#arrrrrrrrrrrt

It is very easy to make fun of these old-timey Superman stories. I do it all the time. Even at their best, these books are hokey, and absurd, and contrived. I would go so far as to say that these books are dumb. This is a dumb book for dummies. I'm sitting here trying to analyze it from a literary perspective, which makes me the dumbest dumbo of them all.

But let it be said now: Just because something is dumb, that doesn't mean it can't be entertaining. Just because something is dumb, that doesn't mean that it can't be emotional. Just because something is dumb, that doesn't mean it can't be art. This issue of Superman is hokey, and absurd, and contrived. By all the gods in heaven and hell, it is dumb. And I love it so much.

The story begins when Superman encounters a big, pink, planet-sized balloon monster in space, a detail I want to include because it proves that this story is, indeed, so very dumb. While chasing it, Superman accidentally travels so fast that he travels back in time, and finds himself on the planet Krypton, before it had exploded. I believe that this is one of the first stories that established the link between Superman's powers and sunlight, empowering him under Earth's yellow sun but weakening him under Krypton's red sun.

Lost in the wilderness, Superman stumbles upon a Kryptonian movie shoot. The film director sees Superman's strange costume and assumes that he's an extra in their science fiction movie. Nowadays it's part of the lore that Superman's "S" shield was a Kryptonian symbol, but during this time period it was just something that Ma and Pa Kent came up with while designing the costume, so the Kryptonians are just baffled by it.

The movie studio pays Superman and offers a bonus for him to walk around wearing his "space costume" to promote the movie. Superman goes along with it because he didn't bring any other clothes. Wandering around town, Superman sees a news broadcast of his parents' wedding and crashes it. Soon after, he travels to his parents' home and gets a job working in Jor-El's lab.

Not to speak too much of my own personal life, but I recently had a birthday, and it was a big milestone. I'm older than my dad was when I was born. I didn't really have a bad relationship with my parents, no more than any other kid, but I have my share of regrets. I sometimes wish I could go back and do things differently. Maybe we wouldn't fight so much, maybe we would understand each other better, I don't know. Maybe it's in our nature to have complicated relationships with our parents, maybe that's just part of the experience of being a person. Superman never even got to see his parents through an adult's eyes, and now he's getting that chance, and he's honestly rocked by the implications of it. It's very staggering to look at. It's emotionally raw and vulnerable in a way that Superman never is.

Jor-El invites Superman to a dinner party, where he meets Lyla Lerror, the lead actress in the movie Superman is working in. I love how Superman is starting to become aware of the L.L. motif in his life. They find themselves quickly falling in love, and honestly, it's the healthiest relationship that Superman has ever been in. I think a lot of this has to do with Superman no longer having to be Superman. He doesn't have to put his life on hold to save the world, or put on a pair of glasses and act like a buffoon. For the first time ever he can just be his honest self.

Of course, the true beauty of this relationship is how it is inevitably doomed. Jor-El begins to detect the instability in Krypton's core that would inevitably lead to its fiery cataclysm. Jor-El has already discovered Earth using his space viewer, and even scouted Smallville as a possible destination. He's even observed the lives and goings-on of Johnathan and Martha Kent, which is one of those wild connections that DC would double and triple down on endlessly.

There is also a lot of really fun world-building for Krypton. We see some of the weird creatures and fantastic locations, we see how they make art with their minds and use robots for manual labor, and there really is a sense of beauty around this place. One fun fact is that despite having flying cars, Kryptonians have never left their planet. Jor-El is living in a post-scarcity society doing elementary rocketry. It's a bit incongruous, but I think it's fascinating.

Getting into space already requires a tremendous amount of fuel to launch a vehicle with very tight engineering standards. However, Krypton has a much higher gravity than Earth. Even if the force of gravity on Krypton was only 50% more than Earth, we would be unable to escape its gravitational pull. Krypton would need to be a world with technology we can't even conceive of in order to even begin to travel into space, let alone shoot a baby into another solar system.

This is why it's so difficult for Superman to try to evacuate the kryptonians. Only one kryptonian scientist has been able to develop a fuel efficient enough to get the ship off the ground, and there's only enough resources on the entire planet to build and fuel a single evacuation ark. Superman even has to design a robot capable of building the ship in time, and that in itself bankrupts the planet of the rare materials needed to build it. There's a real sense here that even if Krypton hadn't exploded, it would be so used up that it couldn't support civilization any more.

Of course, Superman really should have, like, tried maybe 1% harder to keep the spaceship that's vital to saving his entire species literally anywhere other than the one city that's going to get scooped out of the ground by a green space brain robot! Like. Come on. I'm sure Ken-Dal is persuasive but this is the fate of the planet. My god. This is just on you Superman, 100% on you.

With his last hope to save Krypton ruined, Superman basically resigns himself to his destruction along with his homeworld. Superman becomes engaged to Lyla, and promises to marry her after her movie is completed. And honestly this is a good ending. If this had been an imaginary story or an elseworlds, it would be almost perfect. Superman dies with the planet he was born on, but at the same time he helps shepherd himself to the planet he would call home. It would be an absolutely poetic end. But this is not the end.

Superman and Lyla go back to complete the final scenes of their movie. This is where we learn that despite their planet not having any working spaceships, the producers of this science fiction movie were able to build a space rocket that only needed the flames from a fire-breathing pink panthicorn to shoot the dang thing into another solar system. This story begins with a weird pink alien and ends with a weird pink alien. I guess that's also poetic.

Although he's distraught at never seeing his home, his parents, or his love ever again, Superman takes this really well. Once Superman returns to a system with a yellow sun, he realizes that there was never anything he could do for Krypton. Whatever he tried would fail. It's all in the past for him, and he can't change it. He spent weeks on Krypton, probably months, maybe even years, and in the end he realizes that it's nothing more than memories. But his future is Earth. He flies back home, to his rightful place and time, with a smile on his face. He has the undeniable optimism of a man who has come face-to-face with his past and will draw strength from it to shame the future.

Grant Morrison said "Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting." This story is exactly that. It's a story about having a complicated relationship with your parents, about wishing you could go back and avert the great tragedy in our lives, and about trying to find happiness in a world that's slowly dying around you. It's about how nostalgia can be a comforting blanket, but everyone has to throw off the bedclothes and move forward with their lives.

Art can't be all things to all people. Some things will just not resonate universally. Each of us are unique individuals, and art is our way of sharing our truest selves with each other. All we can hope for with art is that at some point, it will reach out through the network of our souls and connect two people across time and space. The right words or notes or pictures you needed to experience to make that connection may have been written thousands of years ago by people whose names have been forgotten, but when you do experience them, at just the right time and place, at just the right mental state, it can change you. Connecting with another soul, even for an instant, will change you. This story changed me. That's all it needed to do.