…Mr Fantastic’s super-human intelligence?

Today’s post comes from fnord12 who is so addicted to comics, he has taken on the ambitious project of trying to physically assemble every Marvel comic and then write reviews/ breakdowns of them in chronological order.  What I especially like is how he scathingly points out all the dated and nonsensical occurrences, such as the Human Torch’s room being entirely composed of asbestos, the Hulk wearing a mask of his own head and the countless sexist remarks about women.

It seems nowadays Reed Richards is so smart that a lot of the traditional threats the Fantastic Four have faced don’t pose any sort of a real challenge.  Dr. Doom is the only human villain presented as Reed’s intellectual equal, so the rest of the human villains seem outclassed by Reed Richards in terms of intelligence.

For example there was a story during Civil War where Reed Richards showed the Mad Thinker his work on predicting events and the Thinker commented that his work was vastly inferior to Reed’s in this field.  How is Mad Thinker supposed to be a threat if Reed is better at the field that the Mad Thinker is supposed to be an expert in?  How is the Wizard supposed to be an intellectual threat to Reed, if Reed is the world’s smartest man? It seems like Reed can just whip up plot devices to solve almost every problem, so it’s hard to have dramatic story lines where FF are in trouble if Reed can just come up with plot devices so easily.

fnord12 has kindly stepped in to attempt to present a FIX for this problem.

Reed Richards is too damn smart.

Sure, he was always an incredibly intelligent guy.  But he’s evolved along the way from being an expert in his field and Marvel’s top scientist to the Smartest Man in the World, by a factor of 100.  In the old days, Reed would sometimes even bring in experts to help him (see Dr. Santini in Fantastic Four #68-71, for example).  Nowadays, even Henry Pym or Tony Stark are redundant when Reed is around.  It makes him, frankly, dull.  A fun way to write Mr. Fantastic would be sort of like a less satirical version of Dr. Jonas Venture, Sr.:  full of 1960s male swagger, exploring the universe and fighting bad guys with super-science, but not above rolling up his sleeves and using his (rubbery) fists.  But his intelligence is too vast, too godlike, for that sort of story to work anymore.  I think Jonathan Hickman is actually reaching for this on his run (and Mark Waid tried, too), but it doesn’t work, because Reed’s super-genius demands that the stakes be too high, the plotline too metaphysical, for things to get down, dirty, and fun.

A while back, on his now defunct blog, Tom Brevoort described a similar problem regarding Spider-Man’s strength.    In Amazing Spider-Man #33, Spidey makes a special effort in extreme circumstances to lift over a ton of heavy machinery.  So the Marvel Handbook later puts Spider-Man’s max strength at one ton and the next thing you know, Spidey is tossing Volkswagens at Tri-Sentinels.  Same thing for Wolverine’s healing factor, etc.

Basically, we have a cycle of threat escalations and power boosts, and with it comes diminishing returns.  The entire Marvel Universe needs some de-powering.  For characters with actual super-powers, we can say that maybe the Fourth Celestial Host left a device buried in the Andes that has been slowly causing all mutants and x-factored humans to absorb more cosmic radiation, leading to a gradual power boost, and one day Dr. Doom discovers it and, since he’s a self-made man and doing so can only increase his advantage over the FF, destroys it.

But Reed’s intelligence isn’t technically a super-power (although it really is) so we need a different method to dumb him down.  We could just have the Thing accidentally drop some equipment on his head, but it’ll be more fun if we mine some continuity for a solution.

In Fantastic Four #271, Mr. Fantastic reveals that he’s missing chunks of his memory, the result of a Negative Zone alien mucking with his head in Fantastic Four #254-256.  The revelation causes him to take the FF back to the house where he grew up, hoping to trigger lost memories.  Instead he finds a time machine that leads him to discover that his father is the ruler of a post-apocalyptic, alternate dimension (!) but the memory loss problem was never actually resolved, at least on panel.

So let’s say that after that trip failed to help with his memory, Reed began experimenting with brain-enhancements; the super-science equivalent of gingko biloba.  In the process, without realizing it, he opened up the doorway for a semi-benevolent cosmic force to enter his brain; sort of a Phoenix Force or Captain Universe for smart people.  Let’s call it Logos.  And slowly, over time, it’s been increasing Reed’s intelligence, to the point where during Civil War he was able to write that equation that predicts the future.  Then there’s that story where he goes back in time with Eternity to solve the math equation that created the universe (Fantastic Four #527-532, the ultimate example of Reed being just way too smart).

Let’s say that event was Logos’ purpose, and with that accomplished, it is now out of control.  Reed begins to evolve, visually becoming something that looks both like the final stage of Mutant Alpha from Defenders #15-16 and Reed’s friend from Fantastic Four #215-216 (just because I like the idea of tying those two guys together, establishing that as what hyper-evolved humans look like).  Reed/Logos begins a scheme to stamp out all Unreason in the word, and the rest of the FF, along with maybe the High Evolutionary, try to stop him, but in the end it’s when Reed sees Sue and Franklin that he realizes he doesn’t want to leave his humanity behind, and he expels Logos into the universe.  For the final part of my arc, we’ll have a downtime issue with Reed coming to grips with the fact that he’s still really smart, but nowhere near what he used to be.  Looking at some of his notes and having his eyes glaze over.  Staring at all of the crazy machinery he’s built recently and realizing it’s beyond human scientific understanding, and he can’t even operate it any more.  But still acknowledging that he’s smart enough to build a rocket ship, a portal to the Negative Zone, etc.  Then the Thing comes in says, “You’ll always be ‘big brain’ to me, buddy.”

Next issue: Rumors of an underground Deviant stronghold in a remote section of Paraguay reach the Baxter Building.  Can the Fantastic Family brave wild jungles, raging rivers, and giant mutated insects to get there before the Wingless Wizard and his Frightful Four reach it and uncovers its secrets???

…the Scarlet Witch’s Insanity?

Well it’s time again for my Guest Poster while I’m once again distracted by health issues, this time Tony from the Net’s sole bastion for the Original Marvel Universe, The Wastebasket, who has graciously prepared the following exceptional fix about the Scarlet Witch.  Over to Tony…

Since at least 2004, when Marvel published its “Avengers Disassembled” storyline, the Scarlet Witch has been consistently portrayed as being mentally ill and dangerously unstable. Her psychosis generally seems to be traced back to the loss of the children she conceived, through highly unorthodox means, with her husband at the time, the artificial man known as the Vision. However, this cannot account for the craziest thing the Scarlet Witch ever did, which was marrying the Vision in the first place. I’ve always felt there must be some deeper, underlying trauma that motivated Wanda Maximoff to make the bizarre life-choices that she did. While looking through the character’s early appearances for clues as to what this might have been, a single panel in her debut issue, Uncanny X-Men #4, inspired an answer. I believe that Wanda was sexually abused by Magneto during the time she and her brother Quicksilver were under the arch-villain’s power. The Scarlet Witch was left with a pathological aversion to sex that only the Vision, by the very nature of his artificiality, was able to circumvent.

When we first meet the Scarlet Witch, she is at Magneto’s island fortress, watching her fellow members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants eat dinner. The Toad is stuffing his face like a pig and Mastermind is making lewd comments about Wanda. She is disgusted with both of them, and says so. She is proud, even haughty, and shows complete confidence in her own power and in her brother Quicksilver. A fight nearly breaks out, but Mastermind clearly fears being punished by Magneto. Later, after Magneto returns, he storms in demanding the twins’ attention. Quicksilver remains defiant, but Wanda’s confident façade crumbles as soon as Magneto touches her. With her shoulders hunched, her arms hanging stiffly at her sides, her head bowed, she looks like a total victim. She meekly agrees with Magneto that she must remain in his service until her debt to him (for saving her from an angry mob) is repaid. But it doesn’t look like gratitude that keeps her there. Her body language says it all.

During the early years, before she falls in love with the Vision, we see glimpses of Wanda’s emerging sexuality. As early as Uncanny X-Men #6, she is ogling the Sub-Mariner’s physique. Magneto sends her to basically seduce Namor into joining the Brotherhood. Looking at the Speedo-wearing Prince of Atlantis, Wanda thinks, “How noble he looks… how slim, yet muscular! He’s fascinating!” She goes on to wonder why someone so “fine” and “masterful” would ally himself with a villain like Magneto.

Later, after breaking away from Magneto and joining the Avengers, Wanda develops a crush on Captain America.  Right away, on page 2 of Avengers #17, Wanda thinks, “Captain America is no weakling! I shall enjoy being an Avenger!” During a training session in Avengers #21, Cap puts a hand on Wanda’s shoulder while lecturing her, prompting her to think, “His touch! So strong—and yet, so gentle…!” And after Cap angrily quits the team in Avengers #23, a tearful Wanda pines for him, thinking, “How I miss the sight of him working out in our private gymnasium! So confident… so handsome! To me, he was every inch an Avenger!” Sounds like she’s got it pretty bad. And yet, even after Cap returns to the team, Wanda never really pursues a relationship with him. In fact, in Avengers #25, she seems to be trying to talk herself out of it. She muses, “What is it about Steve Rogers that makes him so appealing to me? Is it the fact that he seems to harbor some tragic secret… some hidden sorrow? Or am I just confusing pity with the dawning of love?” Wanda never acts on her feelings for Cap and soon loses him to the blonde S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Sharon Carter.

Wanda appears to have a brief crush on Hercules, for in Avengers #46, she seems almost giddy when the Lion of Olympus asks her on a double-date with Hawkeye and the Black Widow. However, almost immediately afterwards, she and Quicksilver once more fall into Magneto’s clutches, and they stay away from the Avengers for quite a while. By the time the twins return, the Vision has joined up, and Wanda falls for her android teammate pretty quickly. At that point, Wanda drops all pretense of trying to establish a normal, healthy sexuality. As time goes on, she becomes more visibly uncomfortable around virile men.  On page 2 of Avengers #242, Wanda looks like she’s been goosed when Starfox puts his hand on her shoulder and intimates that he finds her attractive. She-Hulk, who’s sitting right next to them, takes it in stride and chalks Wanda’s silence up to being worried about the Vision, who was paralyzed at the time. Once again, Wanda’s body language tells the tale, this time showing alarm rather than concern. Wanda looks rather shocked and alarmed again in Avengers #252 when Hercules’ costume is completely destroyed while battling the Blood Brothers, exposing his manhood for all to see (all except the reader, of course). She lends him her cape, but doesn’t seem to find any humor in the situation. After the Vision’s personality is erased, his marriage to Wanda rapidly falls apart. Wonder Man, on whose brain patterns the Vision’s mind had been based, has also fallen in love with Wanda and sees an opportunity to try to win her for himself. But in Avengers West Coast #69, Wanda tries to let him down gently, hoping they can “just be friends.” Perhaps Simon Williams was just a little too real for her.

Wanda’s first serious suitor is actually the semi-barbaric Arkon, ruler of the extradimensional realm of Polemachus, in a story that spans Avengers #75–76. In this tale, Wanda’s behavior can only be described as bizarre. Arkon is a Conan-type who seeks to cause a nuclear catastrophe on Earth in order to save his own world in a parallel universe. He spent years observing the Earth, seeking some means to cross the dimensional boundary, and in the course of his research he became enamored of the Scarlet Witch. Being of the hit-‘em-with-a-club-and-drag-‘em-by-the-hair school of romance, he decides to kidnap Wanda and make her his bride. Though he is pretty ruthless in achieving his objectives, he is not malicious toward Wanda, and seems to have a genuine desire to marry her. Wanda, of course, resists at first, but, strangely, he seems to wear her resolve down pretty fast. At one point, he shows her a sacred flower, telling her it is to be picked by the betrothed of the Imperion and worn on the day of her wedding. So what does Wanda do? She picks the flower. Instead of fighting with Arkon or trying to escape from the palace, she recites to him a poem by Lord Tennyson. Then she says, “Perhaps I could love you… could be happy as queen of your world… if only you weren’t so cold… as distant as the stars…!” Arkon seems willing to give it a go, so Wanda moves in to kiss him. Suddenly, the moment is spoiled as the Avengers storm in to rescue Wanda, which seems to shock her back to her senses. Still, even after Arkon is defeated, Wanda looks almost disappointed as she clutches the fabled flower. It was an intense, surreal situation that clearly messed with Wanda’s head. Having “no choice” in the matter may have been a major contributing factor, as she was bereft of her mutant powers and had given up hope of being rescued. Yielding to Arkon may have been a form of self-preservation. But Arkon did possess the grim, unsmiling demeanor that Wanda seems to respond to. And he was hypermasculine to such an absurd degree that he may have seemed, in his own way, as “unreal” as an android.

Wanda barely notices the Vision when they first meet, during the battle with Arkon. It was hardly a case of love at first sight. She pays scant attention to him at all until Avengers #81, when he surrenders to some heavily-armed crooks to save her life. But over the next ten issues, she slowly comes to realize he is the perfect man for her. In Avengers #91, they nearly kiss while held captive by Ronan the Accuser, though the Vision chickens out—again. (I believe that when the Vision suddenly quit the team at the end of Avengers #79, it was because he realized he was falling in love with Wanda and didn’t know how to handle it.) The Vision would continually be plagued by self-doubt and fears about the worth of his artificial existence. It would prove to be the major stumbling block to their relationship. But in Avengers #102, when Hawkeye finally makes a play for Wanda, she admits for the first time that she’s in love with the Vision. Hawkeye responds with shock and confusion, and the rest of their teammates see the relationship as something to worry about rather than celebrate. (Even a hopeless romantic like the Wasp finally admits, in Avengers West Coast Annual #4, that she never knew what “poor Wanda” saw in the Vision, likens their relationship to a woman marrying a toaster, and says the Vision gives her the “heebie-jeebies.”) When Quicksilver finally finds out in Avengers #110, he is outraged and disgusted. His sentiments are echoed by the general public when the news finally leaks out in Avengers #113. Still, the unlikely couple perseveres through all troubles and setbacks and finally gets married in Giant-Size Avengers #4. The happy event was made possible primarily through the intervention of Immortus, who convinced the Vision that he had been built out of the remains of the original Human Torch. Once the Vision considered himself to have been created by a man (Phineas T. Horton) and to have been a hero of World War II, rather than constructed by a robot (Ultron) to be a weapon against the Avengers, he was able to overcome his self-image problems and finally ask Wanda to marry him. Naturally, the conniving Immortus had reasons of his own and was hardly being beneficent. Eventually, the Vision and the Scarlet Witch retire from the Avengers, move to suburban New Jersey, and try to live a normal life.

Wanda’s dream of domestic bliss is first seriously undermined when she finally discovers that Magneto is her father. As early as Uncanny X-Men #62, Neal Adams revealed that Magneto, without his helmet, bears a striking resemblance to Quicksilver. When we first see Wanda’s mother, in a flashback in Avengers #186, she looks just like her daughter. We learn that Magda’s husband “had gained strange abilities, powers that had sent him raving with a desire to rule the world.” Fearful, Magda fled from this man without even telling him she was pregnant. One month later, in Uncanny X-Men #125, we see Magda again and learn that her husband was none other than Magneto. The true parentage of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver had been revealed at last, though only for the benefit of sharp-eyed readers. The characters themselves did not learn of their familial bond until the last issue of the first Vision and the Scarlet Witch limited series about three and a half years later. In that tale, Magneto comes upon the midwife who delivered the twins and learns from her of Magda’s fate. Magneto then tracks his unsuspecting children down and informs them that he is their father. Wanda is nearly overwhelmed with conflicting emotions. The scene is continued in a flashback in Avengers #234, where Quicksilver rails against Magneto while Wanda looks on silently. In the present, she confides to the Wasp and Captain Marvel that “I barely left the house for days, so chilled was I by the thought that I was Magneto’s daughter. Even now I can hardly begin to express the horror, the shame! It’s as if I suddenly discovered Hitler lurking in my family tree!” Noting Magneto’s claims to be reassessing his war against homo sapiens, Wanda says, “that can never excuse his past crimes… nothing can!”

While it is never suggested outright that Magneto molested Wanda, it would not have been out of character for him during the days of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Magneto is frequently depicted as being physically abusive to his lackeys, and is often threatening them with punishment for disobedience. In Uncanny X-Men #6, we see Magneto hurting Mastermind on two separate occasions, and he also threatens Wanda. In the following issue, Magneto roughs up Mastermind again after the illusionist tries to rape Wanda. In Avengers #53, the Toad becomes so sick of Magneto’s abuse that he finally turns against him, causing Magneto to seemingly fall to his death. While Magneto is shown to be ruthless and cruel in his first few appearances, as time goes on it becomes increasingly clear that he is completely insane. By the time he faces off against Black Bolt and the Royal Family of the Inhumans in Amazing Adventures #9–10, Magneto is practically a gibbering lunatic. He only begins to reclaim a measure of sanity after being reduced to infancy and then restored to adulthood, and it is shortly after that that he starts to seek redemption for his past crimes. It is eventually suggested in Classic X-Men #19 that Magneto’s use of his mutant powers negatively impacts his own body; and that they will slowly, inevitably drive him mad is finally explained in Chris Claremont & Jim Lee’s X-Men #2. In the heat of such madness, it is not hard to believe that Magneto would see Wanda, the spitting image of his lost wife, as a target for his sexual urges. As revealed in the Classic X-Men back-up story, Magneto’s last lover was brutally murdered, apparently by the CIA. He would certainly have some sexual frustrations built up by the time he found Wanda and dressed her up in a skintight costume with opera gloves.

In the second Vision and the Scarlet Witch limited series, Wanda and the Vision decide to try to have children, even though Wanda is convinced it is impossible for the Vision to be a father. In the third issue, during an encounter with Salem’s Seven, Wanda channels the rampant arcane energies of the witches of New Salem, coupled with her own mutant power to alter probabilities, to apparently achieve this impossible feat. After a normal pregnancy, Wanda gives birth to twin boys. At this point, Magneto attempts to rebuild his relationship with Wanda, though she wants nothing to do with him. However, things take a darker turn after the new family moves out to California to join the Avengers’ west coast contingent. Wanda fires a succession of nannies who claim her babies vanish into thin air from time to time when their mother is away. Finally, Agatha Harkness resurfaces to get to the bottom of it, and in Avengers West Coast #51, she informs Wanda that her children are anything but normal. In the following issue we discover that the boys were basically magical constructs containing fragments of Mephisto’s being, ripped from him when he was blasted to smithereens by Franklin Richards in Fantastic Four #277. Mephisto reclaims the missing pieces of his essence, forcing Agatha Harkness to erase all memory of the children from Wanda’s mind. Almost immediately afterward, Wanda slips into a catatonic state.

At this point, Magneto re-enters the picture, abducting the unresponsive Wanda from the Avengers Compound in the middle of Loki’s “Acts of Vengeance” scheme. When she comes to, her powers have been amplified to an astonishing degree, giving her almost complete control over probabilities, and therefore, reality itself. Unfortunately, her mind has snapped and she takes on a villainous persona to rival Magneto at his worst. She chops off her hair, adopts a new costume, and attacks the Avengers. Magneto accompanies her, seeing this change in his daughter as an opportunity to gain her powers for his side in the inevitable war between humans and mutants. Though he is curious about Wanda’s heightened powers, Magneto doesn’t seem overly concerned about the radical change in her personality. As long as he can use her to further his goals, he doesn’t seem to care about her mental health, as he basically admits in Avengers West Coast #60. With a little help from Quicksilver, the Avengers manage to separate Magneto and the Scarlet Witch, only to have Immortus finally play his hand.

Over the next two issues, Immortus finally reveals his grand master plan, which he’s apparently been working on since his first appearance way back in Avengers #10. Not content with being the ruler of Limbo, Immortus intends to use Wanda’s ability to control probabilities to give him complete mastery over the timeline of Earth, allowing him to direct what path reality will take at moments of divergence. In order to prepare Wanda for her role as his puppet, Immortus has been manipulating her life since even before she joined the Avengers. This is why he lied to the Vision about the origins of his android body, to ensure that they would get married. He obviously believed such a marriage would make Wanda more emotionally vulnerable. Immortus claims to have been subtly influencing nearly everything that’s happened to the Scarlet Witch since the start of her career, and his chief aim was to “undermine her confidence by making her fear she was doomed, always to be a victim of circumstances beyond her control.” If we also take into account Quicksilver’s thoughts on the subject, that “for once in his life, my father was being manipulated by one even more powerful than himself,” it’s not a stretch to say that Immortus had been manipulating Magneto into making Wanda feel like a helpless victim, and what could accomplish that evil aim better than sexual abuse?

Interestingly, it’s soon after this that Magneto goes into a profound depression. We should remember that Hank Pym was careful not to discuss their strategy against Magneto with the Wasp at their headquarters, as he was convinced Magneto had the place bugged. Thus, it stands to reason that Magneto may have overheard Immortus’ shade explaining his master plan to Agatha Harkness, and he may also have heard the Avengers discussing what happened in Limbo after the fact. We can assume, then, that Magneto became aware of Immortus’ manipulations of Wanda’s life, including whatever manipulations involved Magneto himself. So what does Magneto do? He retreats to one of his hidden bases in the Savage Land, and before long, he hooks up with another beautiful young auburn-haired mutant girl—Rogue, barely out of her teens at this point. Magneto senses a sexual “spark” between them. Rogue is definitely interested, but Magneto is too depressed to pursue it. After murdering Zaladane for trying to steal his magnetic powers, Magneto returns to Asteroid M alone. When we next see him, in X-Men #1, he has become a recluse, a disillusioned shell of a man, and a shadow of his former self. He is again manipulated into what appears to be a “final confrontation” with the X-Men, which leaves him practically suicidal. We could attribute all this to Magneto struggling to deal with what he did—or perhaps was made to do—to Wanda many years before.

At any rate, if we accept that Wanda was sexually abused by Magneto, it is clear she kept this trauma a secret from everyone, including her twin brother and, later, her husband. Thus, she never got the help she needed to recover from the emotional scars that resulted, leaving her unprepared for the later ordeals she would endure. She was on a downward spiral that, it would seem, led her to become the totally insane mass-murderer of “Avengers Disassembled,” “House of M,” and subsequent stories set in Marvel’s current continuity. I can think of no better explanation.

…Kryptonian Exceptionalism?

Well, I’m glad to announce my return after a long sabbatical imposed upon me as a result of an ongoing medical syndrome. Before diving back in however, I’d like to extend my sincerest apologies to those out there who’d been loyally following this blog, in particular Plok from the consistently excellent and engaging A Trout in the Milk who graciously prepared the exceptional fix you’re about to read below just as I dropped off the radar.

While on the subject of absence, I’d like to announce that I will need to take future convalescences. However, I can assure devotees that I’ll be making a concerted effort to invite others to submit to me their own fan-fixes, those most closely fitting the spirit behind this blog which I will be guest-posting.

But I digress. Over to Plok…

A long time ago, in the Perseid Arm…

Or, no; wait.

Let’s begin at the beginning.

When I was about nine or ten, I was home sick with the flu, and got two hardcover comics books from the library. One was a big Buck Rogers compendium, and one was “Superman From The Thirties To The Seventies”. Obviously I want to talk about the Superman book here today: what an eye-opener it was! As a good comics-reader I’d always understood, almost instinctually, the Superman was the greatest because he was the best…here was my first proof that he was the best because he was the first. So all the other superheroes were adornments on Superman’s awesome first-ness, and that’s why he could always, would always, be able to beat them all up: since he changed so as to stay better than them, as they came along one by one.

And that was what the evolution of Superman was all about, I thought.

It made sense!

So to this day I love to see even a bad Superman movie, because whatever their faults all those movies paint Superman as the first, the one and only, it’s a bird it’s a plane…and everything else doesn’t matter. However, for a few years now, it’s been different in the comics, where it seems sometimes “Superman” is just another way of saying Some Guy, and there’s nothing particularly special about him…and how this jars with the Superman I used to read, whose specialness was so extreme that there was even such a thing as Kryptonian dental work that super-hurt, there was Kryptonian aspirin that could super-cure a headache! And I’m not saying that stuff didn’t go a bit too far, but…

…Shouldn’t there be something super about Superman, after all? All the modern superheroes stand around him and go “wow”, but everytime they do I want to say: man up, Green Lantern, he’s just another Big Strong Guy, why are you so impressed? I want to say: jeez, Martian Manhunter, why be such a big moaner about this Johnny-Come-Lately with half your superpowers, when you could even LOOK like him if you wanted to? It’s like the only reason they respect Superman is because their writers and artists have a reverence for Superman based on his being First…but they themselves don’t know he’s First, they just turn to goo whenever he’s around, and it doesn’t look good on them, and it doesn’t look good on him.

And more importantly, there’s no reason for it: whether one they do know, or one they don’t know. Superman, born under a red sun, so the creatures on his planet presumably developed the ability to wring energy out of a dim star, and once he goes to a bright one he gets superpowers. Well, that’s great, except this isn’t 1938 anymore, and we know there are a kajillion red suns out there in the universe…and so why should Superman be special?

Heck, why should the Daxamites be special? See, now we have a precedent: two completely different red suns spawning two completely separate humanoid species with the same superpowers. So then why aren’t there many, many more similar species? Why isn’t the galaxy crawling with pseudo-Kryptonians like the Daxamites?

Or even: why didn’t the Kryptonians, or the Daxamites, or any of the other races similar to them, create massive star empires? Easy enough to do: stars brighter than “red” are the most common sort of stars, and one Kryptonian is worth at least a dozen Green Lanterns…aren’t they?

Or does it all fall apart, somewhere along there?

I think it does, and so I proposed a solution on my blog: that Superman is special because Krypton is of the very last generation of stars in the whole history of the universe…and so Superman comes from the future, and is special because he’s the Last, even if he no longer gets to be the First. Little did I know Jerry Siegel said the exact same thing back in 1938, or that Grant Morrison said it in the late Nineties or whatever it was! But on reflection that was something that Superman was really all about in 1938 anyway, when he wasn’t yet First because no one knew there were going to be others…so he was indeed Last, as a representative of a more advanced civilization than any of Earth’s. Located “futureward” of us in development.

A great answer!

But still, as good an answer as it is, it just doesn’t fit the facts of the case any longer, either literally or figuratively. Well, in figurative terms we know Superman isn’t special because of Kryptonian “advancement” any longer — because that this “futuristic location” of Superman’s specialness has been effectively pruned away over time is the very reason I wanted to literalize it, as both Siegel and Morrison once intended to do. However, that answer’s no better than “advancement”, now: we know Krypton didn’t blow up in the far future, because Doomsday was born on Krypton, even if I don’t like Doomsday…but even Doomsday’s not the only fly in this ointment. Hawkman, too (for example), has visited the remnants of Krypton — and even if I’d prefer to think he only helped Superman flash forward in time, “back” along his personal timeline, to its end, still NO: he was there. And in the end if there’s a space-warp around Krypton through which it can be reached, that only means Krypton might as well be considered as being in the not-too-distant here-and-now…by the authority of Jor-El’s Razor, if nothing else. Or even, you know, Einstein. And so if time can’t make the uniqueness of the Kryptonian race either this way or that way, then only something else can, whether it’s one way or another.

Because time also didn’t make the complacency of the Guardians of Oa. Which we will get to in a minute, but first…

A long time ago, in the Perseid Arm…

(And this part happens to be true, actually)

…A massive extragalactic hydrogen cloud fell into our galaxy, causing the formation of a great many overstuffed stars — like a supergiant zoo. It may even be going on still! Very interesting from an astronomical viewpoint…

…But from the viewpoint of exobiology, not so much. Your average red giant star, you see (and in all the universe there’s hardly a thing more average), begins its life as what they call in Superman comics a yellow star (actually it’s a white star whose maximum spectral output is in the green part of the spectrum — hence explaining why the visual spectrum is centred on green), and burns like that for ten billion years or so…then expands, turning dim and red and cool, and stays that way for about ten million years this time…eventually shrinking to become a white dwarf and wiggle its ears ’til the end of the universe comes along. By contrast, a red supergiant (you might know these critters as the stars that explode in supernovae at the end of their lives) only burns for a few dozen millions of years period — not nearly enough time to realistically expect to see much in the way of planets form, and certainly not long enough to see an ecosystem like our own develop on them even if they did. And then there are hypergiants, stars even more massive than supergiants, whose total lifespan is something on the order of about five million years only, or even less…the biggest members of this class sometimes testing the limits of how much stuff a star can have in it and still be a star: stars so massive they are always threatening to toss off big chunks of themselves, as gravity strains to hold them in place against their own turbulence. Now, you really wouldn’t expect to see life around one of these, for a couple of reasons! One big reason being the incredible violence of its stellar neighbourhood, and another being that five million years is just not a lot of time for planets to accrete in the solar disc. Stars begin as unthinkably huge “cold clouds” of hydrogen, collapsing under the attraction of gravity to a point of density which causes them to ignite…and like anything else, the bigger they come, the harder they fall. This means, in the case of a soon-to-be hypergiant, a really brutal acceleration by the time it gets itself down to about the size of the solar system, and fusion switches on mighty quickly at that point. There just isn’t any time; it’s all happening so fast.

So, astronomical study: sure thing.

But looking for life?

No way. Even in a comic-book universe: forget it. It ain’t happening.

Except…

Let us say that, a long time ago in the Perseid Arm, after the infalling extragalactic hydrogen started to make REALLY REALLY VAST cold clouds…that there was one that began to fall in on itself in the normal way that, in the fullness of time, causes stars to be brought to life…

But then something unexpected happened to it.

The Silver Twist.

In the DC Universe, no one knows what the hell the Silver Twist does, and no one understands what it’s capable of, how or why it acts as it does; even the five-dimensional Imps don’t understand it, and (just pardon me as I begin the embellishment, here) they’re really the only ones that can track it. They’re fascinated by it, actually! And so they were the only ones who were watching, as this supremely unpredictable entity-or-object (but which is it, the Imps wonder?) passed rapidly through the cold cloud that would one day become that most amazingly gigantic of hypergiant stars, red Rao…

…And changed it where it touched it. One thing you should know about giant stars of any description is that the bigger they are, the less metallicity they tend to have — you could reasonably suppose from this that our star isn’t going to get very big in its red phase — and Rao was all set to have practically nothing in the way of metals in it, except that when the Twist passed through, it converted much of proto-Rao’s hydrogen into heavier elements…and heavier elements, and still heavier elements, and exotic heavy elements, and in the end one very exotic heavy element that’s never been seen before or since. Let’s call it Raotronium, since we’ll never encounter it again anywhere but here…and a very peculiar metal it was, too, even in the family of comic-book elements that can do all sorts of strange things. Full of bizarre energy-bending properties, a silver shifting metal like the Twist itself, aggressively intercommunicative sort of in the manner of a Bose-Einstein condensate, prone to jump all as one mass into different states…a “quantum metal” if you will. It had anti-gravitic tendencies…it had super-gravitic tendencies…it broke all the rules of Special Relativity within itself…it could both suddenly absorb energy and then just as suddenly release it, it was by turns superconducting and hypermagnetic, then superinsulating and hyper-whatever-the-opposite-of-magnetic is, it was slippery, fluctuating, it could be invisible, it could act as a blackbody…it was the greatest piece of ass the Periodic Table ever had, and it’s had ‘em all around the universe…!

…And in this particular instance it sped up the infall of part of the mass of Rao’s cold cloud, while simultaneously seeping out into the rest of what would be the body of the star, and speeding its collapse to a slightly lesser extent. Until: yes, a planet. A planet where no planet could possibly or even theoretically form, a unique solar system lost in the obscuring maze of the supergiant zoo of the Perseid Arm. It would’ve been very hard to see anyway! But in this case, even to the immense cosmic powers of the 3D and even 4D world, it was all but too fuzzy to make out at all.

And besides, it was just one more star among millions. Nothing special about it, that would warrant a special investigation.

And thus it was that the Guardians dropped the ball, but then how could they imagine it had ever been in their hands to start with? If the Silver Twist was mysterious even to the Imps, how much more mysterious was it to the Oans? On the hidden planet Krypton, under the influence of the mysterious intercommunicating metal that not only formed its core and permeated its mantle, but also infected every rock and stone of its crust, eventually every tree and leaf of its biosphere, ultimately every animal and hominid that wandered its surface, not just planetary formation but also biological evolution sprang into extremely high gear. Accelerated in a way that begs comparison with relativistic effects; and in just one million years, Krypton did everything our own Earth took five billion years to achieve. The precursors of the Kryptonian race, the race that would eventually generate a Superman, woke like the elves of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, in forested darkness — to behold, as no intelligent creatures before them, the very turning-on of their Sun.

And that’s some hard shit to shake, lemme tellya!

We’re told the Kryptonian civilization was 500,000 years old by the time of Jor-El…in itself that probably beats the average lifespan of a star Rao’s size, but possibly could add up to as little as 10% of its lifespan…if it was a normal star, which it isn’t since it is shot through with raotronium. Not that anyone could’ve been expected to be aware of such a thing. So, the stellar-lifespan clock is already no good to us, if we’re trying to set timescales for Superman’s planet, biosphere, species…but if Rao itself can’t be our clock, the Guardians can! Because once a hypergiant star like Rao starts to exceed its mathematically-determined lifespan, that’s when the Guardians would get interested, and once they did they’d send a Green Lantern to investigate, and once the nature of the Kryptonians had been unveiled that is the day the Guardians would’ve slapped ONE BIG CORDON around that world, to make sure none of them got out and bred. Of course the Kryptonians would never have been starfarers anyway, given the ridiculous violence of any hypergiant sun…but we know from at least two stories — the Doomsday story and the story of Kryp and Tonn — that Rao must have experienced rare quiescent periods, and so at least in these the Kryptonians might have gotten out and potentially formed a crushing Galactic Empire. The circulation of raotronium caused by convection within the star for which it’s named will (we will say) eventually prolong its life as a humongous hypergiant well past its usual span…and just as in my blog-post about the far-future Krypton, what prolongs the star’s life will also ironically doom the planet. So that means Krypton must die before the Guardians are prepared to wall it off…but after Krypton dies, the Guardians no longer would have any reason to barricade that system, because it would have nothing alarming about it except a star that is beginning to seem freakishly long-lived for its size.

So okay. Here’s how it breaks down, in that case:

1. The presence of “raotronium” in the star Rao is what causes it to last longer than 100,000 years or so. However since the Guardians can’t see it clearly perhaps they conclude it’s got some wiggle room in the lifespan. Maybe a few million years? At least a few million before it starts to seem noteworthy.

2. The presence of “raotronium” accelerates planetary formation.

3. The presence of “raotronium” accelerates evolution on Krypton. Let’s take a bit of a look at this: how can evolutionary processes be hastened? Well, one way is if they are not confined to “vertical” lines of genetic descent, but can proceed “horizontally” from individual to individual, family to family, species to species, genus to genus, and perhaps even all the way up to Kingdom to Kingdom. Indeed even Earthly evolution boasts some processes such as these — so we can imagine what would happen if their effects were to be amplified. Doubtless it would be an extremely wild world that resulted; as species would not be able to keep their adaptations to themselves for long before meeting a counter-adaptation. But this horizontal communication would also affect family groups and their lineages…beyond a chain of physical birth, what would make kinship or (may I say) para-kinship on Krypton would probably get complicated in a hurry. Among intelligent beings, this could make the idea of “belonging” extraordinarily vexed. So I propose that since Krypton had its Dark Ages just as we Terrans did, that this multiplicitous nature of social belonging was the cause of it — how am I to know to what group I owe faithfulness? And isn’t Krypton an exceedingly competitive environment? We Earth-people are lucky: we get our allegiances handed to us on a silver platter, and only ever have to ask ourselves when to betray them or leave them. But on Krypton the allegiances themselves would have been what the Kryptonians had to figure out in the first place, and it wasn’t that their choices would damage society but that their choices might damage the making of a society. But we know that eventually among the hominids of Krypton the great Houses formed, and it isn’t too hard to speculate this was because the environment they lived in demanded some form of corporatism would arise among them just as it did among us, purely as an evolutionary advantage: an association not built on the sharing of genetic adaptations, but cultural ones. Because even if increases in intelligence might be shared out “horizontally” among creatures by biological mechanisms, a history of intellectual discovery obviously could not be…so just as on our own Earth, “society” was an advantage. Only, let us again amplify this by saying that things were bloodier and more fraught on this notional Krypton of mine — in an environment as competitive as that one, the first successful “society” must have spent a lot of its energy trying to forestall the forming of society in other intelligent species, at the risk of perishing once their one special advantage was gone. Thus: we can imagine a whole lot of hunting, but it was hunting that would’ve been more like interspecies warfare…and just as loaded with moral difficulties, since it contained the sure knowledge that everything you killed might have grown, and in short order, to be what you yourself were. Well, on Earth we sort of have this too, in the relation of pre-industrial societies to their game-animal and crop deities, that grants the individual organisms a “spirit” that must be attended to! But on Krypton, again: amplification, as societal Kryptonian life would have in a sense played Deer-God and Corn-God to themselves — their own affiliational identity becoming directly related to their survival, if traits began to pass more fluidly within social groupings than they did outside them. Not an unfair assumption if we are to assume the presence of separate species in the first place, on this wacky “horizontal” world! But then social and political organization might have been expressed physically on Krypton by a more basic agency than cultural instruments — culture, on Krypton, might almost have become a kind of biology itself! And so if we imagine that any social being might have been in danger of being peeled away from one affiliational identity into another without their own choice or consent, we can see how social groupings might have hated and feared one another, and made war on one another or shunned one another.

But let’s stipulate that in the time of the origins of the House Of El, this was all solved by “higher” or “metastable” social and political belonging: if one could only find an effective Great Attractor of Kryptonian society capable of mediating affiliational anxieties, socially-driven evolution could be balanced and tamed. Thus the first Science Council was formed — a stabilizing political body that gave Kryptonians the chance to dominate their world as we’ve dominated ours, by uniting previously-fragmented cultural dispositions…although it didn’t take them anything like a mere 50,000 years or so to do it! So…literalization, eh? The youngest world…but the difficulty of coping with its environment gives us, in relative terms, one of the oldest civilizations.

4. But it couldn’t last: convection might have kept raotronium circulating in Krypton’s star, compensating both for its most suicidal convulsions, and the brick wall of the end of the fusion process called Element 26…but in Krypton itself the stuff was much more concentrated, and it underwent different changes. In Rao’s tremendously violent heliosphere, extreme solar radiation, brutal tidal stresses, and massive coronal ejecta all combined to make Krypton a world in constant peril…I am just talking about it as though it “really happened”, now…but fortunately the mystery metal that permeated it was so tremendously reactive that when the going got tough, Krypton got more resilent. In the core, gravitational waves were absorbed and then converted gradually into kinetic energy — thus Kryptonians had not much to fear from earthquakes, as they were a sign of how their planet kept itself, and them, alive. But more critically for my little theory, the raotronium also expressed its energy-transforming power in a different way from inside the Kryptonian organisms. What happens when a flare from Rao threatens to boil the planet’s seas, turn its plants and animals to flame? The answer is that where such excessive radiation strikes, it’s converted into something other than heat — absorbed by the flora and the fauna and used to drive both their biological processes, and the “horizontal” evolutionary communication that raotronium mediates. Which takes energy, naturally: as when cells speak to cells at superluminal speed across (one presumes) innumerable, infinitesimal hyperspace links it takes energy to receive their information as well as to translate it into physical adaptation.

But, what about the energy it takes to send such impulses? To mediate the incoming evolutionary information does require a large energy-surplus to be built up in Kryptonian organisms, but sending takes a large amount of energy too, and it has to come from somewhere…as well, the theoretical maximum speed of this evolutionary communication must fall under some fairly strict limit or other, or Krypton would be even weirder than it already is: just a boiling sea of continuous re-adaptation, with no stability possible at all, Great Houses or no Great Houses. Fortunately it seems such a limit does exist in the balance between evolution even being at all necessary, and the energy-absorbing power that makes it even possible. Beyond “yellow” sunlight, microwaves, gamma rays, or even massive neutrino fluxes, one type of radiation that fell on Krypton during Rao’s more violent convulsions would have represented a much more catastrophic charge of energy than any other: that being the emissions in the band of Rao’s spectral peak, the rising radiative tide that would have lifted all boats. Raotronium being a marvellous substance, nevertheless it could not have been a magical one, with an actually infinite storage capacity, or infinitely fast ability to convert energy into changed physical structure…so when Rao’s total radiative emissions jumped way up, they both went past the Kryptonians’ ability to convert it into useful work, and past their ability to store it…and there would have been only one mechanism by which it could’ve been gotten rid of before it destroyed the organism. Thus when Rao’s red light spiked, Kryptonian creatures rapidly shed (a better word might be dumped) their stored energy surpluses into the hyperspatial band, radiating it away at superluminal speed, storing it not just in the bodies of plants and animals and phytoplankton, but in the rocks of their planet’s crust, its mantle, and its core. So again, earthquakes on Krypton save the planet, instead of threatening it…

…And just as importantly, this means horizontal evolution is subject to continual braking, as it takes time for organisms to recover the energy they need to carry on with it after each large flare event with a strong red-band component.

Therefore when Superman is on Earth, his body stores and stores the energy it does not have to use to receive evolutionary information from his natural ecosystem (because, of course, that ecosystem no longer exists — though we might expect he is also slowly but constantly bleeding off the highest range of that energy into hyperspatial nowhere anyway), and his biological development is slowed because of it…but when he’s exposed to the light of a red sun his yellow-accustomed body registers that change as a massive flare from Rao, and dumps his entire energetic surplus into hyperspace as a protective measure. Naturally, he recovers the charge pretty rapidly — so did the Kryptonian flora and fauna, after all, and Superman doesn’t even have anything in particular to spend all that energy on! — because Kryptonian organisms are quite efficient at wringing power from all kinds of different radiative sources. Visible sunlight’s still best, though, because ionizing radiation is still ionizing radiation, and still causes damage to the cells that absorb it that translates as an energy-cost — it’s a “hard use” of the Kryptonian bio-machine! Hence Superman is less invulnerable under a blue sun, you see…even if he is just as strong.

But let’s get back to that core. Because it blows up, eventually, but the Kryptonians don’t see it coming…and we can speculate that they don’t see it coming because eventually they, because of their privileged astronomical position, realize that there’s something special about their star. And something similarly special about their planet! Well, sure, you would too if every time there was a solar flare there was a rash of earthquakes to follow it up! In fact that might freak you out a little, and you’d want to know more about that…and if you were ever so lucky as to find a provable theory that told you it all meant you had nothing to worry about, and were bound to go on and on as the extremely special people you knew you were, if you ever had the chance to reconstruct warnings as reassurances, you’d probably drink that up like champagne. One assumes that even if mathematics is still the Queen of Sciences on Krypton, then Geology must be her King — so much to learn about the magic core, the various miracle metals lying about the place! Then Zoology and Biology, the Princes…and only poor old whacko Jor-El messing around with extrasolar astronomy in his off-hours, when he’s not studying hyperspace and discovering the Phantom Zone and things like that…

…And yet if you knew as much about the Phantom Zone as Jor-El, you’d probably be studying astronomy too, since although the PZ is simply (let us suppose) a vast stretch of hyperspace with special properties that exists in no particular “time” and no particular “place”, it does (let us again suppose) have something like a shape, and mathematically the shape is somewhat comparable to an ellipse, and the ellipse has something we might as well call semi-foci in it…and one of these is sitting back several billion years ago at a certain set of spatial coordinates, and the other is sitting at exactly those same coordinates just a few years in the future…when Krypton will be occupying them. And, that’s a little bit of a suspicious coincidence! So Jor-El looks into it further, it and a lot of other sciences as well, where he usually proceeds to do some very groundbreaking work, and from it all he eventually concludes that the constant fluxing between states that Krypton’s core is doing is not simply a matter of it changing from State A to State B and back again over and over, but rather from State A to State B to State C…and somewhere among all the possible states the core can occupy, somewhere along the way there is a State Z in which the entire core will simply become ultra-antigravitic and blow the planet to bits in a giant surge of powerful radiation that would transform its crust into the deadliest substance in the universe…”anti-raotronium”?…with the core itself imploding until it “pops” through space and time to the other semi-focus, giving up all its energy into the hyperspatial field to create the elliptical bubble of nothing called the Phantom Zone. So what that all means, is that every time the core shifts states, there’s a certain probability it’s going to shift to State Z, and the probability is very low, vanishingly small in fact…it can be proven to be vanishingly small…

…If, that is, you happen to reject the notion that you’re dealing with something very like a great big Bose-Einstein condensate (one presumes running on bosonic “odds” and not baryonic ones), and that your greatest scientist seems to be able to calculate exactly when it will happen. But the Science Council proves to be rather good at rejecting these things…!

And so off little Kal-El goes in his rocket ship, the only rocket-ship on Krypton…that only the hyperspatial genius/astronomical hobbyist Jor-El could have built — the Kryptonians don’t even have satellites, Rao just knocks ‘em out of the sky — but that doesn’t quite explain everything.

It doesn’t explain the Daxamites, for example. Surely a key point in any discussion of Kryptonian Exceptionalism! So let’s go back to the two times we positively know that this version of Rao — the hypergiant version — must have had a period of quiescence that made space travel possible within Krypton’s solar system. On the first of these occasions, a space-traveller got shipwrecked on the planet — this is the origin of the story of Kryp and Tonn that later on would be taught to some Kryptonian schoolchildren in an installment of “The Amazing World Of Krypton”, except I am going to propose that the teacher was a substitute teacher, and that she got the story wrong because she told it in its folk-wisdom version, and the ending wasn’t historically factual, and besides she wasn’t even supposed to be telling those children that story at all because it was proscribed in that school curriculum. Because Krypton doesn’t just have rationalists, but religionists too…and in older days the most prevalent and socially destructive of these were called, oh let’s say…

The Cult of Dax-Am.

Hey, why not?

Especially when in this formulation of the story of Rao there was no way someone who was not from Krypton could ever hope to survive Krypton when Rao was in its active phase, and as we happen to know there was a mysterious scientist who eventually came there sometime later, and how in the world could he have known about the planet’s existence, if even the Guardians did not? So the space-traveller traditionally named “Kryp” does indeed meet the girl traditionally named “Tonn”, in my supposition, and they carry on a brief affair while he hurries to get his ship repaired before Rao moves out of its solar minimum…and she gets pregnant by him but then he takes off in the middle of the night, and is never heard from again. In the story he stays, and she’s an offworlder too, and between them they create the Kryptonian race…which is utter nonsense on another couple of fronts too, because even on Krypton you’d need more than a single breeding-pair to make a viable species, and plus the idea that two random space-travellers would be reproductively compatible is kind of nuts too, even though this is still a land of comic-book science. Plus, the hypergiant factor. Radiation. Death.

So we’re ruling this out.

As a possibility; but not as a story. Because if this were the creation myth of the cult of Dax-Am I’m proposing, it would mean that their central belief is that the Kryptonians originated offworld…and from that it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to consider that they believe one day they will “escape” from Krypton and go back to their homes in the stars. Perhaps they view Krypton as a Hell or a Purgatory…perhaps they never heard, or never believed (or even saw as a threat), the news that all these solar-flare earthquakes are perfectly harmless and even good. Maybe they think the world is headed for destruction, and that they have to get off it while they still can. Maybe, even, their lingering influence is what leads the Science Council to decide their greatest member has flipped his lid when he says the planet’s going to blow up. It would go against everything his House has ever stood for, but…could Jor-El be dabbling in the Daxamite heresy?

Has he cracked?

I mean no one denies he was a brilliant young researcher, but let’s face it that Phantom Zone thing was a long time ago…!

Many years after, the space-traveller’s wild story about his crash-landing and subsequent escape from this insanely strange world has come to the ears of a nameless scientist interested in “adaptive evolution”, and certain details (like the native girl’s impossible pregnancy) convince him it would be a perfect natural laboratory for him. During Rao’s next period of quiescence he makes his way there and enlists a bunch of Daxamites to help him conduct his experiment. He wants to know how their peculiar biology works, but he can’t figure it out: no microscope, no test, can ever reveal the raotronium hiding in their cells, it’s just too slippery. He does decide there’s an environmental factor in play, but also concludes something must be inhibiting “pure” adaptive evolution in these dim-witted people who seem to attach to him some sort of religious significance. For one thing, they all look a lot too much the same! So he determines to find some way of enlisting the environmental factor in the creation of a new, non-Kryptonian being who will possess their adaptive power without any limitation. And if things go wrong, it’ll be perfectly safe, he won’t have created an unstoppable monster…the “door” to Rao closes very soon, and there’s no way off the planet, and this is a hypergiant — so it can’t last long!

The inevitable supernova (so he thinks) will take care of his mistakes!

Not that he intends to make any.

Well, as it turns out he can’t isolate, nor even identify, the “adaptive factor”, but he does determine that the Daxamites are constantly picking up ambient elements from their environment, out of the air and the soil, the food, etc…and theorizes that there is a “mystery element” in play that he still might enlist even if he can’t isolate it. After all, it’s all around him! And so through his experiments with the Daxamites he figures out some of the processes involved, finds he is able to make them variously more or less sensitive to any of the elements they’re taking in, able to cause different elements to concentrate differently in the body. And thus he eventually discovers how to increase the effect of the adaptive evolutionary element even though he cannot see it. Now, you can’t really do this to Kryptonians, because it involves disconnecting both the energy-dumping and the ” horizontal sending” adaptations, and these are things that are deeply built into them, built up from the evolutionary history of all the life on their planet…but he does build in the “pure” adaptive factor into his test subject. And something else, too: because he doesn’t want the monster just going off forever and never coming back, he doesn’t want it alerting anybody by its mere existence to what’s going on at his remote experimental facility — he wants it to have a programmable limit. So he sizes up how much of all the elements is floating around out there for the creature to absorb as tissue-building material (it is not going to be doing much eating and drinking, necessarily!), and he figures out various lethal concentrations of them and builds into his creation’s genetic code an allowable “roaming distance”, after which it will succumb to the poison…and he plans to switch what the poison is each time (since whenever the creature is killed by one poison, its next generation will be immune to it), and he starts with lead. Just to make sure it works, he tests it on the Daxamites — sure enough, he’s done a good job, and it’s a nice long leash but it’s a very strong leash, so he puts it in Doomsday and he sends him out.

But then as it turns out, the young Doomsday never lives long enough to succumb to the lead poisoning, so he never has to change it! And then the one time Doomsday lasted long enough that he might’ve been on the verge of succumbing, he came back and killed the scientist!

Whereupon the Daxamites, in terror for their lives, seize the scientist’s ship and blast off into space, away from the creature out of their worst religious nightmares…realizing too late it’s found a way to stow away or cling along. A desperate battle in space ensues, and in the end the monster is flung off the hull into the vastness of space…but the ship is terribly damaged, and has to make an emergency planetfall around (surprise!) an ordinary red giant star, one that has most of its ten million years still ahead of it. The star is slightly brighter than Rao in spectral terms (naturally: because it’s smaller), triggering the hyperspatial energy-dumping pretty much continuously in the Kryptonian refugees. Like “Tonn” they are able to mate with the native humanoids of the world they christen Daxam, even though they’re of a different species, because the overall Kryptonian adaptability (possibly with a little helping hand from the alien scientist’s experiments on them — he was interested in “Tonn”‘s pregnancy, after all) is still working in them…and every once in a while Daxam goes through a solar minimum, which briefly frees their evolutionary powers. So the energy-adaptations spread through Daxam’s native population, but so does the energy-dumping and the genetic sensitivity to lead…and who knows if on Krypton, as native Kryptonian life-forms, they would have evolved themselves out of it? But here the only raotronium around is in their own bodies, and it diminishes to a much lower concentration now that it is indeed no longer in the air and the soil — although of course we must assume a little goes a long way, but still, one of these days those people are going to have no superpowers — and besides, as it happens Daxam is an extraordinarlly metal-poor place, so there’s no evolutionary pressure exerted by the lead-sensitivity anyway. So in a way the refugees are far, far luckier than they have any right to be, but could you tell them that? They’ve gone through a truly terrifying ordeal, shocking to their sensibilities in a way only possible among true believers…and so they become the most timid of people, shunning exploration and adventure. And ultimately this is what saves them from the Guardians’ attentions, because there aren’t even that many of them — this is a long time ago, and Daxam’s native population is tiny! — and no one ever even knows where or who they really are, until Mon-El goes out into space one day to fight…oh I don’t know, invading Khunds or something, and is ironically named “Valor” by them before the fight strays into the precincts of a yellow sun and he tears them to shreds.

And then he goes to Earth.

And thence to the future, where Brainiac-5 is able to cure his lead problem by adding a bit of Kryptonite to a magic anti-lead potion that the Legion brews up…which would probably have killed Superman, but then again Superman is a first-generation Kryptonian from like a hundred thousand years ago, and Mon-El is anything but that! There’s not enough inherited raotronium in his body for “anti-raotronium” to tear his organs apart by interacting with it, and of course as we’ve seen Kryptonite doesn’t cause the sudden “dumping” of superpowers that the light of a red sun does, but instead debilitates Kryptonians by causing very rapid cell damage. Which is not to say that Kryptonite doesn’t do SOMETHING to Mon-El on account of his Kryptonian heritage, because obviously it does…but just what that effect actually is must probably remain mysterious to us…

…At least for another thousand years.

Meanwhile, back in the past, Doomsday eventually lands on a world just positively loaded with lead, and dies…and comes back free of lead-sensitivity, and tromps off to wreak his usual havoc. Until, that is, he has his showdown with the last Kryptonian, the one who escaped Krypton’s destruction and would therefore have the power to destroy him…or at least so says the prophecy cooked up millenia ago around the campfires of the Kryptonian refugees on Daxam, who of course could never have imagined a Superman, but isn’t it funny how things turn out?

And now we’re almost at the end of the story, that began with that library book of mine so long ago. Just another couple of things to say, and characters to revisit. The five-dimensional Imps, for example. Who after thrilling to the whole warp and woof of the Krypton Saga — all caused by nothing more than the transmutation of some elemental hydrogen in the right place and time, why who would’ve imagined! — decided to play around a little with this “evolution” and “adaptation” idea. So down they went to a world and made its main humanoid species extremely evolutionarily significant to the rest of their ecosphere.

These, in my little tale here, were the Czarnians. And the power they got was the power to multiply.

Disaster soon followed. Sure, they had to eat and drink, but their ridiculous superpower being fed from the Fifth Dimension, it never ended until they did. The Czarnian population fluctuated wildly, from several billions to several hundred and back again, just like a yo-yo. Sometimes they had to spill their own blood just to get something to eat: every day another installment of Tales of the Black Freighter! As time went on, and there grew to be times between Cazarnian eco-spasms, each generation of Czarnians found they knew less and less about their world, as grandmothers reminisced about the days when Czarnian children had small mammals they called “pets” and could pick things called “flowers”…and relating the tales of their grandmothers, whose world had been populated by larger mammals, things called “reptiles”, things called “fish”, things called “animals weighing over thirty pounds”…and eventually two things happened. One was that the Czarnians grew very, very physically tough — the better not to spill blood on the ground. The other was that the Czarnians’ society became extremely rigid and extremely pacifistic and extremely environmentally-conscious, just out of pure horror at how they could so effortlessly dominate, so effortlessly destroy, everything around them including their own morality. So then, the young sometimes rebel, and Lobo rebelled, and they stuck him in isolation and tried to rehabilitate him. But then something happened outside his little isolation tank, his prison cell — really, given the nature of the Czarnian curse, it could’ve been anything — and by the time he nerved himself up to make some copies of himself to smash out of there, all the rest of his people were dead, destroyed by themselves…and the ground smoked, and nothing lived anywhere on the planet’s surface or in its seas or in its sky, except for Lobo — who was the very last one left.

Though he says he killed them all. But then he would say that, wouldn’t he? Because he was just a child, and he was the only one who survived.

See? It’s just like Superman! Uh…to the Imps, at any rate. But then again that’s the whole problem with the Imps in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Well, in fact wherever you’ve got these alien races, you’re going to have an interesting background texture to their superpowers that you can throw on there. I only chose Lobo because that infinite duplication-power just has to have some sort of extradimensional power-source, and it is just like Superman only all screwed up…but that’s not to say you couldn’t do it with Martians, for example. Martians, who have so many stealth-based superpowers, clearly you’ve got to think they were in the mammalian niche on their world, when it was dominated by horrific megafauna. Martian super-dinosaurs? So the Kryptonians competed…the Czarnians dominated…but the Martians hid. And then eventually, they inherited.

Uh…until they all died, too, of course. Say, quite a lot of that going around, in the comic-book world…!

Or, you could do the same thing with the Thanagarians. Now here are some people who in a way must’ve been just like the Kryptonians: in that for the longest time they didn’t know what they had. You can’t find Nth-metal anywhere else in the universe, but they didn’t know it. To them it was just another ore. I mean, they used to make maces out of the stuff, now how crazy is that? And Hawkman’s mace alone would probably be enough Nth-metal to power a thousand spaceships…so whaddaya think, is peak Nth-metal past?

Eventually it’s got to be. There was only so much of it made in the beginning, after all…

…There, at the other semi-focal point of the Phantom Zone, where the spent waste-product of the core of Krypton emerged.

At least, that’s my theory. Well, it’s easy enough to test!

Just have Hawkman wallop Superman with that billion-dollar mace of his. And if it gives him a black eye, I’m right!

…