{"id":6921,"date":"2011-07-07T06:00:11","date_gmt":"2011-07-07T06:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=6921"},"modified":"2011-07-06T14:07:10","modified_gmt":"2011-07-06T14:07:10","slug":"world-of-krypton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2011\/07\/07\/world-of-krypton\/","title":{"rendered":"World of Krypton"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy Paul Kupperberg<\/strong>, Howard Chaykin<\/strong>, Murphy Anderson<\/strong> & Frank Chiaramonte<\/strong> (DC\/Tor Books)
\nISBN: 0-523-49017-8<\/p>\n

For fans and comics creators alike continuity can be a harsh mistress. These days, when maintaining a faux-historical cloak of rational integrity for the made-up worlds we inhabit is paramount, the worst casualty of the semi-regular sweeping changes, rationalisations and reboots is great stories that suddenly \u00e2\u20ac\u0153never happened\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. The most painful example of this – for me at least – was the wholesale loss of the entire charm-drenched mythology that had evolved around Superman’s birthworld in the wonder years between 1948 and 1985.<\/p>\n

Silver Age readers buying Superman<\/strong>, Action Comics<\/strong>, Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane<\/strong>, World’s Finest Comics<\/strong> and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen <\/strong>(not forgetting Superboy<\/strong> and Adventure Comics<\/strong>) <\/strong>would delight every time some fascinating snippet of information leaked out. We spent our rainy days filling in the incredible blanks about the lost world through the delightful and thrilling tales from those halcyon publications.<\/p>\n

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s Superman<\/strong> – and an issue of Superman Family<\/strong> – carried a back-up series entitled ‘The Fabulous World of Krypton’<\/em> relating \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Untold Tales of Superman’s Native Planet\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (so long overdue for a complete trade paperback collection) by a host of the industry’s greatest talents which further explored that defunct wonderland.<\/p>\n

Many of those twenty-seven vignettes were referenced alongside the key Krypton-starring issues of the Superman franchise in 1979 when scripter Paul Kupperberg and artists Howard Chaykin, Murphy Anderson & Frank Chiaramonte synthesised the scattered back-story details into DC’s first miniseries World of Krypton<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Although never collected into a graphic novel, this glorious indulgence was resized into a nifty black and white paperback book in 1982, supervised by and with an introduction from the much-missed, multi-talented official DC memory E. Nelson Bridwell (who was always the go-to guy for any detail of fact or trivia concerning the company’s vast comics output). This magical celebration of life on the best of all fictional worlds is a grand old slice of comics fun and nostalgia long overdue for a critical reappraisal and a wider audience.<\/p>\n

The story opens with Superman reviewing a tape-diary found on the moon: a document from his deceased father Jor-El which details the scientist’s life, career and struggle with the nay-saying political authorities whose inaction doomed the Kryptonian race to near extinction.<\/p>\n

As the Man of Steel listens on, he hears how Jor-El wooed and won his mother Lara Lor-Van despite all the sinister efforts of the planetary marriage computer to frustrate them, how he discovered anti-gravity and invented the Phantom Zone ray, uncovered the lost technology of a dead race which provided the clues to Kal-El’s escape rocket, and learns his father’s take on Superman’s many time-twisting trips to Krypton\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

He feels his father’s pain when Brainiac stole the city of Kandor, when rogue scientist Jax-Ur blew up the inhabited moon of Wegthor, when civil war almost wracked the planet thanks to the deranged militarist General Zod and when his own cousin Kru forever disgraced the noble House of El\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Heavily referencing immortal classics such as ‘Superman’s Return to Krypton’<\/em> (Superman<\/strong> volume 1 #141, November 1960), Fabulous World of Krypton<\/strong> mini-epics ‘Jor-El’s Golden Folly’<\/em>, ‘Moon-Crossed Love’<\/em>, ‘Marriage, Kryptonian Style’<\/em> and a host of others, this epochal saga from simpler and more wondrous times is a sheer delight for any fan tired of unremitting angst and non-stop crises\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Moreover the sensitive and meticulous reformatting of the original miniseries by editor Bridwell and designers Bob Rozakis, Shelley Eiber & Alex Saviuk makes this book one of the most smoothly readable of all paperback comic collections.<\/p>\n

Although not that easy to find, World of Krypton<\/strong> is still worth tracking down and until DC get around to gathering the Krypton chronicles into the kind of compendium they deserve this is still your best shot at seeing the evolution of a world we all wanted to live on back in the heady days of yore\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
\n\u00c2\u00a9 1982 DC Comics Inc. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Paul Kupperberg, Howard Chaykin, Murphy Anderson & Frank Chiaramonte (DC\/Tor Books) ISBN: 0-523-49017-8 For fans and comics creators alike continuity can be a harsh mistress. These days, when maintaining a faux-historical cloak of rational integrity for the made-up worlds we inhabit is paramount, the worst casualty of the semi-regular sweeping changes, rationalisations and reboots … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “World of Krypton”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[127,107,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nostalgia","category-science-fiction","category-superman"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-1ND","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}