Cain who played him in the Lois and Clark live-action show is a quarter Japanese), let alone a white guy, barring shape-shifting powers. There must be a common ancestor.

There are real-life conspiracy theories about these sorts of ideas, that modern humans came to be through the meddling of extra-terrestrial sentient life and genetic manipulation. Somewhat less out-there ones saying that we got technology from visitors from other planets. They have evidence. Rather shaky, definitely interpretable-in-other-ways evidence, but it hasn't been totally disproven as impossible ... yet.

[liarashadowsong]

Shoot. The above anonymous reply is me. I didn't realize I wasn't logged in.