DC Lied To You About Superman

The world has changed quite a bit since Superman made his first appearance — and permanently altered the trajectory of popular culture — in 1938. But despite the decades, the modern Man of Steel is basically the same guy that fans saw lifting a car over his head on the cover of Actions Comics #1. Unlike Batman — who's hopped from a bright, fun character to a brutal, grimdark punisher of criminals — Superman hasn't been successfully reinvented. Maybe that's because he never needed to be?

Having said all that, even the Last Son of Krypton isn't immune to the changing nature of comic book culture. And as the years have gone by, his invisible overlords at DC have had to backpedal on a few ideas and concepts that might've made sense at a certain point but eventually became cumbersome, problematic, or silly. And that means, for better or worse, there are some things about Supes that have been radically altered since that very first comic book ... and in a way, that kind of feels like DC pulling a fast one on fans. From his power set to his exaggerated death, here all the times that DC lied to you about Superman.

Released in 2006, All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely tells Superman's origin with, literally, eight words in four panels on a single page: "Doomed Planet. Desperate scientists. Last Hope. Kindly Couple." The origin story of Superman is so deeply ingrained in popular culture that, for the purposes of telling a story that takes place long after Kal-El's earliest moments, Morrison doesn't need to add any additional details. 

But strangely enough, besides those broad strokes, the finer details of Krypton's destruction have been all over the place throughout Superman's history. That's especially true for the "why" of the matter. In some iterations of Superman's genesis, Krypton explodes due to an geological catastrophe of a vague, unspecific nature that only Jor-El predicts. Other times, Brainiac destroys Krypton for his own nefarious purposes. Or maybe he just lets it happen because he thinks evacuating everyone would be a major drag. Sometimes Rogol Zaar blows Krypton up. Why not?

We understand that a character as iconic as Superman will inevitably have his origin story retold indefinitely, and that means some of the nitty gritty aspects might require altering. But it's not like there's been similar inconsistency about an equally important character's backstory. With exception of Tim Burton flipping the script and giving Jack Napier the gun, Batman's parents always die at the hands of the otherwise unspectacular mugger Joe Chill. 

One of the all-time superhero debates revolved around a footrace between Superman and the Flash. The latter competitor is sometimes referred to as "the Fastest Man Alive." Even though Superman is technically not a "man" in the traditional human sense, the fact that the Flash is called "the Fastest Man Alive" and Superman is not should tell us something.

So, the Flash can run fast enough to break the time-space barrier and travel into the past, as well as other universes. This talent of his is the basis for major aspects of DC continuity. It's how Barry Allen shifted into Jay Garrick's universe and established the Multiverse in The Flash of Two Worlds in 1961. It's why and how the Flashpoint Universe came to exist, and without it, a big chunk of the last decade of DC Comics would be completely different. 

Superman, on the other hand, moved fast enough to time travel once — he was flying, not running, by the way — and it's a contested moment in Superman's movie history. It's considered a very strange and singular occurrence because Superman isn't generally considered able to time travel. In other words, it's widely accepted that the Flash can run through time. Superman isn't generally considered capable of flying through time, much less running. So, anyone who suggests Superman can outrun the Flash is talking crazy talk.  

Some of the most memorable Superman stories explore Kal-El's extremely singular nature and the sense of isolation that inevitably comes part with being the last on his kind. We can point to 2019's Superman Smashes the Klan by writer Gene Luen Yang and artist Gurihiru — in which Superman navigates a world that wasn't design for him — as an excellent recent example. 

But Superman Smashes the Klan takes place very early in Superman's crimefighting career, before he had even figured out how to fly. If we contrast that with a classic story set at the end of Superman's run — 1986's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow by Alan Moore, Curt Swan, and George Perez, let's say — we can observe a key difference. Superman's the only Kryptonian in Smashes the Klan, but there are a whole bunch of other Kryptonians in Man of Tomorrow.  

At first, DC told us that Superman was the last son of Krypton. But they lied. A ton of other humanoid alien people survived the destruction of Krypton. The Superman mythos is certainly better off with Zod, Krypto the Superdog, Kara Zor-El, and the rest of the old gang. But, inarguably, the formerly propagated notion that Superman was the only one certainly led him — and us — in an inaccurate direction.

Even though Superman's popularity might ebb and flow every couple of years, it's not because he goes out of style. Much has been written explaining why his wholesomeness is actually what keeps him relevant in changing, uncertain times. But the reason we know all this for a fact, really, is because after DC killed off Superman and brought him back in the early '90s, he returned in a black suit with long black hair reminiscent of Bret "The Hitman" Hart, and the new look didn't exactly click.

Nowadays, when Marvel or DC superheroes die in the comics, readers can more or less take it for granted they'll be back at some point. However, back in 1992, this wasn't the case. Aside from Jean Grey's highly controversial return in the 1980s, fans had grown pretty accustomed to dead characters staying dead, and they were feeling safe that anyone whose name appeared on the title of a profit-generating comic was never in any real mortal danger. 

That changed forever with The Death of Superman in 1992, in which the Man of Steel perishes in a fistfight with the gigantic, semi-mute, violence machine Doomsday. After that, Superman emerged alive and well from a regeneration matrix in a 1993 comic, complete with his new bad boy look. Some of us credulously believed Superman would stay a Supercorpse. But in hindsight, we should've understood that from a corporate standpoint, keeping an intellectual property as lucrative as Superman on the shelf for too long would've been downright irresponsible.