The Man of Steel #6
Released September 4, 1986
John Byrne – Writer & Penciller
Dick Giordano – Inker
Tom Ziuko – Colorist
John Costanza – Letterer
Andy Helfer – Editor
This is going to be an interesting one to dive into because while I thought I had a very strong memory of this issue, there are two details buried in here that ended up provoking a lot of thoughts about this issue. So let’s get to it.
Superman flies into Smallville for a visit with his parents. In a cute detail he changes to Clark at the bus station and blends in with arriving passengers so his parents can pick him up. It’s a neat “cover story” so that no one gets the appearance Clark just showed up at his parents’ farm, but I’m also pretty sure the last time we see the Kents go to these lengths to explain one of Clark’s visits.
During a round of catching up, Pa clearly is about to reveal something Ma doesn’t want him to, as she silences him with an elbow to the gut. Clark drops it and then later his parents tease him about his obvious crush on Lois, whom he mentions frequently in his letters. (Okay, this was adorable.)
Clark brings them up to speed, saying “I like her a LOT” (and I’m sorry, not this issue’s fault, but I can’t NOT read that without hearing Jim Carrey’s inflection from DUMB & DUMBER) but that she’s hated him ever since he beat her to the Superman exclusive.
OH MY GOD LOIS IT’S BEEN FIVE F***KING YEARS! THIS IS WORSE THAN ROSS WITH “WE WERE ON A BREAK!” CAN WE LET THIS GO, PLEASE?
(deep breath)
I get why Byrne had to do this in this way, which is why I’m gonna let this go without complaint the instant it stops being a plot point. Byrne thought he was going to get to write Superman essentially from Year One and get to deal with a Superman fresh on the job. Then he was told that the rest of mainline DC was going to be in Year Five (ish) and the regular books were going to have to reflect a Superman who’d been around for a while.
Obviously, Byrne is going to want to develop any Clark/Lois storyline long-term in the main book, but you can’t have Lois be out of Superman’s life until Year Five, so something had to be done in this mini to trap their relationship in a holding pattern. It’s a weird choice for Lois AND it’s weird for Clark to have this five-year crush on a woman who holds that kind of thing against him.
Like pretend we’re talking about original characters and not someone we know will become the iconic Lois and Clark. Clark says he’s let himself be satisfied with her infatuation with Superman, but that Superman isn’t real “just a fancy pair of long johns that lets me operate in public without losing my private life… and it’s that private life that’s incomplete without someone like Lois.” He seems to have a revelation and says that when he gets back to Metropolis he’s going to do something about this.
So for five years, he’s been content with the table scraps he’s been getting from Lois’s crush on him? That’s… weird, right? I guess you could say he’s so busy being Superman that he hasn’t had time for an actual relationship and this has been the closest salve… but it’s weird.
But more than that, there’s something really toxic about a guy who keeps carrying a torch for a woman who could not be clearer that she’s uninterested in him. If this was Steve and Eve, we’d be telling Steve to move on, not encouraging him to go into work next week and act on his feelings for a woman who has spent five years being unsubtle and unambiguous about how much your presence upsets her.
Also, since the sore spot in your relationship is the fact that somehow you got the Superman scoop, how pissed is she gonna be to learn that’s because you basically interviewed YOURSELF?! Because, Clark, you ARE planning on eventually being honest with her about your double life, right? Right?!
And as a sidebar, the implication here is that neither Lois nor Clark has had any kind of romantic relationship from the time they were 25 to 30 and have been satisfied by living in this weird infatuation stage.
MOONLIGHTING didn’t take this long in getting David and Maddie on a real date!
I think if you were writing it today, the better way of dealing with this would be just to give Lois and Clark other romantic relationships during that period where you can’t get them together. Alternate! When one’s free, the other’s attached, and then flip it. Make it bad timing that’s keeping them apart, not a petty grudge and five years of timidity about making a move.
If you give Clark a girlfriend somewhere in the span of this mini, we could see that relationship fall apart completely because of his obligations as Superman. Sure, it’s a little Peter Parker, but it’s a logical thing to explore and it SHOWS us why it’s taken so long for his relationship with Lois to get going. Eventually we backfill that Clark has had two, perhaps three serious relationships between the time he left Smallville and his debut as Superman, but he never has one that actively gets thwarted by his costumed career.
There’s story potential in a Lois boyfriend during this span too. Picture what this guy’s day is like. The richest man in the world keeps sending your girl expensive dresses from all of his exotic travels, she’s got a schoolgirl crush on Superman AND you’re really suspicious about what’s up with her feelings this guy she hates at work but she can’t stop talking about!
I know, I know… I’m harping on a point that really deserves the MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 treatment of “Repeat to yourself, “It’s just a show. I should really just relax.’” And I promise you, as soon as the storyline moves forward and pretends none of this happened, I’ll stop harping on it. This issue pitches the problem right across the plate, though.
Anyway, Clark can’t sleep that night and when he goes for a late night snack, he runs into an alien hologram that I can only assume is asking, “Are you gonna finish that?”
We know this is Jor-El, Clark’s biological father, but of course Clark has no way of knowing that. It touches him and suddenly Clark finds himself in costume, on Krypton. Somehow speaking Kryptonese, he encounters Jor-El and Lara and the spell is broken just as he seems to understand these are his parents.
However when Clark comes out of this hallucination, it’s in the middle of a field right in front of a very confused Lana Lang. She says he came charging out of the house. Clark is surprised to see her because his folks said she left Smallville years ago. She says, “I had to leave… after what you did to me. To my life.”
Clark doesn’t understand, so Lana reminds him of the last night he came to see her, which we know is the same night he learned his parents found him in a spacecraft. She says “We’d been best friends forever by then, Clark. More than friends. I confess, there in the moonlight on such a romantic night, I half expected you to propose.”
My gut is to react that it’s a little much for Lana to expect a proposal when all evidence is they weren’t actually dating, but then I remember she was a teenage girl then and I roll with it.
Anyway, she says that Clark’s mind was more on the state of the world that night and how one man can make a difference. She’s confused how that man could be him until he shows her – by taking her for a flight around the world. She thought it was beautiful, magical, and though she doesn’t say so, presumably shining, shimmering splendor.
When he brought her home, he kissed her on the forehead, “like a brother kissing a sister” and then he was gone from her life, “And everything good was gone with you,” she says. It left her empty because she realized that her dream of being with Clark could never happen.
“Because you can never belong to one woman, Clark. You’re Superman and Superman belongs to the world.”
Clark is stunned to have hurt Lana so much. She admits she spent years hating him, even to the point of considering revealing his secret when he made his debut. She even followed him for years, but eventually she moved on and returned to Smallville. She no longer has any malice for him, understanding that he showed her what he did out of love.
On one hand, I sympathize with Lana because she had one of the most painful “finding out you’re in the Friend Zone” experiences one could have. On the other, I’m not sure how healthy it was to dump all of that on Clark and be like, “I’ve moved past it.”
This conversation leaves Clark with a lot to think about – especially that part about Superman not being able to belong to one woman. Terrible luck he gets hit with that thought right when he decides to get serious about Lois next week. Lost in his thoughts, he goes out to where his spaceship should be hidden and finds that someone with a truck seems to have taken it at some point in the last six months.
Before he has time to act on that, the hologram appears again (and we NEVER get an answer about why the hologram is suddenly appearing to Clark here and now. Best guess is that some piece of Kryptonian tech is left behind in Smallville and somehow triggered by Clark’s proximity, but that’s a TOTAL supposition.)
The hologram reaches into Superman’s mind, filling it with a million alien images, He’s on the ground in the fetal position when Jonathan and Martha find him. They see the Jor-El hologram too, proving that he isn’t just some program in Superman’s mind.
Defending his son, Jonathan hits the hologram with a shovel, causing it to completely explode. Superman explains that it was some kind of “self-powered holographic projection… a recording of some kind… he called me his son.” With his head a mess of information, he flies off to think.
And here we get a big John Byrne trope – the story that ends with two or three pages filled with world balloons explaining the plot of the story we just read. Usually these are conversations between two, perhaps three people. This one is extra-special because it’s entirely composed of Superman’s thoughts. So much to sort through here, so bear with me…
Superman muses on how Ma and Pa always assumed his rocket was part of some Russian space program, that he was a mutated human of some sort. If we do the math here, Superman is 30 at this point in the story, so he would have been born/found in 1956. Sputnik was 1957, so it’s within the realm of being fudgeable. That also puts his high school graduation in the mid-70s, which means he could have been on his world tour when the UFO craze over aliens really was in full swing.
So I can imagine Ma and Pa clinging to the Russia story… I don’t know if it makes sense to me Clark would look at that craft in Issue 1 and not at least ponder if he was of extraterrestrial origins. And certainly there would have been times during the five years he was active as Superman where he encountered aliens in a way that could have made him at least consider it as a possibility.
Then again, it’s not unreasonable he’d cling to the fact he looks human, with nothing about his appearance to suggest he came from somewhere other than Earth. Between that very convincing detail and the fact that discovering he wasn’t really his parents’ child would have him clinging harder to every other aspect of his existing life, I can roll with it.
But it’s a good example to cite for how someone who knows the Superman mythos is going to have a hard time treating this like it’s a blank page. If this was about an original character and we discovered his origins at the same time he did, we’d be completely thrown for a loop and might even find it a reach we were expected to guess his alien lineage.
It’s hard, but try to see this all from Clark’s POV. He’s pretty sure he’s human. If he ever pondered he was from another planet, he never found anything to support it beyond his space ship. Then one night a hologram hits him with a massive info dump all at once:
- He’s from another planet.
- That planet, Krypton, is gone – destroyed years ago.
- You are literally the only person left from Krypton. No one else escape.
- Here’s a download of our languages, art, and culture.
Imagine finding out your origin after all these years, and the reveal is that there’s no one left. There’s no ship coming to take you home, no family to come and check on you. Now you’re dealing with the fact that your human family isn’t your real family AND there’s no “real” family around. It would feel anticlimactic, no?
SPOILERS FOR BATTLESTAR GALACTICA’S FINAL SEASON.
I tried to think of a parallel in pop culture and the best I can do is the midseason finale of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA’S final season. The entire series has been about our space-faring heroes’ quest for Earth. So much of the story is driven by their hunt to locate it and migrate there.
And in the midseason finale, they finally reach their destination…. and it’s a nuclear wasteland. Whatever Earth was, it’s been long dead.
It’s devastating to the crew. They found what they sought, but it’s not what they wanted.
END SPOILERS
So I think that kind of disappointment could explain how Clark processes this discovery. He thinks about everything the message has told him, the endless information about Krypton that’s sitting in his brain waiting to be accessed, and decides it’s meaningless.
To an audience invested in Krypton, this seems an impossible reaction. But he literally just had the foundation of his identity ripped away and yet, has nothing tangible from Krypton to reinforce any connection to it.
There are some adopted children who are curious about their birth family, and there are plenty who consider their adopted family their real family and never feel any pangs to explore what might have been. I don’t think it’s possible to argue he SHOULD have one reaction over the other. And given the traumatic way all of these answers are dumped on him, it’s more than credible he’d react by clinging to the identity and history of his experience.
I do wonder about the nature of this mental download, especially because of how comprehensive Superman’s thoughts suggest it is. My interpretation is that it’s like he has a massive database in his brain, but that he might have to consciously search through it to experience everything he has access to. I don’t think it’s like TNG’s “The Inner Light,” where a probe gives Picard an experience that feels real to him and seems to last for decades, as a way of making him live out the memories of a long-dead culture. That experience engaged the emotional part of Picard’s brain and left him with a lifetime that felt entirely real to him. Not so much with Clark here.
I had completely, utterly forgotten that Jor-El’s message had that full cultural download too. It’s understandable why, as it’s NEVER addressed again. I don’t know if Byrne later regretted giving Superman that much free knowledge about Krypton or if there just didn’t end up being any stories where it became a factor, but by the time Byrne is gone, the stories treat all of Superman’s knowledge of Krypton as something he has very limited understanding of until The Eradicator changes that.
Really, I feel like this whole issue was an info download, and I wish there’d been a way to make more of this come out in drama rather than being explained in word and thought balloons.
This is the first one that came out less good than I remembered it. There’s too much packed into one issue. The Jor-El experience could have occupied an entire story on its own, and there’s definitely enough material for the Lana story and Clark’s musing about if one woman ever CAN have him in a separate story.
Artwise, Byrne and Giordano are at the top of their game. And with the foundation laid, the main titles can finally start running with the status quo… beginning in two weeks!
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