My Superman
Because I was up for this gig. Along with ten thousand other writers, I’m sure. Jiminy, thing was in development for 19 years, they must have asked everyone on the planet at least once.
Anyway, I never got to the pitch stage (wait a minute, I wasn’t up for this gig after all — I was up for Batman vs. Superman — so this idea never would have worked anyway –)
Anyway, I had this idea. And now that the official WB/DC approved movie is out, I know that they’ll never do my idea. But I still think it’s a great idea and here I share it with you.
The executive I spoke with at WB was interested, of course, in “re-inventing” Superman. So I set my mind to that task and came up with this.
WHAT DOES SUPERMAN KNOW ABOUT HIMSELF? Superman knows that he is the Last Son of Krypton. He knows that his father, Jor-El, was a scientist who predicted that Krypton would explode, and that Jor-El stuck him in a rocket-ship and sent him to Earth where he could be safe. More than safe, actually. Jor-El did all this because he loved him so much.
HOW DOES SUPERMAN KNOW ALL THIS? Well, in the 1978 picture, young Clark finds a glowing green crystal in the barn and takes it, logically enough, to the Arctic, where he throws it in the water and it grows into a crystal palace. And Jor-El comes on in a hologram projector thing and tells young Clark about all this.
Okay. Here’s the pitch. What if — oh, how screenwriters love sentences that begin with “What if — “
WHAT IF JOR-EL IS LYING? What if everything that Jor-El puts in his message to Clark is a lie? What if Kal-El is not the last son of Krypton, what if Jor-El was not a scientist, what if Krypton did not explode, what if Jor-El isn’t even Superman’s father?
Well, why would he lie to young Clark like that? Because Jor-El killed Superman’s father. Because Superman’s father was the Wise and Good King of Krypton, and Jor-El killed him, and put his son in a rocket-ship and sent him off to God knows where, and put this message in the green crystal tucked inside the blanket on the rocket-ship so that Kal-El would never come looking for him. He put on this act of being such a kind father, such a loving father, all so that dumb little Kal-El would never think to go back home, looking for Krypton, to find that Jor-El is, in fact, an evil usurper who is running the planet into the ground.
Which, in fact, is what has occurred. Jor-El, like our own president Bush, is an evil, greedy dictator, always using up more, more, more. And he’s been gradually taking over other planets, spreading his evil all over the galaxy. He’s got an army millions of soldiers strong, always expanding his influence, Rome-like, across the universe.
And now he’s gotten to Earth.
And Superman finds out (somehow) that Jor-El is still alive. He intercepts a space-telegram or something. And he goes out to the moon or something to meet up with his beloved Daddy and there’s Jor-El with a whole army of soldiers, and THEY’RE ALL SUPER. And they fight Superman on the moon, grab him, shove him down, ram a piece of Kryptonite into his mouth and take off for Earth, to kill everyone on the planet and turn it into another Kryptonian outpost.
And Superman has to do something about that. Because he finally realizes, after a lifetime of misplaced, mopey homesickness, that he’s not a Kryptonian. He’s an Earthling.
It’s The Chalk Circle all over again.
Anyway, so that was my idea. When the Bryan Singer picture got greenlit, I knew it was dead, but I brought it up to a friend at DC once because I thought it would make a good “Elseworlds” series. His eyebrows shot up to a fair distance above his head when I got to the big twist, but he said it went “too far” in re-writing the Superman ethos and that they weren’t doing the “Elseworlds” stories any more.
So there you have it. I have another story that involves Batman, Superman and a surprise twist, but maybe I’ll save that for the next issue of Bizarro.
