In the comments for my essay on THE GHOST OF KRYPTON PAST, AT-AT Pilot posted the following:
What is the mythical significance of the fire-fall crystals and Kryptonite? Why is it that the remaining fragments of his doomed planet hurt Superman? Is it supposed to be interpreted as a painful reminder of a past that he wishes he could forget? But of course, Superman has been written to be appreciative of his Kryptonian roots, with the Fortress of Solitude serving as a museum for his mementos. (The one time I can recall Superman distancing himself from his Kryptonian self was the last issue of the Byrne series, where--if I recall accurately--Superman asserts that he is now earth's son, not Krypton's.)
Kryptonite may have the most involved backstory of any element in the Superman mythos.
One of the most egregious mistakes about kryptonite is that it was introduced because Superman was so mighty that he had no weaknesses. That may be true of Superman as he had developed in 1949, when kryptonite officially entered the comics-canon in SUPERMAN #61 (1949). However, the Superman who had been produced for DC by the studio of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster did not need a specific weakness. Throughout the eight-or-so years that the studio elaborated the nature of the Man of Steel, the hero was occasionally seen being stymied by energy-rays or mental powers. (The moderately famous "Powerstone" story even shows him being briefly mesmerized by the hypnosis of guardian serpents.) I don't know at what point the hero became so godlike that he could fly into the heart of Earth's sun without taking harm, though I'm reasonably sure that it took place after DC kicked Siegel and Schuster to the curb in the late 1940s. But the point is that Siegel himself never thought of his pre-eminent creation as being invulnerable in the way later DC editors defined the term.
And yet, in 1940 Siegel birthed the basic idea of kryptonite in a story rejected by DC's editors and then squirreled away in a vault for the next fifty-plus years. "The K-Metal from Krypton" only came to the light of day because in 1994 Mark Waid, working on staff for DC, encountered the story in the files and made known its contents to comics-fandom. It's been further theorized that though DC never published the story (except for a very brief excerpt in a 1960s annual), Whitney Ellsworth made all Superman material available to the writers of the 1940-51 SUPERMAN radio serial, and that one of those writers used Siegel's K-metal story as a template for the 1943 episode "The Meteor from Krypton," in which the name "kryptonite" was first used for the radioactive mineral that could bring death to Krypton's only surviving son.
Since the Siegel story was not completed at the time of its composition-- though the aforementioned site provided a modern interpretation-- we can't know exactly why Siegel introduced the K-metal. But as I mentioned above, Siegel's Superman did not need a specific weakness, because he was already vulnerable to a handful of esoteric menaces. The most likely reasons are that (a) Siegel wanted to inject a new level of drama into Superman's adventures, in part by revealing his identity of Clark Kent to Lois Lane, and (b) to get that drama, the hero would find his mighty powers endangered by metal from his homeworld. Siegel could have conjured up any kind of power-draining entity or material, but I'm sure that on some level he appreciated the irony of Superman being weakened by a fragment of his own world. Indeed, on page 15 of the modern interpretation, Clark Kent muses that originally he derived "great strength and powers from the planet," which might be the only time Siegel had ever advanced that particular explanation of Superman's powers.
I'm not aware of any examples from folklore or myth in which a hero's strength is either increased or depleted by contact with native soil. The only example in which native soil increases a character's mojo would seem Bram Stoker's 1897 DRACULA. To the best of my knowledge, Stoker made up the idea of the vampire needing to rest in his native Earth out of whole cloth. But there can be no question that Stoker gave the idea special significance, for I just happened to cover the matter in depth in my 2008 AA essay A MOVABLE FEASTER. I wrote in part:
Early in the novel, Dracula tells Jonathan Harker:
"Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders."
Naturally, at that point in the novel, the vampire does not dwell on how this "blood-enriched" earth is going to make it possible for him to pick up stakes (so to speak) and invade merry old England. But much later in the novel, Van Helsing goes into greater detail about Dracula's literal need for earth that has been sanctified (as well as ensanguinated) by the past:
"There have been from the loins of this very one [Dracula] great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest."
So in Stoker's mythos the sacred earth of Dracula's Transylvania is replete with both "the blood of the heroic dead" and "memories of great men and good women." Blood, then, is not just plasma and platelets in Stoker's cosmos, but rather the objective correlate of life itself, a sort of vitality that doesn't vanish with the deaths of individual humans but which seeps into the earth and sustains the life of a vampire quite as much as feeding off the blood of the living. This "sacred earth" explanation may explain how Dracula and his vampire brides managed to survive without exsanguinating every last mortal left in the region, especially given that Stoker's Transylvania often seems like a barren Hades-on-Earth, lacking the vitality that Dracula praises in past generations of his land. Stoker, in formulating this notion of the vampire needing to take his native soil with him when he departed for other climes, was thus overcoming the folkloric notion that a vampire had to return to his grave. Thanks to Stoker, Dracula could take his grave with him as he travelled.
To be sure, Stoker never has any scenes which directly prove Van Helsing's assertion about Dracula's dependence on Transylvanian soil-- that is, scenes like having Dracula try without success to sleep in English soil. But apparently whatever "blood-memories" in Dracula's native soil nourish the vampire, that vitality can be trumped by a greater vitality, as Van Helsing uses holy wafers, presumably blessed by the Catholic Church, to make some of Dracula's earth-filled coffins useless to him. (Side-note: the "holy water" device popular in many later vampire-tales appears nowhere in the original novel.) Still, the original folklore-limitation does crop again with respect to Dracula's only vampiric convert in England, for apparently Lucy Westenra can't just go anywhere she likes, but is obliged to return to her mausoleum at daybreak. Stoker does not emphasize her dependence on being close to English soil, but one must presume that she has some such dependence on returning to her original grave.
I think it's pretty likely that by 1940 Jerry Siegel had read DRACULA, though I don't know that he ever committed to posterity any comment on Stoker's greatest work. A long time ago I read a vampire story Siegel did for his 1930s series DOCTOR OCCULT, but I don't recall any special Stoker quotes therein. But writers are packrats, and I think it very likely that he picked up the symbolism of "beneficial earth" from Stoker and later transformed it into "inimical earth" for his superhero.
Oh, and though it has nothing to do with the derivation of kryptonite, the title of this essay I rook from the King James Bible, wherein God tells the murderous Cain that he's "cursed from the earth"-- meaning not that the earth is literally poisonous to Cain; just that the earth won't give him sustenance. Readers of this blog should know that a day without a myth-quote is like a day without sunshine.
7 comments:
It would makes sense if he borrowed the conceit from Dracula and inverted it for his story. I've always found the idea to be really weird and interesting. I thought there was a decent attempt to make some poetic sense out of Kryptonite with the creation of the villain Conduit (introduced in the #0 issues of the Superman titles beginning in 1994), who is infused with the mineral, but he did not achieve the popularity I expected, so maybe the mythic power wasn't truly there. I should mention Metallo as another villain powered by Kryptonite, but I don't think he's a good antagonist (based on his appearances on the Superman Animated Series).
Thank you for posting! As always, this Campbellian-Fryeian criticism you bring to comics is impressive.
You're welcome. and it's my pleasure.
I hadn't heard of Conduit, so maybe I'll check that out. One never knows in what obscure corner of the pop fiction universe one may find things that are at least near-mythic.
That's more or less my take on Metallo. Years ago, I put together an essay on his first appearance in the sixties, but when I more recently reread the essay, I didn't think my points held up. The writer clearly wanted Metallo to be sort of a dark double of Superman, one who could survive on the element fatal to Kryptonians, but somehow his story didn't gel as well as I wanted. He does seem to have staying power, having been adapted three-four times as well as getting new incarnations in the comics, but that may be because the Superman series as a whole doesn't have that many memorable villains to conjure with. I can't think of any from the last 20 years that have really resonated with fans, can you?
I really can't think of any recent villains. They did try to have Rogol Zaar (introduced in 2018) play an important part in the Superman mythos, but the fans are not too fond of him (even though he is visually similar to Doomsday). The DC writers seem to have more fun creating villains for Batman. I don't read the Batman comics, but I've seen action figures of Hush and The Batman Who Laughs; those characters seem to have a considerable following. I suppose it's difficult to create villains for Superman because he resides in a basically optimistic and fantastic sub-world (hopefully I've understood the concept from The Virgin Spring review) where people see flying heroes daily, while Batman's grimy, "down-to-earth" sub-world is a bit closer to our own, and does not require a powerful being like Darkseid to disrupt it (although the Batman Who Laughs does seem to have fantastic powers).
Hi there,
I like your reverse Dracula/homesoil interpretation for Kryptonite’s effects over Superman. However, I’ ve always thought about it in a more prosaic way. In the earlier years of Superman adventures, back at the (almost) very beggining, Superman’s powers had a rationale that was lift from scientific principles, that had been used before (in 1912, to be more precise) by Edgar Rice Burroughs to explain whay John Carter had superior strenght and was able to leap “tal buildings in a single bound” when in Mars: gravity, as it was affected by the red planet’s size relative to Earth’s.
This is the explanation Siegel & Schuster presented in a page in Superman #1 (1939), under the title “Scientific Explanation of Superman’s Amazing Strenght”, where they write: “Superman came to Earth from the planet Krypton, whose inhabitants had evolved, after millions of years, to physical perfection! The smaller size of our planet, with its smaller gravity pull, assists Superman’s tremendous muscles in the performance of miraculous feats of strenght!” So, SUperman’s powers come from a perfectly evolved physique aided by Earth’s smaller gravity pull.
My guess is that the basic simple explanation became unconsciously associated with the nature of the planets themselves, and not wih the simple gravity of each. So, John Carter didn’t become a Superman because of Mars lower gravity pull, but because he was on Mars. The correspondente consequence (also unconsciously present in the back of readers’ – and maybe writers’ – minds) was that once back on Earth, he would loose his powers.
The same correlation, I guess, was made throughout the years between Earth and Krypton. Superman was super-powerful, not because of Earth’s lower gravity, but because he was on Earth – hence, once back on Krypton, he would loose his powers. The cinch is, as Krypton was destroyed, he couldn’t go back to it – but Krypton could come to him, in the form of shards from the exploded planet – kryptonite.
In the presence of Kryptonite, he was back on Krypton, and so it would annul Earth’s influence. Obviously, this would not explain why the other mementos from Krypton he would come t keep in his Arctic Fortress wouldn’t have the same effect. And there I would guess that it came from some form of essentialist thinking. As we do not think of our transformed goods (chairs, houses, even processed meat) as a part of nature, Krypton artifacts are (psycologically, at least) not part of Krypton. In some holistic way, only the natural debris of the exploded planet somehow embody its essence.
I think that the introduction, later on, of the bottled city of Kandor, where Kryptonians loose their powers, because they are back on Krypton, bears this out (although one could also tae account of the diminute size of Kandor).
Then, in 1966, when Superman firt encounters the effects of a Red Sun (in Superman #184), a sun similar to that of Krypton, the psychological process I sketched above came together. Gravity, not able to explain by then Superman’s invulnerability and flight capabilities, was substituted by the sun’s very own radiation, which facilitates the mental association between Superman’s powers and the place where he’s at – his environment. Now, by making Superman loose his powers whenever he’s under the light of a red son, he can go back to the natural conditions of Krypton, where he would loose his powers, just as John Carter woud loose his on returning to Earth. And one could ye bring to the table the color-code of this assiciation: in the same reverse correlation you find between Krypton’s and Transsylvannian soil over Superman and Dracula, one can marvel at how a red planet giver superpowers to John Carter, and a red sun seeps the strenght from Superman.
And those are my two cents worth of it (although it doensn’t add anything to any eventual mythicity, as per AT-AT Pilot’s question).
Cheers,
Sherman
Hi again, Gene,
After jotting down my previous comment, I read your previous post ("MYTHCOMICS: "THE GHOST OF KRYPTON PAST"), and I noticed you covered the core of my argument. Sorry for the repetition.
Cheers!
Sherman
I didn't find your post repetitious, and part of the reason is because you worked in something I left out of my account: that the closest thing Siegel gave to an early explanation of his hero's powers was that short prologue about the ant lifting things greater than its own weight, or whatever the insect was. I think the idea about the Kryptonians having super-powers on their own world appeared mostly in materials that didn't make it into print, except for the comic strip origin of Superman, where Siegel briefly shows Jor-L leaping into a tall building at a single bound (more or less). Siegel conflates the idea of advanced evolution with that of an organism being formed to a general condition of gravity-- for instance, no animal born of Krypton DOESN'T have the strength to resist the gravity, or it wouldn't have survived to become a species. That's not evolution, any more than being able to breathe the home planet's atmosphere.
I feel that Siegel must have figured out eventually that gravity wouldn't account for powers like X-ray vision, but I haven't come across any story he wrote that expands on the subject. My late BNF friend Rich Morrissey was probably enough of a Superman expert that he could have said exactly when Big Blue started diving into suns and juggling planet. But for the present I have to assume that's a development of post-Siegel writers, who kept upping the hero's powers with the idea of further impressing their youthful audience. And I would guess that's where it became critical for the DC people to advance the solar hypothesis.
Thanks for commenting; a pleasure as always.
Hey Pilot,
IMO the biggest problem with Superman's rogues gallery is the very success of Superman himself. His breakout success in 1938 changed DC from a routine New York publisher of pulps and girly mags to a major player, and an awful lot of Golden Age Superman stories have this tone of "Isn't Superman great? Let us show you how great he is in every way!" Siegel's scripts have this quality as well, and that might be because he too was so elevated in reputation if not in actual power. Thus it became common to toss out villains almost as afterthoughts. As I recall Superman's first major villain, the Ultra-Humanite, appears halfway through what looks like a mundane story about subway conditions, or something like that. And even when Siegel left DC in the late forties, subsequent writers didn't seem to feel the need to expand on the villains. Brainiac's debut in 1958 opened the gates a little, since he was followed by the Phantom Zone dastards and interesting one-shots like Zha-Vam in the sixties, but still, not a great deal of expansion.
Contrast this approach to the way William Marston handled his rogue's gallery for the similarly powerful Wonder Woman. Yes, there's lots of gushing about how great WW is, and a lot of villains are dull stereotypes. But at least Marston would devote some time to the origins of certain foes, particularly the pre-eminent Doctor Psycho. Robert Kanigher took the reins for something like twenty years thereafter, but even though a lot of his villains are badly conceived, at least he kept adding to the roster over the years.
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