Episode 100 - All Star Superman (Part 2 - Issues 7-12) with June Munford and Alan Kistler

It’s the 100th episode, baby! So we’re covering All Star Superman, widely considered one of the best Superman stories of all time. Well, we want to do it right, so, for the second part of our three part retrospective, we're joined by June Munford and Alan Kistler for an in depth look at the back half of the series.

Oh, and check out Poor Skeleton Games to see the awesome games that June is developing!

SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts • Google Podcasts • Spotify • iHeartRADIO • Stitcher • RSS

AI meeting summary:

●      The meeting focused on celebrating the 100th episode of the Men of Steel podcast and discussing key themes in the All-Star Superman comic series. Each issue was analyzed in depth, highlighting elements such as Superman's isolation, care for individuals, and ultimate sacrifice to save Earth's sun. The meeting concluded with reflections on the visual and thematic impact of the series.

Notes:

●      🎉 Introduction and Overview (00:00 - 05:00)

●      Celebration of the 100th episode of the Men of Steel podcast.

●      Discussion on the All-Star Superman comic series, focusing on issues 7-12.

●      Introduction of guests June Munford and Alan Kistler.

●      🦸 Issue 7: Bizarro World (05:00 - 25:00)

●      Superman is ambushed and dragged into Bizarro World.

●      Discussion on the horror and zombie-like elements of Bizarro World.

●      Comparison of Bizarro World to cosmic horror and depression.

●      Introduction of Zbarro, a character reflecting Superman's isolation and solipsism.

●      🧠 Issue 8: Kryptonian Scientists (25:00 - 45:00)

●      Introduction of Kryptonian scientists who want to terraform Earth.

●      Discussion on the colonialist and arrogant attitudes of the Kryptonian scientists.

●      Comparison to modern political threats and historical colonization.

●      Superman's confrontation with the Kryptonian scientists and their eventual death.

●      📜 Issue 9: Last Will and Testament (45:00 - 65:00)

●      Superman logs his thoughts and writes his will.

●      Superman saves a girl contemplating suicide, emphasizing his care for individuals.

●      Discussion on the Bottle City of Kandor and its relocation to Mars.

●      Superman's creation of the infant universe of Qwewq to observe a world without Superman.

●      🌞 Issue 10: Solaris and Luthor's Escape (65:00 - 85:00)

●      Luthor gains superpowers and escapes from prison.

●      Introduction of Solaris, the sentient artificial sun.

●      Superman's battle with Solaris and the death of the Sun-Eater.

●      Luthor's confrontation with Superman and his realization of the interconnectedness of life.

●      💫 Issue 11: Superman's Death and Legacy (85:00 - 105:00)

●      Superman confronts his own death and chooses to return to Earth to set things right.

●      Superman's final battle with Luthor, using a gravity gun to accelerate Luthor's time.

●      Luthor's moment of clarity and remorse as he understands life.

●      Superman's transformation into a star to save Earth's sun.

●      🏛️ Epilogue and Reflections (105:00 - 120:00)

●      Lois Lane holds out hope for Superman's return.

●      Jimmy Olsen continues his adventures, symbolizing the world's continuity.

●      Discussion on the visual and thematic elements of the comic series.

●      Reflections on the impact and legacy of All-Star Superman.

TRANSCRIPTION

00:00
Case
And, yeah, if Matt hasn't decided to kill me after the last episode, that should be good for him. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Men of Steel podcast. I'm case Aiken, and as always, I am joined by my co host, J. Mike Falsen.

00:38
Jmike
Hello. Hello.

00:38
Jmike
Hello.

00:39
Jmike
Welcome back, everybody.

00:40
Case
Yeah, welcome back, indeed, because apparently this is part two of a in a series that I. Apparently, it's gonna be at least three parts. I thought it was gonna be two. So this is our hundredth episode spectacular. We're talking about all star Superman, which is a fantastic, some might even say the greatest Superman comic ever made. And so we thought that episode 99 was going to be us talking about the comics, and then episode 100 was us talking about the animated movie, and that was going to be all she wrote. But our guests for our conversation about the comics are wonderfully intelligent nerds. That conversation went real long for the first six issues, and we're like, oh, God, we need to take a break. So we're back from that break, and we're back with June Munford.

01:25
June
Hi. I've taken 20,000 words worth of notes since the break.

01:29
Case
The scary thing is possibly true. And we've also got Alan Kistler.

01:33
Alan
You're welcome. Sorry. I couldn't resist. Hello again.

01:43
Case
So we're continuing our conversation about all star Superman. We got through the first six issues before, and those are a lot of fun. And now we're about to pick up when things start getting a little bit darker. But let's just get into it, because you honestly need to start with part one if you're gonna be listening to this episode. Just go. Go back. This is not the episode to start on. For all you new people, I don't care what Jim Shooter says.

02:06
Alan
There are many reasons you should not care what Jim Shooter says on certain topics.

02:11
Case
On certain topics. Yeah. So we're talking about issue seven now, which is the bizarro issue of all star Superman. And it's a weird take where it's a lot creepier and it's a lot more preternatural. It's like this, like Cthulhu esque, kind of like coming up from the darkness kind of element. So, yeah, let's talk about where it kind of opens. Like Superman's letting his pet sun eater go and then is all of a sudden ambushed and dragged into this cubic hell that is bizarro world.

02:41
June
And that's also at the same time, while Earth is experiencing the horrors of bizarro world, sending it's goopy folks to bizarrofy people.

02:48
Case
Yeah. This is very much bizarro as, like, a zombie kind of concept in a lot of ways.

02:52
June
Very much so.

02:54
Jmike
That was new. I was not expecting that because once again, this is my first. It was my first time reading that. And so, like, in the movie, you don't really. They don't really touch on this at all. So I went from, like, really depressing dad death scene to space zombies that turned you into clay people to tale.

03:14
Alan
As old as time.

03:15
June
Yeah.

03:15
Jmike
And I was like, this took a turn.

03:19
Alan
I actually, when I interviewed Dwayne McDuffie about the film adaptation, I did bring up the lack of Bizarro and he said, I mean, and there were gonna be lack of certain things because for whatever reason, someone decided a while ago that the animated movies are gonna top out at 70 minutes. Usually they had 70 minutes to adapt all Star Superman. Now a little bit later, they decided, well, we can't possibly cut the story short for our animated adaptation of the dark dive returns. So we'll just make that a two parter. And I really am still resentful that attitude was not given to all star Superman or certain other comic book arcs. But here we are. So you're gonna cut out stuff anyway.

04:02
Alan
But Dwayne also said, if you're gonna cut out anything, the bizarro stuff is kind of easier to make a decision on cutting out because certain parts of the conceit, especially the language that the bizarros use, that reverse speech pattern is much more difficult to pull off and truly absorb when it's being done in audio visual form. Reading your mind kind of works to translate it and you can work at your own pace. Hearing people talk like that and having the scene continue without waiting for you to catch up can be very jarring. And so that was one of the reasons why that was one of the things decided that would be left out of the story. And that makes sense to me.

04:43
Case
Yeah, I mean, we talked about that when we did our bizarro episode. Like, it's. It is hard sometimes to translate the written word when it is written intentionally in a weird way to a spoken thing and have it not really hurt your brain. So I do get that part.

05:02
Alan
Yeah. I mean, the recent Superman Lois tv show, when it dealt with its own version of Bizarro did kind of a clever thing of literally, just when the bizarro Superman speaks, it's just reverse dialogue, as if you played a tape backwards. And it was sort of a new fun twist on it, I thought. But with this yeah, like you said, it's both a familiar take on Bizarro because it's got sort of that cute absurdity to it. They bring back the. Again, so much of the series has to do with Otto Binder, the Silver Age writer of many a Superman tale. Otto Bender, along with doing the stories of Superman, meeting Atlas and Hercules and Samson, he also created the bizarro world, the original idea of the bizarro world, which was that bizarro, at a certain point just wasn't going to stick on Earth.

05:56
Alan
It was too weird. It was too against his ideas of how the world should be. Bizarro being an imperfect attempt at cloning Superman. And so he thinks in reverse. And later on, some of his powers are even in reverse with ice vision and heat breath. And Superman helped him find another planetoid and terraform it into a square planet. Thus, it's a version of Earth as imperfect as he is. Hatre Earth spelled backwards. He populates it with a bizarro population. It's adorable. They have a whole code of conduct about acting in reverse and promoting ugliness and imperfection, and it's great. And we start with that. There's the big cube planet in the sky, and then we shift it into zombie film and then keep on going into cosmic horror. A gravity well is sucking the planet into the underverse, but then also into depression.

07:02
Alan
And, yeah, it's one of those Morrison ideas where I look at it and think, that's so weird, and yet it works so well. It seems like that was always how it was meant to be. It seems obvious in retrospect that a bizarre world would exist in a dimension of gravity, heavy currents, and emotional depression.

07:26
Case
Yeah. And this predatory nature to the planet, it's a cube version of Earth because it's trying to imitate Earth to make us notice that it's a threat until it's too late. That kind of element of it all is so creepy and weird, and it feels so morrisonian in terms of the way they present ideas of, like, oh, yeah, this is a parasitic idea. This is a meme that's going to kill you all. This is a world from another dimension that is actively stalking our own and, like, imitating it and sucking its life out.

07:56
June
It is very much a hellish presentation. Right. It is not a whimsical presentation, and, in fact, the, this is another big strength to Jamie Grant as a colorist here. But this is, these are the only two issues that really have this color palette going on, and it is a hellish color palette deep purples, dark reds, browns, grays. It's so different than the way represented everything else. And I love not only their approach to Bizarro, which is that Bizarro's number one is still out there. And there's a king bizarro. That's a horrible version of Superman's dad. But the real character here, I think, is Zbaro, which is presented as such a direct analog to Superman.

08:40
June
But if Superman were lost in solipsism and isolation and just eternal, inward looking, all that Zabaro does is talk about how alone he is and how different and unique he is and how people can understand him. And it's such a parallel to Clark struggling with his own death this entire time, but now it's in his face as like a parody of his own grief.

09:04
Alan
And how perfect that it comes at this point in the story, because we had the, if you look at this whole series as a story arc, you know, we started off with the new status quo. I'm dying. We then rise into Superman dealing with that new status quo being. Being inspired to find new adventures, new directions, try new things. Then we get to that halfway point of confronting the past and opening old wounds while mending them. And now we're sliding into the depression of, oh, just as I got a reminder of my younger self seeing things, he couldn't stop. There are things that can bring me down in a variety of levels. We go into our journey into the underworld that we'll have to rise out of again later and again. It can only be accomplished with help.

10:00
Alan
One of the big themes of this whole storyline. I mean, when you bring up, it's a hellish representation, I completely agree. And it's more than that. It's also, to me, old world idea of hell, of dark, cold, barren, things can't grow, things can't be built, or at least not properly. It's that old idea of hell and a hades underworld being more akin to desolate caverns than some place where you're roasted and there's light everywhere.

10:34
Case
Yeah, a place of shadows, like the greek idea that it's your shade is the spirit that continues into the afterlife. And bringing up hades, though, I think is a good time. We didn't really talk about this last time, this idea of twelve labors of Superman in this all. And there are certainly strong parallels here to Hercules descent into pulling cerberus out.

10:57
Alan
Oh, absolutely.

10:57
Case
Maybe it's not one to one, but certainly a trip into the underworld is very much like this mythic adventure that a lot of epic heroes really do. And this is Superman's version of that.

11:09
June
Also, I think that there's a common sort of idea that floats around with Superman, which is that Superman is some sort of Christ like figure. But I think here he's more clearly, as Alan pointed out, presented as almost an old world figure of Christianity, where he's doing the Dante's inferno kick and he's slowly descending into hell one step at a time, with the fear that he himself would become a denizen of hell. Right. It's not just that Superman is going here to get out or save Earth or whatever. He has to understand the people that live there and understand Zbaro's complete self absorbent. I mean, it's not only does the Dante approach hit me, but Zabaro is such a byronic hero, right? Like this classical, ambiguous, unique. They're cooler than the other people, but they're very alone and they're very self absorbed.

12:07
June
They're very poetic. They talk about their own emotions through the lens of, well, I know poetry and I know beauty, and I can see the sunset and nobody else sees what I see in the sunset. It's such an interesting version of Superman as a Christ figure because at the end of the story, he doesn't escape hell and find righteousness. He tells the people of hell to stand up and stand up for each other and that they can help each other and they can want better, too.

12:38
Case
Bringing up the Dante's inferno comparison, Zbara really feels like Virgil now that you say that out loud, like, that's a really strong comparison.

12:46
Alan
And it also. It's so great to me. Cause it's absolutely going into those mythological ideas. And I mean, Superman himself, the idea of him being more of a Christ like figure is more newish. And it's slightly there in the crystal Reeve films, and it's smacking you in the head with a hammer in Zack Snyder's man of Steel, where it seemed like there are literally scenes set up of, like, do you get it? But, I mean, he is in his golden age form in 1938 and the next few years forward is more of that Old Testament kind of champion of a mythic champion. His inspirations include Gilgamesh and Hercules and John Carter of Mars. And his origin very much speaks of Moses.

13:37
Alan
That mythic idea of the Shadowlands I also just find so perfect because before we created Bizarro, we had a couple stories where Superman fought a being called the phantom Superman, who was this ethereal copy created. And then they did another version of him being a negative Superman, where he looked like a photo negative. And then finally, they took that idea yet again and made it into Bizarro, the imperfect clone who seems to mean well, but doesn't see things properly or in the right context and doesn't understand our point of view. And so half the time causes harm and havoc. Yeah, like, as you said, zbaro is so interesting. It's, again, it's taking an old idea. In 1959, in action Comics 254, there was a character introduced called New Bizarro, who Bizarro made an imperfect duplicate of himself, which then looked identical to Superman.

14:35
Alan
Still didn't think quite right or speak quite right, and then tried to help Superman against Bizarro. And here Morrison takes that idea, the reverse of the imperfect duplicate, who's more like Superman, more like a brother to Superman. But, yeah, he's this ironic character where because of the greater awareness, he's more greatly aware of how flawed the world is and that no one else can see what he sees. And it's such an interesting exercise because, again, all these different chapters are reflecting different aspects of Superman's life or his friends or his world. And here we do have, oh, what if Clark hadn't had the Kents? And there are a lot of other storytellers who decide, well, if Clark didn't have the Kents, Clarke didn't have the emotional support.

15:18
Alan
And people like the Legion of superheroes or like Lana or Lois, who maybe they can't quite understand them, but they were trying, and they're trying to see his point of view, and they're trying to connect with him. And that counts for something. If Clark had none of that. Some storytellers argue, well, then he takes over, or he becomes this vicious killer, or he is Hitler with a cape, or he tries to be Superman, but he's just lethal and knocks over buildings. And here Morrison is saying, well, no, he might just get depressed. He might just become this lone poet wishing for other worlds, but not having any motivation or any sense of that being something he can accomplish.

16:05
Case
Yeah, there's a real nature versus nurture conversation there where your best qualities can be nurtured, but you're not necessarily exclusively built upon that. You can have a foundation of good just in who you are. I mean, that's, I think, a through line for all of Morrison's take on it. I mean, you know, we talk about how they talk, the senses that they experience when they have superpowers, when Lois and Lex and this, that it drives them to do good. And that's a common idea. That Morrison shows whenever he's doing, whenever they're doing a Superman story, constantly. Like going back to World War three at the end of the JLA arc where Oracle stands up and it's like all those feelings you're feeling all right now that make you want to make this world a better place. That's what Superman experiences every day.

16:55
Case
And that, I think, you know. Yeah. Like, if you didn't have the kins, if you didn't have all these things, you might not take that good foundation and bring it to fruition. Like, you might not have the best version of Superman, but you would still have a person who can see the beauty. They're just very lonely and sad about it. And that's kind of Zbarro here. Side note, this is just a dumb aside. So my dad can't pronounce Zbaro's pizza. And he also, same way that dads just can't say Chipotle. They just say Chipotle or whatnot. And so he always says Zavaro. And like, I can't look at that not kind of thing.

17:36
Alan
You just keep thinking of Michael Scott's favorite New York pizza spot.

17:39
Case
Right, exactly.

17:40
Alan
Yeah. But even here, there's so much, it's again, like, this could be just a melancholic chapter. And again, June rightly points out the coloring and the lighting and the tone that's established. Like, my God, just such a stark contrast, especially after seeing the bright colors of visiting Smallville with the Superman squad.

18:01
Case
Yeah, now it's just dark reds.

18:03
Alan
Yeah. And it's also, I mean, Morrison talked one time about you're going through the day as you go through this series. So you start off with an adventure on the sun almost. And that's the dawn of our story. And then you're going through all these adventures that have a lot of sunlight, and then the sun starts settling down. And then at this point in the story arc, we're going into the night of our story, or maybe the twilight leading into night with our deep reds and our grays rising. It's, again, the reading it month to month. Didn't pick up on that once you read it as a whole. And once you hear Grant say that, oh, man, it's so clear. Like you are following this sun rise and fall and rise again of Superman's life, of Superman's final days.

18:53
Alan
And in the midst of even that depression of the bizarro world, you have comedy. Cause you have some of the delightful dialogue of the bizarros. I love bizarros. And I love the Bizarro Justice League, which Jeff Johns cribbed later for when he did escape from Bizarre world. And he recreated a version that was clearly influenced by the all star Superman. Bizarro Justice League. I love him. I love him. I love the silly bizarro Lantern and the Flash. I love that Batman's not there because his parents shot him. That also feels like a great callback to one of my favorite bizarro jokes, which was so dark but so perfect, where when the crisis happened in the mid eighties and DC was redoing its canon and its continuity and rebooting many characters, they still, for a few characters, they did give a final story to.

19:52
Alan
And with Bizarro in the end of, I think it was DC Comics presents, we saw the death of the bizarro world, and it's emulating the death of Krypton. The planet's exploding. And one of the final scenes is Bizarro. Lois. Coming up to Bizarro number one, our imperfect version of Superman, and asking, where is our child? And Bizarro number one saying, no, worry me. Send him to center of planet. So him die first. And then the planet blows up, and it's so dark, and I love it.

20:28
June
That's so beautiful.

20:30
Alan
It's so wrong.

20:33
Case
Apparently you can successfully do a dead baby joke, but that's the only one.

20:38
Alan
That works for me.

20:39
Case
A lot of work to make it happen. Yeah. It's so funny because, like, looking at this, looking at it when it was coming out, issue to issue, like, the first, again, some of these are really quick reads. Like, the first part of this is like, blink and you miss it. Like, oh, yeah, there's kind of a zombie invasion thing going on with it. And then they have some jokes about, you know, male performance enhancer, like, what not going would Lombard.

21:03
Alan
Yeah, Lombard's using a blue pill, and so he's immune to zombie virus.

21:08
June
That's where you cut to the ad case.

21:11
Case
I wonder if we could pull, like, a legit, like, old school Bob Dole ad.

21:16
June
Do you want to survive when the bizarro show up? It's bluetooth.com.

21:22
Case
We need a ped for your e or whatever the slogans are for that one. Man, I wish were making money on this show. I would replicate you.

21:32
Alan
It's not too late to call up some sponsors.

21:34
June
That's right.

21:35
Case
Yeah. Who knows now? But that first part is so quick. And then all of a sudden, you're on Bizarro world and you're expecting it to be more of the zaniness. And there is that. Like we said, the Justice League is hilarious. Like, every moment with them is fantastic. So good. The statue of Wonder Woman, like, great stuff. But then we get these, like, pensive moments with Zbaro. And it's so nice there. And then it's also kind of fucked up at the end where, like, Superman's like, well, I gotta test this because otherwise, like, you're not gonna survive this thing. But, like, there is something beautiful that you are creating in this world. And I don't know, it feels like, bittersweet. Like he can't, he actually can't take this person who's trapped there again, like, kind of making that, like, virgil comparison.

22:18
June
Yeah, actually, I love that comparison because the idea of him being the only one that crosses over. I mean, one of the things he promises is that he'll come back, right? Oh, I'll come back for you. Right. Knowing that he's gonna die. And I'm sure he's not saying that disingenuously. I'm still, I'm assuming he's still staying there on his deathbed going, no, I'm going to help you one day. And truly believes it. But that doesn't really speak to what we know about the narrative as a whole.

22:42
Alan
It's also, it is something that's a recurring theme with certain characters who get close to Superman or have sort of a familial connection to him because the Silver Age, to which so much of this series is a love letter to also establish certain it expanded Superman's world while also adding a lot of bittersweet things to it. One of those was the bottle city of Candor, which will show up much more prominently later in this series. And the idea there that the bottle city was a city of kryptonians and the whole city was captured, miniaturized and kept as a lab specimen by Brainiac, one of my favorite Superman villains ever. And Superman liberates the bottle city of Kandor, but doesn't have the technology to safely enlarge them all.

23:34
Alan
And throughout the sixties and seventies, up until about the early eighties, in the original, in that Silver Age canon, it's this model civic. Kandor was both a fun setting for out of the box stories of Superman miniaturizing himself so he could visit it. And he didn't have his powers there because it simulates Krypton's environment. And so he's more vulnerable, but also he's learning about his culture da da. But also, it's an ongoing.

23:58
Case
He's pretending to be Batman so he could be nightwing.

24:00
Alan
Exactly. He takes on a custom identity, and he just wants to be like his best friend. But it's also a constant reminder of readers, again, of, there are tragedies ongoing in Superman's life. He can't help the last of his people. He's not, his race isn't exactly extinct, but it's not thriving either. He's gonna blame that on himself. Likewise, the Silver Age brought us Mon El, an alien explorer who, initially, due to amnesia, meets teenage Superman, meets teenage Clark Kentucky. They assume, due to some evidence, he might be a long lost older brother. They find out he's not, and then basically, through a trick Superman pulled and didn't realize how dangerous it would be, mon El gets poisoned and must be sent into the Phantom zone or else he'll die.

24:54
Alan
And the Phantom zone keeps him from aging, keeps his body from being affected, because it turns you into a phantom, basically. And it's one of those things where, again, this was a recurring thing throughout the years in Superman comics. He wants to find a way to free Mon El, to help Monell, to find something that'll cure Monel and get him out there. And he kind of can't. Like, it's, again, someone he can't save. And he can even see Mon El through the Phantom zone monitor and just know, oh, I can't help him. And then later comes confirm, yeah, you don't. He eventually gets out in the 30th or 31st century, but you don't get to help him all that time. He goes the slow way. That's something you have to deal with.

25:39
Alan
And so zbaro sort of seems to me an echo of those kinds of silver age stories. I made a connection, and then I had to leave them behind, and I want to take them with. I want to help them, and I can't.

25:53
Case
Yeah. The Monau comparison is also nice, considering that Zbaro has that same reverse color scheme, like the red body with the blue cape and so forth, which. Yeah, it just. It feels like a similar kind of, this is a. This is a character trapped in it. I mean, trapped in a phantom zone, even if it's not the Phantom Zone here.

26:10
June
I think that's a brilliant observation and actually ties into one of the notes I took about sort of how bizarro world is presented not just as this is a separate planet, but it is a. It is under our own reality. It is a sicker, worse version of our world. It's not just an opposite. That's, I think, where the difference between this interpretation comes in and God, I know it's always great to bust out the poetry in hour three of your podcast case, sure. But there is something very telling here at the beginning of issue seven, where Leo Quintum calls bizarro world a gulf of glamour gay Grimm, which comes from anonymous irish poem about witnessing the fairies, but was reinterpreted into a relatively well known sort of post modernist poem in the early eighties by a man named Norman Shaw.

27:09
June
And that quote that quintum uses is a direct reference to the Shaw poem, which, if you don't mind, I would like to read a piece of it here, because I think it's very telling, yes. Of what Morrison's entire thing here is with this bizarro presentation. Amethyst Avenue, twix towards worlds under the full moon's ladder. Gulf of glamour gay grim infinities of despair. Unholy mountain climb next, craning aghast at the tower that stretches to the far away, bringing it close, so close the above and the below are forever parted and only now fused together on borrowed time. Out on the ebbing borders of liminal lands fore lord, there are no differences twixt mind and matter. Dualities dissolve. Enter the lords of Chiasmosis. White dot, heart of the black hearted, heavily guarded. Dreams within nightmares within dreams within nightmares. Books within books.

28:05
June
Words like birds flapping, gone. And in the silent text, the patterns thronging, waving, sonorous, opalescent. Now, there's a lot going on in this poem, and the poem itself is every little line I just read you is accented with a footnote. And sometimes the footnotes are longer than the entire poem itself. But essentially what this poem is it's a reinterpretation of ancient, old irish fairy tale poem, which, of course, it is. We're talking about Morrison here, but the story is about an average, anxious, depressed person meeting a fairy, a symbol of another world in irish mythology. It's not just that fairies come here and they live here. They are from another reality. And we, seeing fairies, are a brief glimpse of that other reality.

28:54
June
By quoting this poem, Morrison's making the comparison here that bizarro world and earth actually aren't any different, really, that you can argue which one's real and which one isn't. But Superman has to exist within both and see the connections between both. And of course, because we're talking the sort of like meta approach towards writing, it's books within books, and stories within stories. Kandor is such a great example of, literally, Superman getting to tell different kinds of superhero stories because he's in a story on story and story on story. I love the idea of that kind of follow throughs Morrison's writing, that fiction is real and reality is fiction. Thin line between those two.

29:43
June
And Superman's job in these two works are to synthesize the two to treat the fiction, no matter how absurd it is or how different it is, as it's just as important, just as emotionally valid and almost a lens to see the real world. They're the same thing, because Superman has the luxury or burden of having to exist in both.

30:07
Case
And this is why I love having you on the show.

30:10
June
I just have an english lit degree and talk too much. It's all good.

30:13
Case
No, it's great because it's exactly what we want to have these discussions about. You know, the deeper themes that are going on with just what, you know, starts off as a basic. We want to use Bizarro, which is just bad copy and kind of just having some cheeky fun at all that. And then we find a way to have this larger conversation about our world. I mean, looking at the bizarro world that we see evidence of crass commercialism all over. There's, like, McDonald's parodies and stuff like that they're interacting with. The rocket that he escapes with is all the junk that they produce, you know, like reality itself. Like, you can't look at this bizarro world and not say that there's some kind of social commentary going on. And it is so.

30:55
Case
It is so fun to be able to take a step back and sort of, like, take that all in because otherwise you could just be like, oh, yeah, Superman's in a weird dimension. How's he gonna get back? Because that's the very surface. Like, this is the thing that we get the kids in for. And then the reason why we are rereading this and doing these deeper analyses is because you can put on these additional layers.

31:16
June
Yeah, absolutely. If you're using fiction as a lens to understand the real world, and then you act on that understanding, then how fictitious was it in the first place? It's affecting real life now. So I think that's a very telling element of Superman's kind of history, where any sort of insane, wild spectacle can come across him, but he always walks away from it with a sense of shared humanity and a desire to understand the thing in front of him. Which I think is such an interesting counterbalance to Zavaro here, who has zero interest in the world outside of himself.

31:50
Alan
Yeah, I mean, he's come to resent the world around him, and it's understandable. I mean, it's, again, using cosmic stories to talk about human issues and relatable issues. I mean, we've all had those days or weeks where we seem to be in the bizarre world in the underverse. We're just surrounded by, we still have the knowledge we had before, and we know what things can better, but we're not seeing it better. And we're just surrounded by junk and shattered dreams and capitalism and all these things. But it's also Superman escaping the enderverse and the gravitational pull of bizarre world and being such a, from Morrison's point of view, a character who embraces being fictional by embracing the impossible and imagination.

32:41
Alan
Everything reminds me of in new X Men annual, I want to say 2001, when Morrison was writing the X Men main title and retitled it new X Men. There was a line where Cyclops, the leader, the X Men, the field leader, is talking to a being that seems to be made of electromagnetic energy, and it's causing gravity. Well, and da da, and things are looking bad. And Cyclops brings up, this is affected by your mind. This is affected by your thoughts. So think about how some say a black hole collapsing becomes a white hole somewhere else and says, imagine everything you can do, and then says, imagination is the only thing which can survive a gravitational collapse.

33:35
Alan
Yeah, I just think about that line when I see Superman escaping in the end of this little story arc, the gravity pull of depression and the underverse.

33:46
Case
And we're left with Zbara reaching actually up and kind of happy. Like, you know, Superman gave him that moment of saying, like, oh, you're writing. You're taking in of all this is not only valid, it's important, and it's something that should be encouraged. And, like, you're left with a zbara that is more hopeful in it all. So even though he doesn't, like, free him from this underworld, you know, he's still a shade in the space. He is now at least given a new sense of optimism and all. And that is ultimately what Superman is trying to do throughout this entire adventure.

34:25
June
And there's beauty there because Zbaro is literally in his face talking to him, just this very grotesque parody of his own grief. And what he's feeling in that moment, the life that he's living when he's sinking down to these places and he's still able to reject that. Do you know what I mean? He's still able to go, yeah, you're fictive. Yeah. You're fake. Yeah. This is the worst version of me, and I have to look you in the face. But because he's Superman, he doesn't accept that. He goes, well, wait a second. There could beauty and value in what Zavarro is doing if only someone bothered to look.

34:55
Alan
Yeah. Depression isn't an enemy to fight. It's something to confront and process and accept. And that's such a. It's, again, like, you see so many of these characters. You know, some of these stories aren't clean. Some of the lessons aren't clean. That's fine, because people are messy. And Superman, you know, isn't demanding that you be anything else. Yeah, it's really lovely.

35:19
Case
So why don't we move on, however, to the next story where Superman crash lands back on Earth and supposedly has been replaced, apparently, by kryptonian scientists who want to terraform Earth but aren't Zod style. We're going to terraform Earth to be, you know, new Krypton in a evil.

35:37
Alan
Way, so much as just, we're better than you.

35:40
Case
Yeah. Just like it's a colonialist way, as opposed to, I don't know, it's already. It's bad. It's just not as bad.

35:48
June
They're futurists. They believe in the potential of technology and living in the future, and they. They go into this, the fortress of solitude, and they look at Superman's entire history of his own life and goes, well, that's just morbidity, actually. You're just thinking about death too much. This is the past, and we don't live in the past, which is such an, like, Superman is building all this stuff to be remembered, and these two show up and go, no one gives a shit if you're remembered. We're living in the future now. It's very direct and confrontational.

36:17
Alan
It is. And one of the things, there's versions of the Superman canon where in a lot of Superman canon, Krypton had a space program, but then by the time Superman's being born, they no longer have a space program. This is part of why Jor El and Lara have to make a prototype rocket ship, a prototype spaceship and don't have time to make a bigger one, or don't get the resources to make a space arc for everyone and all that jazz, there's no space program anymore. And in a couple versions of the canon, the idea was that Krypton had its colonization period. And especially when they saw how powerful they got on certain worlds took it on themselves to change those worlds to their mind for the better and take over.

37:04
Alan
Because, well, if nature made us this way, then, you know, there seems to be a hierarchy that's just built in and it's. And then of course, like, you know, they get their asses kicked eventually and then they go back to Krypton and decide, well, we don't need a space program because actually this is the perfect place. This brand of menace. I won't call it exactly evil, but it is menace and it is a threat. And it's just as the other stories have been looking at things that are more human. This is much more, I hesitate to say, realistic, but much more grounded in political threats today and political wars that actually happened in history where it's usually not someone saying, I'm going to conquer earth. Colonization, empire expansion is justified as we're improving that. Look at how those people live, for God's sake.

37:54
Alan
You know, they need us there. Or worse, you know, their children. And we're here to teach them. Or like. Or worse than that, they're not even human. And we're gonna tame their lands and we'll give them a real purpose so at least they get to do something and, you know, bask in our knowledge and evolution and social stat. All this jazz, it's so insidious because it was like, with racism, it's like with misogyny. Like, a lot of it is not intended to be that. It's not intended to be harmful. It's someone thinking, well, this just makes sense, right? And it's so much harder to argue against. It's so much harder to see in yourself as harmful as something that should be defeated.

38:43
Alan
So the frustration here, and I mean, Superman just had a couple issues of frustration dealing with a bizarro world where people literally can't understand what he's saying half the time. Now he's dealing with this frustration of, this isn't Luthor. This isn't Zod, where he can say, no, you don't get to do genocide and hurt people. Screw you. It's a different frustration of, like, they really think they're acting on the side of right. And, you know, we're bringing back a superior culture, which. Why didn't you do that already? They're not even seeing him as a threat or someone who needs to oppose because they think he's evil. He's just a naive kid and maybe.

39:18
Case
He'S they say he's gone native.

39:21
Alan
Yeah. And he might be kind of dumb. And, you know, God, that's infuriating when you face that. And a lot of us have faced that attitude, especially, it seems, in the last few years. And it's just this. How do you face that? How do you reason with that?

39:37
Case
Yeah. Just raw arrogance in your face. Like, they're well meaning, but they won't even listen to the value of the.

39:44
Alan
People of this world, this entitlement. And again, like with Luther, the, like, self focus, but in such a different way.

39:51
June
Yeah. The modern parallels are very striking for me. When you look at a lot of the technology that venture capital has invested in medical technology over the last five or ten years. There's such an obsession in the tech world of outliving death. Right? Like, you can look at Peter Thiel's work with blood. You can look at theranos. You can look at Bill Gates and Microsoft's obsession with things like vaccines. These aren't governmental entities, and yet they're throwing themselves all in on these projects that are very much about public health and some broader view of what health or death means. Of course, people are still dying.

40:28
Case
Right. It's privatized public health.

40:29
June
Exactly. But I think the interesting analogy here is that the first time I read this series, this is my least favorite issue. I felt it's like there's nothing here, really, this time. I think there's something interesting going on in that. Their attitude, their belief towards the world, their superiority. It's kind of snapped into focus when Superman tells them, actually, you two are rotting out from the inside and are going to die, too. You have a deep sickness inside of you that you can't even see and you haven't paid attention to. The radiation belts out in space are killing you, and you don't even know when you're sitting here talking about the future. And so I think it's very interesting that, like, the challenge is it's not a fight, but it is a threat.

41:14
June
And the threat is not by Superman winning ideologically, but by going, hey, you are missing things about yourself. And that is really important because, you know, if nobody bothered to tell you were dying, all of these plans wouldn't mean anything.

41:29
Case
Well, it's just so sudden when all of a sudden, that rot starts to catch up with them. And, like, it's such a painful sequence as they, like, go blind and, like, are put on deathbed. Like, almost after this moment of them being bullies. Like, they are acting aggressively, they're doing all these things. I think one thing that should be noted is that they're not just kryptonians. Like, it's Berel. He's of the house of L. Like that it's family. And they are trying to do what they see as good, but they are so arrogant and also sick and that you can't help but have pity for them at the end.

42:10
Alan
Like when you have Thanksgiving and your uncle really needs to talk about a political view that you just don't want to hear. It's interesting, though. Cause again, the contrast of it's not as insidious or overtly evil a thing as Darksider Luthor want to do regarding the fate of earth. And once they are confronted with. I mean, they're sort of, you know, they almost. They're almost like that venture capitalist or celebrity story of once having attained power or fame, you somehow tell yourself, this was always meant to be, as opposed to remembering, oh, well, since I didn't have it once before, I might not have it again in the future. If my rise has shown that states can change, then states can change. But they don't absorb that until it's forced upon them.

43:00
Alan
And then it's sympathy without expectation of reward or without gloating that gets them to say, okay, were wrong about you. It's not necessarily that they think necessarily all their beliefs were wrong. They haven't had time to really reflect on that yet. But it's the start. And I find that really key. Because, again, if Superman loves us and Superman believes in us, then you need to show certain things, justifying some of that. And it can't just be that his friends are great and his enemies are evil. There has to be some aspect of empathy leading to understanding, leading to a step towards redemption which could lead to another step, and which could lead to another one. If.

43:41
Alan
If you don't have concrete evidence that sometimes redemption can happen, then you are undermining a story of someone who loves us so much that he believes one day we won't blow ourselves up, that one day we won't need a Superman.

43:55
June
I think it's interesting that you put such an importance on that scene, because I feel like it's like, on this reading more than anything else, that scene is the climax of the book. I mean, this is the first moment where, since Clark is being made aware of his own death, that he actually witnesses death in front of him. And whatever is going on with the two, the Kryptonians, Superman is watching them die with dignity and the ability to cut through their belief system comes when they realize they care for each other. Right? The words that the two Kryptonians are saying before they die are directed not at Superman, but at each other.

44:36
June
And in witnessing, seeing people die with dignity and hope and to have some sense of resolution, right, like, the ending is literally them standing in Superman heaven, beating up the bad guys. Like, it's this point in which the rest of the narrative kicks in. And in ten, 1112, Superman begins his plan to die. He's laying all his dominoes on the table, but he doesn't start doing that until he's actually forced to face it up close and see that there could be a dignity and a beauty or a death if you don't have to be alone.

45:09
Alan
You're absolutely right. And the fact that also, it's so fascinating to me that the last moment of the story is they're dying, but their essence ascended to the Phantom zone, and they actually find new purpose and perhaps a better purpose. And that's so fascinating because the Phantom zone, by and large, has been this metaphorical hell dimension that Superman inherits the keys to. Like, dad found the keys to hell, and I keep the door to it in my arctic clubhouse. It's. I mean, the Phantom Zone started off as really an idea of the fourth dimension. In action Comics 131 in 1949, Luthor uses a ray to send Superman into the fourth dimension. And Superman is able to influence an electric typewriter to tell Lois what the hell happened and how to get him out.

46:03
Alan
That story then got repeated in the 1950s Superman serial Superman versus the Atom man, where they refer to it as the empty doom. You then had a couple more stories where, like, Jimmy Olsen got accidentally sent to the fourth dimension and influenced a typewriter. Clark Kent typewriter. And then Lois got accidentally sent to the fourth dimension, influenced the typewriter that was conveniently in between Jimmy and Perry and Clark and told them, I'm not dead. I was teleporting to the fourth dimension. Please help me. And then finally, it got turned into the Phantom Zone in 1961 in Adventure Comics 283, where you learn that Jor El, and later they talked in that issue about he discovered the Phantom Zone and built the Phantom Zone projector. And it was used to exile the worst criminals.

46:56
Alan
And the first two criminals we learned about were Doctor Zadu and General Zodiac. Later, they expanded on it further, that Jor El had actually been looking for parallel earths and parallel kryptons, I should say, and failing to find them, found this sub dimension that became the Phantom zone. And it could be presented as an alternative to the death penalty because he just found that barbaric or even an alternate thing that they had of keeping criminals in cryo suspension, which had its own problematic nature. While that was a good intention, the Phantom zone we saw was hellish. It was a place where you are a phantom, and you could, in the original presentation of it, perceive the world around you and hear it, but not interact. You become a ghost wandering through the physical world, forced to look at everything.

47:47
Alan
You can't participate anymore and so truly have nothing to reflect on but what you're missing out on and what you did to get you here. And hopefully you figure that stuff out. And then Superman, you know, will hear your parole argument and let you out. A lot of times didn't happen that way. And they just become bitter, bitter, bitter people hell bent on revenge and looking for ways to break out. And all this jazz and the fact that these two kryptonians we meet who've been so arrogant, so entitled, don't even say, just let me die. Or you know what? Just pop me in the head with heat vision and just end it now. But take it as even if it's the phantom zone, if there's a chance we can still be together. Yeah, let's do it.

48:35
Alan
And once they see, okay, we are here, we are together. We need purpose. Hey, maybe it's only hell. Because we let it be hell. We get to shape what this place is. And what a great idea of, like, two people taking control of their narrative.

48:50
June
Therefore their own deaths, right? Like, they have zero time. Superman's got a whole twelve issues to do. These folks get three panels, and yet it's no less effective.

49:02
Case
Yeah, it's. It's. I mean, it is a very beautiful moment when they, like, hold hands and then when we see them, like, kind of triumphantly, like, towering over the figures of the phantom zone. You know, I don't love that. It's like, take law and order into the phantom zone. Like, that feels like a little. Yeah, but, yeah, it's interesting. I was thinking about this, Alan. When you're saying it was hellish, I'm like, or is it purgatory? Like, is this then the next stage after being in the hellish underverse in this adventure?

49:35
Case
If Superman is Dante at this point in it all, and I don't think that the bulk of the text supports that, but it is interesting that we go from a story about what is very much a hell reality to one that hinges on putting everything into a space that is basically a pause button.

49:51
Alan
I think that totally makes sense. And certainly for the effects of this story, I think it is that middle ground between life and the hell depression of the bizarre world. It's just a space and a void.

50:07
Case
Yeah. I mean, definitely a lot more going on than what I took it as. On my first read, I was like, oh, kryptonians. Oh, they just show up.

50:14
Alan
Cool.

50:15
Case
Wait, what? You know, it feels kind of jarring if you're not in for the larger ride of, like, here are the labors of Superman, right? And here's the send up to all the things that we love about silver age stuff. Like, if you're coming at it from, like, a post crisis perspective on comics, like, this is gonna feel real weird. But in this broader context, in this, in being this big story that is out of continuity and whatnot, it, you know, does have this, like, very poetic quality to it all.

50:44
Case
But why don't we move on then, to what we're, what is really like getting to the finale of the story, like, getting into the meat and potatoes as Superman logs everything, which is great, because I love that as, like, a callback to the, those great scenes of Superman, like, etching into metal with his fingernail, like his journals and so forth. As we go into the story of coming up with the diplomatic solution for the candor situation and moving into.

51:08
June
Lex Luthor's plot and writing a will, too. I mean, he's writing his story, but it is also, like, I think the title of the issue is actually the last will and testament of Superman. There's a lot going on in this, and it really does not, it feels like a, this is one of the issues that feels like a much bigger part of the story. There's stuff going on here that is consistent what he does with the infant universe. You know, there's. There's definitely some resolution there, but for the most part, this feels like Superman has finally accepted his death. Here's the setup.

51:37
Alan
This is sort of packing up the house. And, I mean, it's a callback to when he told Lois to think of the fortress not just as a place he stores things and goes to when he needs to not hear people in the surrounding hundred mile radius around him. It's a time capsule. One of the things that time capsule needs to do is give you context. And so him facing the end of his life is trying to give some final thoughts in terms of, okay, future generations. I was here for the beginning of the age of superheroes. I'm not going to make it till the end. So here's what I think about things so far. And then just trying to tidy up little bits of the world here and there of, again, just his increased curiosity, intelligence being put to its.

52:29
Alan
Its absolute limit of what can I.

52:32
Case
Do right now without using that increased curiosity to be arrogant? We're not getting this sort of high level view of a miracle man type scenario where it's like, I don't have time for regular people anymore, because this is the issue where we get probably the most famous page from this whole comic, which is the girl who's on the ledge, and Superman gives her a hug. And, like, I mean, it's a beautiful page that we all talk about for a reason. You know, he's. He is there for the little people and also the very little people because there's a candor subplot. And I couldn't help but make that joke. But how dare you? There's big idea stuff here. He makes a whole tiny little universe so he can observe what a world without Superman is like, which is so fucking rad.

53:17
Case
And also so fucking Morse.

53:19
Alan
I mean, and again, talk about seeds planted earlier. The infinite universe of Queek first appears in the 1990s series JLA in Rock of Ages, when our heroes visit the alternate dimensional world of Wonderworld. There it is. And then Morrison visits again in JLA classified and then connects it to the seven soldiers villain, the nebula man. And then it leads into a whole seven soldiers saga later. This little universe gets around in different forms in different parts of the DC multiverse. And here. Yeah, it's just, again, it's. You're absolutely right. Curiosity is not arrogance. It's enthusiasm. He is not looking at this little universe and thinking like, I am your God. It's just. I wonder what they're gonna do. And I hope I just keep the outside of it safe.

54:13
June
Yeah, and there's a lot of nods here to those JLA classified issues, which do feel like a prequel to this book. Queek is our world. It's us. It's. It's the one that we're on of us talking right now. I mean, that's a big center part of JLA class. It's nailed to, like, specifical historical occurrences here.

54:31
Alan
Yeah.

54:31
June
Where, like, we literally see Nietzsche writing his Superman book. It's not. It's not disguised that it's meant to be us. I think that's such an interesting thing where, you know, the moral of this. Of this issue and Creek doesn't really come up again in the book is that, you know, without Superman, we'd have to make it right. That's kind of like it's so clearly put on the page. But I think it's beautiful that even Superman has to do that. You know what I mean? Like, he has to figure out how to do that in himself because almost.

54:59
Alan
Like, his fascination with queek and his admiration of queec sort of puts this nice idea into mind of, like, oh, we're his heroes too, which I rather like. And case, when you bring up, you know, there's no one too small to help. There's no one too insignificant to help, is, to me, one of the things that made Superman groundbreaking in 1938 because we had costumed crime fighters and adventure heroes before him. You know, Scarlett Pimpernel is sort of a proto superhero. And then in 1915, Russell Thorndike writes Doctor the scarecrow of Romney Marsh, a pirate turned reverend who dresses up like a scarecrow and is fighting the british authorities while protecting his parishioners and helping their smuggling operations. And then that story gets retold with a more charming protagonist in Zorro a few years later.

55:51
Alan
Eventually, we get to the shadow, the Green Hornet, Lone Ranger. But all of those guys were fighting a specific political corruption system. A corrupt political system or major crime lords, major terrorists who basically threatened entire cities. Even if it was something where one of their friends was in danger, their friend was in danger from a crime lord running black mailers, as opposed to one blackmailer or someone who was really, like, high up there. And the police couldn't touch Superman coming out in 1938 being made by two guys who grew up in the depression era.

56:37
Alan
They were really feeding a lot of, we want a different kind of hero who in the first issue is fighting and hunting down a corrupt politician and a gang lord, but also goes out of his way to stop a guy beating his wife, which is groundbreaking to see in 1938, called out, and also in the first couple pages of the story alone, calls out the police and the governor for having arrested the wrong person for a crime they didn't commit. And having convicted that person, it was this new take on our costumed hero isn't just gonna focus on the big threats or the threats the police can't handle. The police probably can handle some of these, but he's there and he can help. So he's going to and he will.

57:23
Case
Help, which is the other part of it, not just because the cops could.

57:26
Alan
Help in a lot of these spots.

57:28
Case
But would they in these moments?

57:30
Alan
And I feel like that's really emphasized here. And especially, it's so key because we just had all these issues of huge concepts of kryptonians coming to Earth and thinking of terraforming, of, you know, predatory planets, trying to pull our world into a gravity well in an underverse. Superman becoming a version of Doomsday and chronovores. And now we juxtapose that with a train crash. And then there's a young person who thinks, this is it, and they're alone and no one cares. That's not less important. He's not heading there less quickly.

58:16
June
I think there's something in the structure of this one to me that speaks to me. If were to create a series of bullet points about what Superman does in his day to day life. Wakes up in the morning, does something in the fortress of solitude, punches a robot, talks to Lois, saves somebody. And that's basically the plot beats of this issue. But there's death in every single one of those things. Mechanoman the robot has Alzheimer's. He's alive, but it's not a good thing that he's reached his elderly age. It's not a good thing where he is. He is finally getting time to spend Lois as his true self. And he cannot even focus to what she's saying because all he can pay attention to are dead skin cells falling off of her face. The rescuing the girl is so.

58:59
June
It's such a beautiful page, but there's a lot of thematic death in it as well. Right? He's not telling her, like, you have a purpose, you have meaning. I'm going to save you. I'm going to rescue. I'm going to put you in a better place. No. He tells her that her fears are real. Right? Like, God, I would understand if your therapist didn't answer the phone, but they seriously did have that problem. And sometimes life's hard like that. He's not romanticizing his own death when he's writing this own will. He hates it. He sees it everywhere.

59:30
June
And even though he sees that joy and that spark of life in the infinite universe, what allows him to go forward on his path to mourning and accepting his own mortality is allowing the candor issue, in quotes, to be handled by someone else, to hand that to somebody else who can pick that problem up and actually do something with it. He's realized the limitations of his own perspective, even if he's suffering by having to face death constant.

59:59
Case
Yeah. And what a resolution to the Kandor situation also. Yeah, just put him on Mars. But that gives way to these big ideas, like then using them to fight diseases for, you know, they try on Superman and it doesn't work. But he takes them to a sick ward, and it's him now being like, oh, like, I can't do it. But the smallest, like my smallest Ken can. Like, they can go in and work miracles that I never could.

01:00:30
June
What he says to quintum as soon as he sees all of the Candorians on Mars is, wow, it's such a good and simple solution. I can't believe I never thought of it. Like the whole. The answer was here the whole time. It just. I needed to trust someone else, which.

01:00:44
Alan
Which, again, is juxtaposing him against, contrasting him against someone like Luthor, where it's not a resentment of, well, I would have thought of it if I hadn't been saving the world from antimatter creatures. That's amazing, man.

01:01:01
June
Yeah, exactly.

01:01:02
Alan
You're amazing. It's genuine appreciation of someone else. He doesn't have to be a loser for you to be a winner. He's not going to take that poison into himself. Likewise, as you said, he's not romanticizing things to the young woman. He doesn't say, tell me what's going on, and we'll fix it together. He just says, you are stronger than you think, which is both supportive but also acknowledging, I can't fix this for you.

01:01:36
Case
And then at the end, we see, in a world without Superman, we do create him. And simultaneously on the world that we've been watching, Clark Kennett is writing kind of his own obituary.

01:01:48
Alan
Yeah. I also love that we get to, in those flashes to Earth q. Earth earthquake. The philosopher who was part of Morrison's inspiration for this story, speaking of philosophy of, well, people are imitators. Humanity is a race of imitators. We see a bird and we want to fly and we see fish, and we try to figure out how to also swim like that or how to go that deep. So if we just try to be as we imagine angels are, what is to stop us from becoming more angelic? What is to stop us from becoming? If we can imagine it, then isn't that at least partly a possibility which.

01:02:28
June
Ties directly into the bizarro stuff about fiction being so powerful that it could have real meaning and real effects on people's lives? And, I mean, you can see Superman writing about Earth Q as a fiction, but it's really not. It's presented as just as real as any other place in the DC universe. Superman could go to Earth Q and meet, like, I don't know, my neighbor or something. It's just as likely.

01:02:51
Alan
I remember there was an idea Morrison floated about occasionally, Superman having stories on Earth Q and disguising himself as hyperman, which is an old reference to another golden age story. But so that way, he didn't disrupt the world of earthquake with the history or their narrative fiction and stuff like that. And it was just, yeah, there are so many ideas peppered here that some of which Morrison explored later and some of which never got picked up again. And much like Leo Quinton, I find that a shame that some of these ideas were never picked up again. But on the other hand, they get to say so lovely and not overused or undermined by staying centric to this story. No, dang it.

01:03:41
Jmike
Who was the guy in the little crystal orb that Superman gets out of the box?

01:03:46
June
Oh, that he's talking to someone from the future. God, I don't remember there.

01:03:50
Case
I had a half second when I was rereading this being like, oh, is this a message from Earth? Q and I think it's a reverse time capsule, or rather a time capsule sent back in time, and it's lead shielded. And it's this broken English that is, makes it difficult to understand because it's someone trying to communicate to Superman this thing. Again, themes of time travel are pervasive in this whole thing, and this is a big spot for it. And then, like, the whole actual Superman is dead newspaper headline is revealed to be a time trap that Superman's kind of aware of. And I think partially because of this message he gets, because the message references solar intelligence systems. And that's the biggest tip off of who the secret bad guy in this whole series has been.

01:04:35
Jmike
I will take your word for that.

01:04:39
Case
I mean, it's deliberately obtuse because it's using this weird kind of future jargon type, very broken by a person who wouldn't even speak English the way at all at that point. Because presumably, technology and all the ways that we communicate with each other have advanced so much that this is like some sort of crude metric of speech and also language drift. Because I will tell you what, if I tried to talk to someone at the time of Chaucer, they would understand some words. And that's about all you could say.

01:05:11
Alan
Morrison plays with that in a few places, that future speak just becomes more like how people were text messaging in 2003, where it's a combination of just syllables and numbers and stuff like that. That's an idea that Morrison likes to play with here and there, that our language just keeps becoming more compact as we go further, which Morrison views as both a good and bad thing because it can also echo new speak and certain dystopian realities.

01:05:42
June
Yeah, there's an element of that. I believe in the Batman time travel story as well, where all of the cave people speak in cave drawings rather than words.

01:05:50
Case
So why don't we move on to Red Sunday? So the story opens with Lex Luthor being put in the electric chair, and then he doesn't die.

01:06:00
Alan
Which is a direct reference to a Golden Age Luthor storyline, because in Superman 13 in 1941, he created an identity for himself as the Light, where he was kidnapping and hypnotizing politicians. Superman arrived. He escaped then, and this was right after yet another scheme had been foiled. So now he's just so obsessed, like, no, you're gonna stop beating me. Which leads directly into a 1942 story in action comics 47, Power Stone, where Luthor chemically treats his body so that now he can absorb electricity and convert that either to superhuman strength or release it as bursts of lightning and shocking electricity. But this is temporary. And he runs out of juice. And then he's also not sure if this will be a permanent change.

01:06:51
Alan
So he wants to find the mystical power stone, which is supposed to be a stone from another planet that will give him powers as great as Superman, maybe greater. And they fight. The strength wears off. Luthor is finally arrested for the first time in the character's history. And then that leads into Superman issue 17, same year, just a couple months later, and Luther is to be executed. You kind of assume that the cops figured his power ran out and that he could no longer absorb electricity. And Clark doesn't make any mention of it, interestingly. Also, Clark is told to cover the execution and doesn't want to. He finds that. But watching Luther's death is not something that would bring him joy. And he doesn't want to witness at all. But he's sent there.

01:07:44
Alan
And then, yeah, it's a very similar scene of the lever is pulled. Luthor's in the electric chair, and it's all electrifying. And then he just starts laughing and gloating because he's super strong again, actually stronger than he was before. This has reactivated his super strength, charging up even more. He goes off and grabs the power stone. They have a big fight. Then Superman tricks him into losing the power stone. He loses all his powers entirely. And after that, he's back to scientist Luthor. But, yeah, this is a direct reference to that golden age story, the third part of which was when titans clash in Superman 17. And those stories were all done by Superman Crater as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

01:08:31
Case
Yeah. So, like, just such deep tributes all throughout this whole thing.

01:08:37
Alan
It's also the strongest golden age tribute. Most of this stuff in the, in all star Superman has been a love letter to the Silver Age, the fifties and sixties. But this is the deepest. Along with, I think, just, you know, the occasional Superman swagger when he's taken on a couple guys. Like, this is the deepest golden age. Cut. Yeah.

01:08:59
Case
So Luthor frees himself now that he has superpowers and he goes back to nasty and starts to prepare his takeover. And that's when Superman is also seemingly, like, rearming himself and surprise. It's an evil son, but Superman's aware.

01:09:18
Alan
Solaris.

01:09:20
Case
Yes.

01:09:21
Alan
I love the idea of Solaris. I love that there's a sentient artificial sun and that it went evil.

01:09:28
Case
Yeah.

01:09:29
June
Solaris rules. There's another Superman.

01:09:32
Case
Such a great idea. Like, yeah, like, Superman weakened by a red sun. How about an evil red sun?

01:09:39
Alan
And now with one eye, he's not.

01:09:42
June
Only evil too, he's a dick. Like, he's, like, rude and taunt Superman. And, like, it's such a funny interpretation of, like, this gigantic cosmic, you know, completely imperceptible thing for human beings just acting like a petty jerk online.

01:09:57
Alan
Yeah, that's a good point. Because it's, on first glance, lovecraftian, but then speaks like an Internet troll.

01:10:04
June
It really does.

01:10:08
Case
Why not? Empowerless in my red rays.

01:10:11
June
It's also an interesting thorough for the rest of the book because we see Superman constantly fighting these giant cosmological forces that are given some sort of body or form, time, oppression, death. And in this instance, it's the sun. Like, literally the sun. But instead of having an abstract relationship with it, this is a superhero comic. So you gotta punch that thing.

01:10:32
Case
Punch it right in the eye.

01:10:33
Alan
It also, again, brings us full circle because one of the early lines in chapter one, after he has been supercharged and is now poisoned by Earth's actual sun, is how ironic that the source of my powers will kill me when so many things have failed. And now where that was irony and that was abstract thinking. Oh, a son has destroyed me. Now there's literally a son trying to destroy him and trash talking him while it's at it. I can't punch my cancer, but I can punch you.

01:11:12
Case
Yeah. We also bring back the sun eater that had been released previously. It's sad that it doesn't make it through. Like, I didn't think I'd feel sympathy for a sun eater at any point, justice for Pharaoh. But, you know, here we are, Morrison has done it.

01:11:29
June
And honestly, it's the closest thing you see to Superman actually having a child on camera, right? Any sort of partner or someone who relies on him. You shown earlier in the work having defeated and that food is work that no one else could really do. And suddenly, here we are. It's, you know, it's not the same as watching crypto die, but it ain't that different, you know, for the way Superman treats them both. And that's beautiful because obviously, crypto is literally like just a cute dog that looks like Superman sometimes. But the sun eater is presented as like a drooling shadow creature. Like, it's very quote unquote unlovable. But Superman's relationship with it throughout this work is, you know, it was small and it got lost, and it deserves a chance, too.

01:12:12
June
And then at the end, because he was so gracious in the past and so gracious with his time, there's the nature of the thing has changed.

01:12:21
Alan
And it so nicely works with this arc upward from after we've left the bizarro dimension of constantly Superman through his kindness, causing others to turn villainy or harm or depression into hope and help. And you have that with Zbaro. And then the next chapter, his relatives from Krypton facing death with dignity and becoming more chilled. And you have that with, here the sun eater is turning good. And then, and also there's a robot revealed to have betrayed Superman, but Superman so good that the robot is so affected by his example that it still goes against its reprogramming and is able to attempt to help Superman, even though this will cost its existence. It's again, just that influence of, like, the good you put out there won't be perfect.

01:13:28
Alan
Not everything will be solved, but it can be rewarded and it can affect other people in ways you will not predict, but which will be positive and lovely. I also, on a totally other level, love the design of Superman robots in this book. Superman robots, I've always had a mixed relationship with. I like the idea when they were identical to Superman. I thought, this is dumb. And it leads open too many lazy story possibilities later. I like them when they look more like robots. I love that we're not even trying to have them look like Superman. They've got blue capes instead of red. They've got their own style. I think it's a great design for the Superman robots in this series.

01:14:10
Case
Yeah. So on, not the last episode, because last episode was part one of this. But the episode prior, we talked about Superman Doomsday, the early two thousands animated adaptation of the Doomsday fight. Yes. And I found the robot designs in that kind of annoying because it was a little like they had weird, like, alpha five style heads that was like kind of like Kalex, but at the same time, they had bodies kind of like these robots here. And it was just sort of like too much of things were going on here. And I like this one here because it does still feel like that silver age idea of they are patterned off of Superman, but they look like vision or like they look, you know, or like, you know, some. Some other.

01:14:50
Case
They're their own thing, which I dig, because it is weird that he would just have, like, perfectly identical robots to himself.

01:14:55
Alan
No, that's really weird. And is self love in a way that I don't find healthy. It's. I find that. I find that very suspect.

01:15:05
Jmike
They did that. They pulled it. They tried to do that in the Justice Lords episodes of Justice League.

01:15:13
June
Yes.

01:15:14
Alan
Right. Which. Which made sense to me there, because that is a superman who has decided to become a conqueror. And so. Yeah, for that power trip, having identical robots, basically being surrounded by your own image, who's also serving you, it's like. Yeah, that makes sense in a sick way. Sure.

01:15:33
Case
Well, they're just kind of like doom bots. If they all just look like Superman at that point. It's just like, I didn't kill the real Superman. The real Superman is over there.

01:15:40
Alan
Too many lazy, get out of jail free cards.

01:15:44
June
There's an interesting parallel here between both the sun Eater and the Superman robots and Luthor and nostalgia or Nathalia, because at the end of the series or the end of the issue, we see Superman showing kindness to even Solaris. Right. Like, you just killed this thing I love, and you still deserve that sense of grace and dignity. And Luther inspires none of that in nasty. Right. She's not with him because she likes him or admires him, but because she worships death and, like, romanticizes death. Right. She talks about how it'd beautiful to get married and then kill herself and kill everyone else. And it's such an interesting parallel where Luther is trying to create that same sense of interconnectivity that Superman's discovering, but he inspires nothing. He inspires nothing. No one follows his lead.

01:16:36
June
And even someone with his last name doesn't understand brilliance or science or genius, but just worships death. That's kind of all it is.

01:16:45
Alan
Yeah, it's Superman in trying to help all these people and in helping other people self actualize and self realize and become more self aware, is leaving a legacy that doesn't have to be about carrying on his name. He does meet the Superman squad, but in the present, modern day, wherein the story takes place, he's not telling Jimmy or Lois or anything like, so when I'm gone, please continue wearing my t shirt and speak stories of me and maybe change your name to Elle. Or like, what? Like, it's not. It doesn't have to be that directed legacy. It's just know yourself, be kind, look out for each other. And so in doing it that way, he is creating a great legacy. And Luther has no legacy.

01:17:37
Alan
You're right, because nostalgia is not thinking Luthor is going to make us a better world, and we deserve it. It's Luther's probably going to win. And I want power. I want to have people I can beat up. This seems an easy way to do it. He doesn't ask a lot of me. I don't have to fill out a resume. There's no real training period involved. Apparently, I get access to cool weapons, and I get to look down on people who told me that hard work would pay off. This seems great. And that's it. And it's such a fragile idea, such a petty idea. There's no legacy. There's no longevity to it.

01:18:20
Case
Just the selling point of a monster truck tank.

01:18:23
June
That's an interesting parallel to me because we see, this is, what, the fourth character, no, third character now to have been given Superman's temporary powers for a day between Jimmy and Lois. And the beauty of this Luthor character and this interpretation of Luthor is that, like, he's jealous of Superman, right? He hates him for being who he could never be. But Superman has a whole fortress of solitude full of robots and futuristic science machines to help him make this serum. And Luthor does it, like, six months later with shit he finds in prison. Like, he's really not that far behind Superman. Humanity isn't that far behind Superman at all. But we're lost in ourselves and we're lost in our own petty insecurities to ever really see that or understand that.

01:19:10
Alan
Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the thing, Luther, because he's so self focused, because he's so petty, and because he's looking for that tangible proof of power and reward, misses some obvious things. Like you. You made a robot in prison that can recite books and then also do so in such a way it can become a drill. And instead of revolutionizing construction across the world, or possibly rescue efforts for cave ins and such, you're just like, this will break me out of prison so I can brag about how brilliantly I broke out of prison? Are you joking? And then along with that, it's funny. One of my favorite Luther moments has to do with, as I said earlier, Otto Bender made the initial stories of Hercules and Superman meeting.

01:20:04
Alan
In one of those stories in 1960, Luthor summons Hercules to take on Superman to be his muscle. And he does this from prison. And we see that he's able to make a time ray. We don't see everything he's using, but we see that the main ingredients of the time ray seem to be a clock, paper clips, some extra gears and wire, a shaving mirror to reflect sunlight coming in from the window into the power cells, which apparently are solar powered. And they specifically say this, aspirin. And together, all of that made a time, right? And it's like mother trucker MacGyver. And it's pointed out by Superman later, if you wanted to save the world, you could have look at everything. Look at what you do when almost out of boredom.

01:20:58
Case
Yeah. Look at all the things you can make out of scraps in a cage.

01:21:03
Alan
But because it doesn't make you look cooler than me to your mind, because it doesn't fit your definition of strength versus legacy versus altruism versus changing the effing world, you didn't pursue that? Like, how, again, how childish are you?

01:21:21
Jmike
Very.

01:21:23
Alan
Yeah, that is correct. Thank you.

01:21:26
Case
Very.

01:21:27
Alan
Thank you. That was the answer I was looking for. Thank you.

01:21:31
Case
So issue eleven ends with Superman reverting. Well, first off, he punches out Solaris, and there's like a nuclear explosion when he does so, he goes back to the Daily Planet and apparently dies as he submits the Superman dead headline. And Luthor shows up in the cliffhanger, just, like, floating there, like, ready to kill the staff. And we pick up issue twelve and Superman is dead and in space. Radio heaven, for lack of a better word on this one. And we find out that kryptonians, as they die, their consciousness becomes radio waves. And Superman is given a choice of either existing in this liminal space of kryptonian minds, like, interacting with each other, or going back and setting things right before he dies. And.

01:22:17
Case
But the choice is, like, die or die, and it'll be a death of finality, or exist in this sort of mental heaven. And obviously, it's Superman. Like, you know, he makes the choice that, you know, allows the story to progress.

01:22:32
June
It's an interesting representation of the afterlife because it ties. So, and look, Morrison talks about psychedelics a lot. So I don't think I'm reaching here, but it's clearly sort of a representation of DMT, which is often described as a chemical released in your brain at or near the process of dying. And it's one of the best guesses that we have for what happens to us when we die, which is that we're presented our life in sort of a compressed form, and in some cases, people have reported losing a sense of time in the sense that you might stay there forever. But of course, he's Superman. So he is presented with this and then goes, no, I got shit to do. Yeah. I don't care if I have to give everything up. I don't care if I don't live forever. It's.

01:23:17
June
It's a very beautiful moment where you see, like, you see him die physically, and then you say, are you gonna die like a man? And he goes, no, I know I'm Superman. I don't doubt like that. That's bullshit. It's kind of interesting to me.

01:23:31
Case
Yeah. I had flashes, too. For the man who has ever.

01:23:34
June
Oh, very much so, yes.

01:23:36
Case
Yeah. And while I think there's entirely different things being said, I can't imagine that there wasn't at least some thought to pay tribute to what is a super famous Superman story.

01:23:48
June
It's everywhere in this work. Right. The Superman robots and the sort of weird relationship between he and Lotus. It does feel like, of course, it's a more response to Ray Morrison's writing, but there is a lot of, like, I'm going to do a bigger and broader take on the same concept and maybe spread it out a little more. Whereas for the man who has everything is pretty human.

01:24:09
Case
Yeah.

01:24:10
Alan
Yeah. And was very much about sort of grounding down the idea of Krypton and taking away romanticism about it and fairytale aspects about it and making it just seem like, oh, this is, I don't like what could happen to earth, because we've seen this happen before. And the story seeing, starting off as like a dream for Clark in the man who has everything, and then turning into this terrible nightmare of what could have happened with a cynical Krypton and if his father gave into cynicism and a form of nationalism. Yeah. The radio wave consciousness. I mean, we've seen that in other Morrison stories. And the whole idea of if the underverse and the phantom zone don't have to be hell and purgatory it just becomes that because of your mindset, then heaven is a state of mind as well, quite literally.

01:25:09
Alan
And does going away now mean I'm cheating myself of being able to achieve this evolution later? Possibly. But someone needs me. And so maybe I'm cheating myself of heaven, or maybe knowing this much will keep me from being able to hit this level of consciousness again later. But, yeah, again, that's the price I'm willing to pay. There's work to be done. I rather like that. It also honestly reminded me of in the nineties when Superman became electric Superman. And we would later discover that this was basically because of a sorcerer trying to bring him into phase with another dimension and screwing it up a little bit. So he became this energy being. But initially, we didn't know that.

01:25:54
Alan
Initially, we just knew, hey, Superman's becoming more and more energy, and now he looks like he's made of lightning and he's got to wear a containment suit. And we knew it was a way to give the stories a little bit of a kick to put Superman in a new situation for a while and get reader interest. We didn't know the why, but I remember my grandfather and I talking about it and him having just a fan idea of, like, well, maybe Kryptonians enter, like, a different life stage for a time, and they can become energy consciousness or something. And this little moment reminded me of that, which also, again, goes into a theme that we see later. Like, Superman is becoming a star.

01:26:32
Alan
So the cancer is, our perception of the cancer can change, and it might be destroying your physical body, but you can either then enter a heaven made world of consciousness on another dimensional plane, another energy plane, whatever you want to call it, and create your paradise or your prison, however you want to see it. It's all up to you. Or you can stay on this world and figure out what being a star means or what being part of a larger star means. And it's. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I also just like the idea that we're not actually told if this is literally Jor El or Clark's idea of Jor El. And either way, it works, especially when it comes to afterlife stuff.

01:27:19
Alan
Anytime comic books or certain other shows, like, really nail down what the afterlife is and what the rules, and we can talk to this dead person, we can go to heaven and talk to him and get advice or da da. Well, now, this is just another place. I don't want heaven and hell to be other planets that you can just, you need a special way to get there, but you can get there and go back and forth. I like the ambiguity of this. Right before we then rocket back to physical threats. Luthor's got my powers. Holy crap. What do we do?

01:27:51
Case
Shoot him with a gun? Alan. Bringing up the electric blue Superman is interesting because I was thinking about that when he first manifests those, like, energy fields he creates. When he, in issue one, when he's exposed to the sun, I was like, oh, is that playing some kind of tribute to all of that?

01:28:08
Alan
I figured that was playing tribute to, I mean, once we started in the eighties redefining Superman's powers, it was this.

01:28:15
Case
Idea of lots of psychic powers going on. There's a lot of. Right.

01:28:19
Alan
And, like, the idea of, like, well, you know, were entering enough realism into the comic world that we knew if a guy lifts a ship and he just has two hands lifting a whole yacht or a ship that's the size of the Queen Elizabeth two, it's going to collapse, because all that strength is being put into two points that are the size of a person's hands. So therefore, there must be something more going on. And different writers interpreted that as sort of like, there's some kind of psychokinetic energy field. Like the force field that makes him invulnerable is extending and lifting the ship, or that his real main power is warping gravity and that can manifest a superhuman strength and then also is acting to reinforce things he's lifting.

01:29:01
Alan
So I just saw it as sort of a thing like that, of like, well, Superman's manipulating gravity or whatever the energy field is that turns his cells into chainmail, each of them superhumanly strong and reinforcing each other. Then, okay, now he's extending that energy field in.

01:29:19
Case
I always took the energy, Superman as being an extension of that kind of concept. And so I didn't think that it was in Congress. And I think that alluding to the sort of, like, larger energy powers that Superman has under the surface, but they don't necessarily talk about very often, I thought was kind of what was going on there. And it's cool that it's called back.

01:29:38
June
Here the scene where Superman is in purgatory, altered state, DMT moment or heaven or whatever, colored very similarly to the bizarro issues. Jor El appears in both. And it's not the same Jerrel. They're not dressed the same. Right. It's not King Jerrel in his garbage outfit, but it's clearly representing yet another moment where Superman is given the option to ponder himself forever. Right? Like, you can be here and you can try to transcend, and you can try to make meaning out of being here. And Superman ultimately rejects it. He's got stuff to do. He's got to go back to our world where there's more than just him.

01:30:19
Alan
Yeah, that's absolutely true. In both cases, he's in a place where he's seeing a shade of his biological father. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I also, just quickly, because case brought it up, it also makes sense to me that Morrison might be giving a nod to energy Superman or view Electric Superman as an outgrowth of those energy manipulation powers rather than a different Superman, because frankly, no one did a better version of Electric Superman than Morrison in jail. A seeing electric Superman there. That was the only comic book run where I thought, oh, man, that's Superman. He's got new powers. He's got a different skill set he's got to use. But look at him go, like, he's not de powered. It's just different. And he's doing amazing things. Like there's a whole NJLA, I want to say issue seven.

01:31:19
Case
Are we talking about the moon?

01:31:20
Alan
Yeah, the moon.

01:31:21
Case
Yeah.

01:31:22
Alan
Demon is making the moon head towards Earth. So Superman grabs some equipment, gives the moon magnetic poles, and then charges it so that it pushes back away from Earth. And it's just a silent splash. Page. Electric Superman standing between, floating between two artificial magnetic poles that he's made in the moon. And I was like, oh, my God, like that. Now I get it now. Like, Electric Superman is still Superman and actually is showing us how creative and smart Superman can be. Whatever monkey wrench you throw at him.

01:31:55
Case
Yeah. It's not super strength he's using. It's science strength.

01:31:58
Alan
Yes. Perhaps the greatest magic of all, science.

01:32:03
Jmike
Just missing the purple Ray. You'd have the whole thing down.

01:32:08
Case
Oh, well, if they hit electric blue Superman with a purple ray so that we had electric purple Superman, we would have had, like, the, er, example of a superhero right there.

01:32:17
June
Electric purple Superman. Sounds delicious.

01:32:20
Case
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's grape flavored. You know, like, Lois kissing him is going to be like, you got the purple and the blue.

01:32:28
June
I'm expecting some raspberry notes.

01:32:31
Case
Oh, yeah, yeah, the whites, the mystery flavor, which is secretly always raspberry.

01:32:37
Alan
Actually, now just thinking, I want a drink now called gravity gun.

01:32:42
June
You lose 5 hours.

01:32:43
Case
It's got to be a high proof because it's gonna put you on the floor. On that note, let's get back to the actual confrontation between Superman and Luthor here. So Superman rises up. He uses the gravity gun on Luthor. And at first, it's just like, oh, yeah, I used one of myriad weapons that I have. And then Luthor gets shot out. And we've got some good moments here where, like, Luthor says, I should be writing these ideas down because his mind is working at superhuman speeds and so forth. And that's a cool, subtle detail right there. And then we're like, oh, yeah. Remember that whole thing about how, like, really bad gravity can liquefy time and how gravity can warp time and how time travel and time warping has been a huge part of every issue so far.

01:33:24
Case
Just sped up that little 24 hours clock you had there, baby.

01:33:28
Alan
And again, it subverts the expectations because many other stories would have been, we got a special gun and we shot him. That's it. I mean, one of my problem with several superhero movies is that they don't show creative solutions as much as the comic books, where a whole team of heroes each has to figure out, I'll use my power this way, which you'll use your power this way. And by doing this in conjunction, we take away their power or we shut off their thing. It instead becomes, if you attack there and I attack there, we can blow this up, or we'll hit hard enough that at a certain point, we don't have to hit anymore. And that's fine. It just. It's not as creative or as interesting to me.

01:34:10
Alan
And here again, it seems like Superman being weakened, just grabbed a gun that was powerful enough to do something. It's like. No, it actually like. Cause God knows the. The lethal weaponry that exists in the forces of solitude, and he didn't get any of those devices. He didn't even exile Luthor to the Phantom zone. He just turned the clock and then made Luthor run out of time because he didn't understand how much time he actually had left. And trusted also that Luther would waste some of that time because of his ego, because of his arrogance. And gives us one of my favorite scenes ever. We've brought up several times about how, of course, Superman sees the world differently because his senses are as enhanced as his physical traits. And Luther sees that and is shattered. Absolutely shattered.

01:35:09
Alan
The idea that there is now scientific evidence in front of his eyes that we are all in this together is shattering. That human consciousness is so strong, it can possibly affect tangible reality. Just how much his ego supporting his paradigm. And now that ego's been faced with questions it can't answer. And Superman doesn't take any gloating about this like, I made you run the clock. It's, you know, nostalgia is asking what's going on? And Superman just flatly, like, a teacher who just wished the student figured it out earlier before they ran to a wall with scissors says, you know, he figured out how life works. That's all.

01:35:55
June
Yeah. I mean, this is something he goes to the chair for. Keep in mind his belief of self actualization, the entire thing. He's going, I know what I'm doing. I'm the best. I'm confronting this the right way. And he's willing to die for that. There's no guarantee he ever receives this. But in doing so, Superman inadvertently or inadvertently by reminding him of his fragility gives even Luthor a happy ending. You know, where it's even presented after Superman's, you know, the sun now was, you know, it. I believe it's Jimmy brings it up. He just says, even Luther showed remorse. Even Luther showed humanity.

01:36:29
Alan
Yeah.

01:36:30
Case
I also took the scene as being, like, the truest, like, or rather the oldest school callback that we can kind of get, which is that I took the scene as also being kind of a reflection of the reign of the Superman. Because we've got this bald man who realizes that he had all this power and he let it slip away and didn't make a mark on the world while he had it for this brief period of time. You know, I feel like that is, like, the ultimate refutation of the evil Superman scenario because that ultimately wasn't what sold and that's not what inspired people. It is. Superman is a force for good. And Lex Luthor here slots in pretty well for that spot.

01:37:08
Alan
Yeah, absolutely. There's also. It's funny because there is almost. I don't know if cruelty is the right word. Harshness. There's a harshness then because Luthor has the ability to regain those powers and Superman shatters it in front of him. And Luthor is initially bringing up, well, wait. But I see things now. Now that I see things differently, I can save the world. And Sumer just like you would have already. And it can seem harsh because, well, wait. Maybe he needed this paradigm shift. Maybe he needed to see the world the way you see it, to fix things. But it's, again, like, Luthor actually doesn't need any powers to fix the world. If his paradigm's already shifted, that should be good enough. Now the rest is up to him to actually become a better person.

01:37:52
Alan
Instead of asking or even demanding power first and then assuring us he'll better now he actually hasn't put in the work to be trusted with that and again, with all his inventions. Doesn't need that power. He doesn't need that power.

01:38:07
June
And I think he's sent back to jail, in fact, like, he really is, he is, quote unquote, punished for his crimes. But I think the beauty of it is that, like, in doing so, in forcing Lex to have this. This beauty of self awareness, Superman conquers his own fear of death in the process by being, becoming, and recognizing the interconnectedness of even into someone like Luther. Right? Like, you can't. You can't escape the fact that it's all of us. Or what is. What does Luther say? It's just all of us in here together. And that's all there is. That's all we've got. It's a beautiful thing that in that process, Superman is finally willing to let go, right? He's finally comfortable, and he's finally ready to go fly into that big sun.

01:38:48
Case
Which we should have noted. But earlier, part of Solaris attack on our world was not only did Solaris fill our skies with red sunlight, it also poisoned our star so that it was blue and apparently toxic to our life. So Superman has to go deal with the sun trying to kill us all.

01:39:06
Alan
It's funny, because that whole self acceptance of, okay, I'm ready to let go now, and I'm ready to enter this new stage, which will be isolated, but what's killing me is actually just destroying my body. But maybe I can exist beyond that. And if I can, then I can fix the sun. And if that's what I have to do for the next 853 centuries, then, or 833 centuries, then that's what I'm going to do. And what I love about that is that in that acceptance, in that I think I'm strong enough to do this. I love you. Goodbye. The page arrangement, the panel arrangement, mirrors when we saw him with the young woman contemplating suicide and was telling her, you are stronger than you think you are.

01:39:52
Alan
And we, in that arrangement, that long, tall panel on the side of the page, is emphasizing to us the height they are and the danger of. She could have stepped off that ledge. But thank goodness she's here. And here on this page, that long, tall panel is Lois looking up as Superman launches into the sky. Because there's work to do, and I'm ready to do it, and it's going to be okay. And what a great visual callback.

01:40:25
Jmike
I do also like the fact that you start to see the cell degradation in his face and, like, the energy starting to burst through his skin at this point. And now it's sparkling around him, too.

01:40:36
June
Yeah, it's interesting. It's almost a form of watching him die. Slow motion. Right? Like you're seeing for the first time Superman be visibly ill. I mean, we're told that he's sick this entire time, but never slows him down, really. But here it is, that last moment where he really can't deny it's all breaking up and it's spectacular. It's like fireworks, really.

01:40:55
Case
Yeah. He bursts into the sky and as, like a flaming comet and races into this blue star and makes it yellow so that we can live again. Truly amazing stuff there. And then we get this, like, nice little epilogue of, like, lois still holding out hope for him and Jimmy still having wild shit. Like, he just shows up with the jetpack because, you know, it's Jimmy Olsen.

01:41:14
Alan
Yeah.

01:41:14
Case
He's got access to that shit.

01:41:15
June
But also part of that is that now Jimmy can fly just like Superman. Right. We've, the world's moved on and there's still room for that.

01:41:23
Case
Yeah, yeah. We got a shot of Superman and it's like this really, like, interesting. I don't know what art style it's reflecting, but it feels like something like 19th century ish depiction of the heart. Literally. He's framed in what appears to be a heart, but it's a mechanical heart. Yeah.

01:41:44
Alan
It's glass tubes and all. It's very, to me, that sort of early 20th century working man, the sweat of your brow is going to help us idea. And it goes to, I mean, initially, when they were even thinking about Superman as being a heroic character, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, before they thought of the costume, we're just picturing him as this herculean dude with no shirt and trousers who look like he could have just walked off a construction site. Yeah. He's still at heart and in a literal heart, this sort of depression era working class hero who just wants to make sure that we're okay.

01:42:29
Case
Yeah. Every time I see this panel, I think he's wearing overhaul overalls.

01:42:33
June
Right.

01:42:34
Case
And he's not. He's not. But, like, that just is the design. Like, he feels like a John Henry type right here. Like, so much so. But nope, he's still just in a Superman costume.

01:42:43
Alan
It would be great if he had made himself overalls and then, like, you checking him later and he's also got, like, a fun train conductor's hat and he's just living his best life. He's made himself a breakfast nook in the corner of the heart and then a reading area in the other corner of the heart.

01:43:03
June
He's igniting the sun, but he's also creating sunproof genes at the same time.

01:43:06
Case
Yeah.

01:43:07
Alan
Like, I mean, he's a guy. He's got to sit down from time to time. He's got to be comfortable.

01:43:13
Case
Yeah. Kansas modesty still is impossible.

01:43:15
June
That's very true. Yeah.

01:43:19
Alan
Yeah. And so it's like, but it's also that wonderful. You know, what you were saying, june, about the world continues. It's so funny to me because there are other stories of a superhero retiring and particular, like, some folks who do a story of Superman's final story or their idea of Superman's final story, where there's an implication of, and then everything went back to normal, and we didn't really have supervillains anymore. And for some reason, there weren't new generations of mad scientists and da da da. You know, it's like, no, some things went back to normal. Some things have changed. Jimmy Olsen is still a person who's been on these amazing adventures and can have a rocket pack, and strange adventures will still be happening. The parasite still exists. Other villains still exist. Batman and Robin are still out there doing their thing, and.

01:44:08
Alan
Yeah, just that the ending is the ending of this story, but it's not the ending of Superman. You're not seeing Lois die. You're not seeing, and then Earth was fine forever. Just things go on. And you know what? Who knows what will happen next? Because Quintum seems to be making a Superman two, a Superman second, and we don't know how that'll go. Morrison did confirm that the young guy with golden Superman prime who shows up at the end of the time travel issue with Paul Kentucky is a young superman. Secundus Gil doesn't tell you anything, does he? Does he have dark years? What is the extent of his powers? Does he stay on earth the whole time? Does he go off and become a wandering adventurer or sage does.

01:44:56
Alan
Does, yeah, there's lots of open possibility there, and I think that's great because there is something, one of the things about the longevity of comics is there is always that idea of to be continued and something could come next and something can be revised or re approached and to have that feeling but also still present an ending, to present something that does also work as the last Superman story is. We'll say it again like a very lovely balancing act to me.

01:45:27
June
I definitely read the ending as Superman getting his happy ending. In the sense that Jimmy's still Jimmy, the world's still moving on. Nobody's so devastated or torn apart by his death that things are gonna stop or going to slow down or be grim. But he does leave his hope with Lois, right? Like, he does pass that on. There is still a part of him there. And that's very beautiful. Like, you get your happy ending, even if you don't get to see it again.

01:45:57
Alan
You don't need the tangible proof that Luther was demanding.

01:46:00
June
And that's what he has to accept before he is ready to let go. Right? Like, that's sort of like, I'm not going to be here, and that's okay. Very beautiful book. Like, I can't think of another superhero book that takes so much care and attention to study one topic for twelve issues straight the way that this does. Superman trying to understand and accept his own death. But it's so rich, every single one of these interpretations and every single one of these false supermans that are in front of him that can accept death at the end. It's just a very peaceful and calm and quiet world.

01:46:32
Case
Yeah. Just a really thoughtful work that is paired with really fantastic art. Like, we, you know, we praise quitely at the top, but, like, you know, we haven't really talked about, like, all the brilliant panel layouts. Like, Alan, you brought up the parallel structure between the. The suicide scene and then the, like, the Superman send off. But, like, so many wonderful layouts. Like the print in the prison issue when, like, they're walking down the stairs of the prison and, like, they're. We are seeing them literally at each of the, like, the different points or like, the different landings of the steps while having zoom ins on the left and right flanking it. You know, just really interesting works that's, like, outside of the normal, like, either a nine panel grid or whatever, kind of, like, much more rigid structures that we're dealing with.

01:47:15
Case
Like, whitely's, like, really playing with panel layouts in order to give senses of movement or to give us perspectives on how scenes should be interpreted. You know, just. And again, we said that the color and everything by Jamie Grant is stunning. The book is a visual treat on top of everything else. And it is narratively so fulfilling, especially when taken as a whole.

01:47:37
Alan
And, I mean, every cover works beautifully, just as its own poster.

01:47:42
June
Very true.

01:47:44
Alan
Just amazing work. And, yeah, so many panels, so many pages just are quite stunning. And also just, there are books out there where there's a great penciler, but maybe the anchor went too heavy on things and didn't quite match their energy. Or it's a great anchor and pencil team, but colors are a little bit off for the tonality. Or great art story ain't quite right. Or great story, man. That art didn't really convey the crowd in the way that writer clearly meant the crowd to be conveyed or didn't convey the scope the writer clearly wanted to have. And here, no. Everyone worked so beautifully together.

01:48:33
Jmike
You could tell they had a lot of fun with certain scenes in this book. Like when the Pizarros first attack.

01:48:40
June
Oh, yeah.

01:48:41
Jmike
And there's a panel where they're, like, actively running around the city, switching things around, like the McDonald's signs, and they're flipping the one way street signs upside down, so they're pointing the other direction. You can tell they had a lot of fun with those.

01:48:56
June
Every single scene where Superman accidentally saved someone by fumbling as Clark Kent is just, like, quietly stunting so hard. Just this incredible visual motion language. Like, you didn't have to draw 14 after images of Clark Kent spilling coffee. But you get that in the first issue to let you know what you're in for. That's very cool. It's so devoid of irony. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is such an honest and authentic work. And the art complements that so much because I think if at any point in time it was played a little tongue in cheek, it really wouldn't hit that hard.

01:49:31
Alan
There's a simplicity to the artwork at times because sometimes you'll just have rather than overly complex backgrounds and perspectives. Sometimes you'll just have two people against a gray background. And you understand they're at the fortress or they're walking in a hallway or something. But the focus is these two people, and how are they looking at each other and letting that speak for the scene? And then you'll have hyper detail on. When you see candor in the bottle city, it's not three or four buildings that are like, there are a couple dozen buildings layered onto.

01:50:09
Case
That's intricate.

01:50:10
Alan
It's a sense of scale and depth there. And same thing with the time sphere and the fortress of solitude. It's not just here are two chairs and a control panel. And somehow this travels to. No, there's levers and wires and interconnecting parts underneath. And then just, I mean, I think was the third time I was reading the comic and I realized that the space shuttle in the force of solitude is Columbia. Which immediately invites you of, yeah, it's not our world, man. And why are we pretending that superheroes live in our world? Which is something Morrison costly brings up, like, yeah, it's not our world in this world. Superman stopped that or helped it in some way.

01:50:57
June
This work even posits that we need that world. We need Superman to live in a world that's not our own. For us to get that idea of what humanity could really do or be. Be. It goes right back to the liminal spaces that were existing in the bizarro stories, where Superman's the fairy for us. Right. Superman's our glimpse into a different world. It's not ours, but ours could look a little more like that.

01:51:18
Alan
Yeah, it's. Again, we might not be able to ever literally become angelic, but in the process of trying, what could we become that's in between here and there?

01:51:31
June
How do we gain Superman's perspective? Right. The thing that everyone's missing the entire work, and the gift that he grants everybody his perspective and his ability to sense the world and be present in it.

01:51:44
Alan
I would love to have sat in or read the notes that were sent to frank quietly and just like, of, so this is what a Kronivore looks like. And just bring that perception to life of like, it's silly, but scary at the same time. It's something that's implying it exists in different dimensions. And therefore, we can only see parts of it. We can't see the whole, which is another idea Morrison loves and that they've used for bat mite and creatures in the invisibles and other things.

01:52:23
June
Oh, yeah, totally. In the Invisibles. The filth, too, is a great one about that sort of distance in space.

01:52:29
Alan
Yeah.

01:52:30
Case
So I'm really glad that we looked at this again. It's been a while since I've read it, and I was really happy to really sit down and read it from start to finish, especially after, like I said, having reread so much Morrison stuff and read future Morrison stuff. You know, junior on when we talked about action comics for the new 52 run. So, like, lots of fun, kind of like, re exploring all that. J Mike, did you say that you actually hadn't read this all before we prepped for this episode?

01:52:56
Jmike
Make me feel embarrassed again. No, I hadn't read all this.

01:53:00
Alan
I'm not embarrassed.

01:53:01
Case
I'm not trying to embarrass you. But you're gonna come for me, Case.

01:53:04
Alan
The show where we shame J Mike. You are correct to be successful.

01:53:08
Jmike
What have you done?

01:53:09
Case
No, no, because you read it for this.

01:53:12
Jmike
I can see the pitchforks and flame.

01:53:15
Alan
Torches now case is known for his unforgiving nature and his gatekeeping ways. It's very true.

01:53:22
Case
Yeah, I, yeah, my entire existence is just to persecute everyone.

01:53:25
June
You're just treating j mike the way that Superman would want us to.

01:53:28
Jmike
I know.

01:53:28
Alan
That's right. That's right.

01:53:31
Jmike
I read, like, I think the first issue, and I was like, cool, I'll come back to it later. But then I saw, like I said, I saw the movie first, and so that was like, my first introduction to the all star Superman thing. But there's a lot more going on here. A little, a little bit more. And now that I've seen both, I can appreciate the book for everything that it has in it and everything that's going for it. It's a really good man trying to think, like, is this my favorite Superman book? Because I liked, went, we've gone over Earth one Superman, and we talked about how close that was to the whole Snyderverse thing and how they were producing that the same, but done right, they're kind of going over at that same time.

01:54:23
Jmike
And the Snyderverse thing happened, and then Earth one Superman happened, and I really loved that. And Superman for all seasons, that was a great two. I think this is pretty much right up there with those two as some of my favorite Superman literature.

01:54:36
Case
Yeah, it certainly, I mean, like, it has a lot of Runway, so there's, you know, there are series that just would not, you know, just don't have the breathing room to get all the same ideas out. But this is certainly a strong piece. There's a reason why we saved this for episode 100. So it, like I said, I'm really glad that we looked at it. I, I don't know if I'd say it's necessarily my favorite, but it certainly is spending a lot of time with a lot of the ideas that I love the most about Superman. I don't know. I still like, if anyone, like gun to my head, I usually still will go to Superman secret identity as my kind of first choice on that one.

01:55:10
Case
But that's also playing with, like, well, what if Superman was in the real world, too, which is, like, different themes? Anyway, suffice it to say, though, this is a great book. It's big and it's fun, but it's still a quick read. Like, you can knock it out in an afternoon without too much effort. It doesn't require a shitload of foreknowledge, and it also doesn't feel like it's stripping it out unnecessarily. Like, there are there is stuff for people who are continuity wonks and who really appreciate all those, all the weird little details and so forth. So I love it a lot and I'm really glad to look at it again. June, thank you for coming on. Thank you for bringing like a crap ton of notes. And thank you for bringing poetry to discuss.

01:55:50
June
You might be asking yourself, did you really read poetry? It's like, yes. Am I any fun at parties? No, buddy, I'm worse. I read poetry at your damn house.

01:56:00
Case
So, June, if people are looking to find you, follow you, where can they find you, follow you, do all that stuff.

01:56:05
June
You can find me on Twitter opalandjuniper. I do not post anymore, I guess, but I'll answer questions. You're welcome to talk to me or shoot me a message or whatever. I also have a podcast that is a game history podcast. It is a study of the history of criminality in video games in the video game business. Our topics include abandonware, copyright law, sampling, white collar crime, queer erasure, bootlegging, custom firmware, fan translations, and a billion other things. I do that one with my buddy Mike Bachmann. You might have heard him from the Drunks and Dragons podcast. Now the greeting Adventures podcast. And we've got some new episodes coming out soon, so, you know, excited to share those with the world. Also in the Shu podcast, I run the show weird adventures in space.

01:56:56
June
And if you like, these sort of high minded, you know, abstract, high fantasy Sci-Fi ideas might be up your alley. It's about superheroes trying and failing to create a utopia on Mars. And finally, if you are into card games like I am, I've made a few with some couple of my artist friends of mine. You can get those at Poreskeleton games.com.

01:57:18
Case
Yeah, the games are fun. That's actually how we first met. Famously, you just had a cake of your prototype card games, and were in an elevator together, and I was like, what's that? And then next thing I know, it's been years of us just chatting about.

01:57:33
June
Pretty much random superhero shit.

01:57:36
Case
So thank you again for coming on. And everyone should check all those out. I got a sneak peek at what will be one of your future game crimes episodes at Geekly Con. Talking about sampling. And that was a fantastic time. So everyone should check that out. Check out the Twitch channel. Also, because y'all do amazing playing games that I've never heard of. Having a lot of fun with it, showing off cool hardware.

01:57:57
June
Yeah, we're goofing around a little bit, but we occasionally do a more serious one. Our next upcoming episode on Game Crimes is about the connections between the Saudi Arabia venture capital funds and modern AAA gaming. So, you know, given everything that's been in the news, feels topical. Come and check it out. Great. Thank you.

01:58:16
Case
Wild stuff. Alan, thank you for coming and bringing, like, the wealth of knowledge that you always have on any of these subjects. And, like, the amount of continuity references that I totally missed are very appreciated.

01:58:28
Alan
My pleasure. I'm always happy to discuss history of pop culture and the stories behind the stories and especially characters like Superman.

01:58:38
Case
Yeah. If there's anything you want to plug today, by all means, sure.

01:58:42
Alan
So, once again, if you've not seen it, go to Netflix and find rrR. It's so good. Guys like, you don't. You don't understand. It's like, you see two bros and you're like, what are they gonna do? Could they possibly fight the British? And it's like, well, maybe they will by picking up a leopard and throwing it at a man's face. And you're like, that can't happen. But it does, and it's amazing. And I would also suggest maybe you can go to Amazon and check out Romy and Michelle's high school reunion, which is just a good time. Also the worst person in the world.

01:59:16
Case
It was like a game of chicken of, like, all right, so what is he gonna. What is he gonna plug right there?

01:59:21
Alan
These are all great things you should watch that'll improve your life. They'll, like, clean your teeth. It's good times. And I've got projects.

01:59:29
Case
My teeth are rrr white.

01:59:31
Alan
Yeah, I've got projects that I just can't talk about yet, but they'll be out there. And then I'll tell case, and he'll.

01:59:39
Case
Tell you, where can people find you?

01:59:41
Jmike
Follow you.

01:59:42
Case
What have you got going on?

01:59:42
Jmike
I am on Twitter at j Mike 101. I post funny jokes. I post funny gifts sometimes, and I reply. I respond to case and all the things that he gets me into whenever I can.

01:59:54
Case
This is true. A good chunk of our relationship is me being like, dude, this would be cool. Hey, everyone tell J Mike this thing is cool. And then everyone just like, dog piles being like, j Mike, this thing is cool.

02:00:03
Alan
J Mike, you should. You should tell people to go to steam and play night in the woods also, which is a great game. Such a good game, folks. I also want to give a shout out to Laura Hudson, my dear, dear friend Laura Hudson, who recommended RR in night in the woods to me. Game changers. Awesome.

02:00:22
Case
And then as for me, you can find me on Twitter acesakin. You can find the podcast innosteelpod. You can find more episodes of this show@certainpov.com dot where you can also find a link to our discord server where you can come get sneak peeks, chat about nerdy stuff, you know, all that jazz. You can also find tons of other great shows, like I'm, I'll be selfish today, which is, we've got another pass, which is one of my shows. We're coming up on episode 150. So we are doing all kinds of crazy stuff. It's a great time. My co host Sam Alisea and I have been having so much fun looking at movies and trying to, like, really get to the heart of, like, where they didn't work. And for movies that worked really well, like, what creativity allowed them to overcome adversity.

02:01:07
Case
So that's a cool time. You should also check out the certain POV YouTube channel. We've got clips of all of, well, my podcast, at least. I've been posting, like, animated clips to correspond to episode drops, as well as we've got the side quest videos, we've got the Superman analog videos. A lot of great times. But yeah, come back over to Certainpov.com, check out the next episode of Men of Steel, because we are continuing our conversation about all star Superman by talking about the animated movie. And we've got different great guests for that one. So we'll see you then. And until then, stay super man.

02:01:44
Jmike
Men of steel is a certain POV production. Our hosts are J. Mike Foley Olsen and case akin. The show is edited by Matt Storm. Our logo is by Chris Bautista. Episode art is by case Aiken. And our theme is by Jeff Moon.

02:02:04
Case
Hey, Nerf Herders, you sure you want to go with that? Hey, everyone. There we go. More inviting. Have you ever had a movie that you really wanted to love, but something holds up, or one that you did love in spite of a flaw? Well, I'm Case Aiker. And I'm Sam Alisea. And on another pass, we sit down with cool guests to look at movies.

02:02:24
Alan
That we find fascinating but flawed, and.

02:02:27
Case
We try to imagine what could have been done when they were made to give them that little push. We're not experts. We just believe in criticism. Constructive criticism, sure. So come take another pass at some movies with us. And every now and then, we can celebrate movies that did it on their own, too. You can find us@certainpov.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Pass it on cpov certainpov.com.