Superman makes his first appearance on the cover of Action #1, June 1938. Copyright DC Comics.

Baby Kal-El (or Kal-L) came from Krypton. His abilities-- he could outrun freight trains, leap an eighth of a mile, and "nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin!"-- were natural for Kryptonians. The first appearance of his alien father, Jor-L or Jor-El, showed him leaping up onto the balcony of his skyscraper home to tell wife Lora they needed to rocket their baby away from their doomed planet.

	Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's original vision of Krypton and its inhabitants' abilities.

He was adopted by the Kents, Eb and Mary, later known as John and Martha (Martha's maiden name has been both Clark and Hudson). Their son, Clark, grew up to work for the Daily Star, the Cleveland Daily News, and finally the Daily Planet. Lois Lane apparently followed him from job to job. They were even TV newscasters, briefly, in the 1970s, for Galaxy Communications.

Over the course of the 1940s, the Man of Steel developed sustained flight, x-ray vision, super senses, and so forth. He even had the muscular control, for a time, to contort his face to resemble anyone's, which makes his thin disguise as Clark seem a little lame. That last power has long since gone the way of "super-ventriloquism," though I recall a comic from my childhood where he used super-muscular-control to temporarily stop his heart so that people would think Clark Kent was dead, for some reason that the plot required.

As he grew more powerful, people wondered why the other Kryptonians didn't just fly away when their doomed planet exploded. Over time, Kryptonians-- like father Jor-El and wife Lara-- turned out not to be powerful after all, while on their home planet. Superman was super because of the effects of earth's lighter gravity and the rays of our yellow, as opposed to Krypton's red, sun. These alternative explanations jockeyed with the original one until some time in the mid-1950s, when the "super-off-Krypton" explanation won out. The absorption of solar radiation also explained the gradual increase readers had witnessed in Supes' powers-- except that, when the childhood Superboy stories came along, he already had the adult Superman's powers.

By the 1950s, his costume was also an indestructible item from Krypton, despite changes to its design over the years. I recall reading a comic when I was a kid where Martha Kent was said to have sewn the costume from indestructable fabric she found in the ship. Quite a feat. Perhaps she also found an indestructable Kryptonian sewing kit.

Currently, she sewed the original costume out of ordinary material, but it turns out anything next to Clark's Kryptonian "body aura" is protected.

The Superboy tales were initially set in the late 1920s and early 30s, when Clark would have been a boy, but he quickly found himself in the same period as the adult Superman stories. And Ma and Pa Kent have died any number of times over the years. I believe they're currently alive.

Arch-enemy Lex Luthor (famously an L.L., like most of Superman's girlfriends), a redhead who later became bald, entered the stories early on. When the childhood Superboy adventures started, however, the young Lex had already lost his hair in a lab accident.

Superman learned a great deal about Krypton from various artifacts he found-- but then it later turned out he had been three when he left the planet, and actually had memories of it.

In the 1960s, Earth-One and Earth-Two, parallel earths, were established, to clear up some of the discrepancies. The comics of the 1940s ("The Golden Age") took place on Earth-Two, and those dating to sometime in the late 1950s ("The Silver Age") took place on Earth-One.

For that matter, over the years, an evil Superman from Earth-3 appeared (Ultraman), and an alternative-universe Superboy showed up. There was even a one-shot alternative "Hyperman," in a "Canadian Centenniel tribute" timeline where baby Kal-El was raised in Montreal. Superman had Superman robots, built with knowledge he gained from Kryptonian records, to help him patrol the earth. An entire, miniaturized Kryptonian city, Kandor, was discovered, preserved in a bottle by the space-villain Braniac. For some reason, they opted to live as an isolated specimen culture in Superman's Fortress of Solitude, and not interact with our world.

Yet another Kryptonian survivor, coincidentally, Kal-El's cousin, Kara Zor-El, arrived, and became Supergirl. And the young Superboy found a Kryptonian super-dog named Krypto. Kara's alter-ego, Linda Lee Danvers, owned a regular Terran cat which through some amazing coincidence was exposed to radiation or alien catnip or something and developed Kryptonian-type super-powers. Y'know, super pets, as much as I like animals, would present super problems.

Meanwhile, Superman's powers grew to the ridiculous-- he could time-travel, didn't need to breathe, and he was vulnerable only to kryptonite, red sun radiation, and, um, magic. In the 70s, it turned out that Krypton was an artificial world in the first place, and the Kryptonians, so powerful off their planet, were part of a breeding plan started by superior aliens, possibly the Guardians of the Universe (the godlike beings who created the Green Lantern Corps. There's a logic here, of sorts. The Guardians are obsessed with justice, and red giant stars are not likely to have earth-type planets around them naturally). Krypton finally became unstable and blew up, but the final end-product of the bajillion-year breeding plan, baby Kal-El, escaped, the epitome of heroism and power. Also, the ship created a space-warp through which all sorts of debris followed, thus explaining why so much kryptonite, and other detritus of the planet, ended up on earth over the years (including a Kryptonian super-monkey).

In the mid-1980s, DC wiped out the universe in a miniseries called Crisis on Infinite Earths, and started a new chronology, which was supposed to be consistent. Only one earth existed now (many alternate earths had materialized over the years), inhabited by the most marketable of the characters.*

Post-Crisis, Superman was toned down. He needs air to breathe. He can be hurt. The messianic aspects, suggested in the 70s, are gone, though he remains the most powerful of the super-folk. He also arrives a newborn, since Kryptonians generally develop in artificial wombs (so the ship was a sort of flying space-womb. The various designs of the ship over the years are an interesting study in the current state of pop SF hardware). The Kents, as always, find and adopt him and he grows up, as always, in Smallville, which, over the years, has been located in several midwestern states. His powers increase as he ages and absorbs solar radiation. "Heat vision," initially the heat from his x-ray vision (because x-rays are hot, get it?) is now produced by Supes firing out some of the solar radiation he has absorbed. Exactly how he flies has never been made clear, other than the belief that his original method of travelling-- super-leaping-- was apparently undignified for the Patriarch of the Super- heroes (as Jules Feiffer called him).

Lex Luthor, now a brilliant industrialist, hides behind the respectable facade of Lexcorp.

Kryptonite, once so common that even minor stick-up artists sometimes had a sample, exists in only a couple known samples on earth.

The early Superboy career disappears.

Oh-- except they needed a Superboy to make the entire Legion of Superheroes series work, so they invented one from an alternate universe, starting the "alternate-earth" mess up months into their new chronology.

After setting the Legion in motion, that universe is wiped out, and its young Kal-El dies.

So does Superman, as I'm sure you read, in 1993. Of course, it was temporary. But by then, many of the silly things which cluttered the old series had been reintroduced. And, while Superman now never had an earlier career as Superboy, a new hero by that name emerged, a smartass clone who wears a modified Superman suit and (initially) a black leather jacket.

Sometime after returning from the quasi-dead, Superman became an energy being, but he's since returned to his old form. I think DC realized after the "death" that if they had something unthinkable happen to the character every few years, they'd grab headlines and sell lots of comic-books.

Luthor was exposed as a criminal at some point, then he dies, then it turns out he transplanted his brain in a younger clone, then the clone deteriorates, then he makes a deal with a supernatural being (the Devil, you say?) to get his old body back, and then, somehow, he ends up back as the shady but publically respectable head of Lexcorp.

Finally, he gets elected President and uses various crises to take unprecedented powers for himself. As Scott Slemmons said, "Damn those butterfly ballots!"

Political commentary aside, in 2003/2004, in a Superman/Batman series, both Luthor and Superman took a turn back to the Silver Age. President Lex goes over the edge thanks in part to a serum he was taking to enhance his abilities. By issue #6, he has lost most of his judgment, lost his family fortune (Bruce Wayne buys up some of the assets), lost the presidency, donned a variation of his old super-suit, and been exposed once and for all as a criminal. He's on the lam now. Perhaps it was time for a change, but I rather liked Business Class Lex, and the comicworld has enough villains already who are marked criminals maniacally obsessed with their arch-enemies.

Meanwhile, a fragment of krypton explodes over earth, meaning that, as in the Silver Age, kryptonite can be found in abundance, so that even petty crooks have a weapon to use against the Man of Steel, and lazy writers have an old reliable plot device to once more run into the ground.

One post-Crisis change that remains: Lois Lane had finally learned that (duh!) Clark is Superman, and they married. Actually, it has happened before. In the 1940s newspaper strip, this occured, and then was written out, since it hadn't happened in the comic. The old "Earth Two" Clark Kent was also shown married to Lois, despite the problems that a human/kryptonian mating would cause.

Of course, there have been biologically compatible females about.

Supergirl, circa 2001.

Supergirl has had her share of changes. She arrived in 1959, Superman's Kryptonian cousin. A few versions of her have lived and died since then, and the original declared to have retroactively never existed. This has allowed her to appear again for the first time, the cousin of Superman who, once again, is no longer the sole survival of Krypton's destruction.

They've come full circle since the mid-1980s. There are, once again, lots of parallel earths and alternative timelines, and that's just the way it goes when you live in comix. One 90s story even involved Supermen from alternative universes, each representing a different era in the comic-book history of the character.

Another recent addition to the mythos is Smallville. I've only seen a handful of episodes, but it's a decent reworking of the story, with a contemporary, teenage Clark Kent slowly developing into the icon. In this version, Lex is the early-twenties son of a corrupt industrialist, not terribly moral but not yet evil, and a friend of the teenage Clark. He loses his hair as a child, in the kryptonite meteor shower that accompanies Kal-El's arrival. Large chunks of kryptonite lie all around Smallville, and their radiation in this version causes mutations, so that young Clark can have all sorts of X-filesque characters to face. The show has added some other interesting twists. Jor-El, for example, appears to have had a longstanding interest in earth, and possible aims of conquest. This may be the darkest portrayal of Krypton to date.

The episodes I've seen have never quite measured up to the pilot episode, and there have been some significant missed opportunities. When Clark discovers his heat vision and cannot initially control it, for example, a promising premise (with obvious potential as an analogy for adolescence) was squandered by cheesey use of the analogy and a very bad (and unnecessary) "Freak of the Week" villain. Nevertheless, the show has had the staying power to take Clark into young adulthood, and it's another interesting addition to a pop legend that shows no signs of dying.

The Silver Age Superman: superdogs, superbabies, and Lori the Mermaid.

*I read Crisis, but not Zero Hour, a second series, apparently created because the original Crisis created a number of problems of its own. Nevertheless, Crisis #11 (my re-introduction to comix, as an adult) piqued my interest because of its nearly-metafictional approach to a retcon. The universe has already been destroyed and reborn. The aged, original Superman, a survivor of these events, wakes up in the new Superman's apartment. Unaware that reality has been retconned, he walks into a world that knows nothing of his existence.

Supergirl: Fashion Victim

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