As the year draws to a close, we reflect on what has transpired over the past 365 days. We’ve had the first African-American president sworn into office, we’ve seen the economy flux and wane, and most importantly to some, we’ve seen the life of a universal icon changed forever.
Earlier this August, the family of Jerry Siegel, one of the co-creators of Superman, was awarded ownership rights to the character’s origin.
This means DC Comics, the company that owns the rights to the current Superman character, no longer has access to portions of the Superman mythos including the planet Krypton, being put into a rocket by his parents to escape his exploding planet and crash landing on Earth. If DC ever wants to use these portions of the Superman mythos in any future stories, they have to pay rights to Siegel’s family.
Much like the character’s personal history, he no longer has a home to return to.
This raises some problems, undoubtedly, for DC, who has used the character’s origin for a source of many of his antagonists. The term Kryptonite, the remains of Krypton, and most generally known weakness for Superman, is still owned by DC comics. This means that DC can still use it in stories as a weakness for Superman, but the glowing green rock can no longer be the remains of Superman’s home planet.
“I think [the comic] is just going to go more towards where a lot of the other comics are going. Where they just change a lot of the core elements of it to make it either more realistic…I think they’ll simply find a new solution as a new weakness for Superman. They’ll give him a fake new origin and they’ll pass him off as some alternate dimension,” Jonny Chandler, a comic book fan, said.
DC can remedy this by avoiding the use of Krypton in its stories. This month, there will be a new series released by DC titled “Superman: Earth 1″, which will be set in a different continuity than the main Superman series.
J. Michael Straczynski, the writer of Superman: Earth 1, revealed in an interview with Aintitcoolnews.com that the series will deal with Clark Kent (Superman’s alter-ego) coming to terms with how he is going to use his powers, and at the same time, the story will “flash back to his life growing up in Smallville, so we can see how the Kent’s helped mold him and protect him and get him to a point in his life where he can finally make this most difficult of choices.”
An article on MTV’s Splash Page pointed out that at no point in this interview does Straczynski make mention of the planet Krypton or any details regarding Superman’s origins other than he grew up in Smallville. No mention of the character’s birth off planet or dead civilization are made. How will this go over with fans?
Pretty easily, actually.
“If you’re doing Superman’s origins when he’s just learning about his powers…and how he’s going to use them and conflicts that arise from that, then yeah, I think it’s fine,” Michael Esposito, another comic book fan said. “But if you want to see Superman with a formidable villain or something like that, than that’s where the problem’s going to come from.”
In television shows and movies depicting Superman, most of the threats the main character deals with stem from his heritage: on the “Smallville” TV show, many of the antagonists get their abilities from Kryptonite, and in “Superman 2” Superman faced other Kryptonians with powers similar to his own.
Even in the comics, the most fearsome of Superman’s antagonists have some ties to Krypton. Like General Zod or Doomsday, the creature that is famous for killing the character back in the 90’s.
The challenge now lies with new writers to work with the constraints put on them by this legal result.
“I think comics as a whole are an effectively static medium,” Brian LaCour, another comic book fan said. “As much as anyone wants to argue that it isn’t, the way fans come in and reinforce in writing the various aspects of canon or things they loved as a kid just keeps status quo is position.
“Then lawsuits like this develop and the writers just find a way to bring back their canon under the new medium,” LaCour said.
It remains to be seen how these legal issues will affect Superman. Thought he may not be the Last Son Of Krypton anymore, the character that he has become since leaving his home planet remains to tell the same stories he has for almost half a century. Superman is still, to many, The Man of Steel.
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Guys…the only reason I didn’t mention Krypton is that I wasn’t asked.
Care to comment here?
[...] recently wrote about a similar situation involving the family of Jerry Siegel and the rights to the character [...]