Word: krypton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Vincent Sullivan, editor of Detective Comics, had a terrific idea. So what if it was someone else's? The year before, a muscle-bound man from Krypton had landed in the pages of rival Action Comics and become an instant icon of pop culture. Sullivan may not have owned Superman, but he could clone it. He called in cartoonist Bob Kane, then 18, and asked for a similar "super-duper" character. Kane went home, tossed the movies The Mark of Zorro and The Bat Whispers into an imaginary blender with Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine, and dreamed up Batman...
...heroic scenario: the explosion of the doomed planet Krypton, the miraculous escape of the infant son of a Kryptonian scientist, the discovery of the baby's spaceship by an elderly couple near the Midwestern town of Smallville. And the gradual revelations of the child's superhuman strength, the foster parents' exhortation that he "must use it to assist humanity," the youth's adoption of a dual identity -- the mild-mannered, blue-suited newspaper reporter, Clark Kent, and the red-caped, blue-haired Superman, the man of steel. And Lois Lane, the toothsome fellow reporter who attached herself to the Superman...
...Superman and know him well and have known him forever. In fact, we hardly know Superman at all, for the details of his life have been changed again and again, according to either the whims of his owners or the demands of the market. His originally nameless father on Krypton, for example, became Jor-L, then Jor-El (and eventually Marlon Brando). His employer in Metropolis, before it was the Daily Planet, was the Daily Star and then the Evening News. His Luciferian arch-enemy Luthor, the mad scientist who wants to conquer the world, once had red hair, then...
...from Smallville who applied for a job at the Planet. Then there was a Supergirl who appeared as a result of Cub Reporter Jimmy Olsen's making a wish over a Latin American idol. No sooner was she dispatched back to pre-Columbian limbo than it turned out that Krypton had not exploded all at once and that Superman's cute cousin Kara had also rocketed to earth as another Supergirl, a.k.a. Linda Lee. (Why all the females in Superman have names beginning with L remains unexplained, and might make a promising subject for a Ph.D. dissertation...
...David Odell's "Supergirl" script keeps the comic at the cost of coherence. The plot has holes large enough to fit the planet of Krypton through, even before it blew up into tiny bits of Kryptonite...