14 Apr 06 Kal-L’s Ultimate Fate …
WARNING: Major comic book geekery ahead.
I’m a fan of Infinite Crisis, a revolutionary comic book event that’s currently going on in the D.C. Universe. I’ve been wondering what will happen to the “Golden Age” Superman, and I found this theory by a guy named “PatrickG” on a message board. It’d make a helluva lot of sense:
Well, I can say one thing.
That is that the merger almost certainly won’t happen now. We have a new DCU with everything pretty much fixed, continuity-wise, and if Kal-L and Kal-El were going to merge, it would have been then.
HOWEVER…
Somebody had a neat suggestion that “Superman Prime” from DC One Million is Kal-L.
It works on a lot of levels and ties things together.
DC One Million was the celebration of a million months since Superman’s 1938 debut.
It also spoke a lot about “the original Superman” who left earth after Lois Lane’s death and after millenia roaming the stars and a thousand years in the sun, returns where he is celebrated by a universe of super-heroes where everyone has super-powers and reveres Superman as their inspiration. Superman Prime is reunited with Lois.
And it’s not a boring old Heaven. There are villains there but the tone of everything is brighter and more energetic.
And Superman Prime’s chest emblem is based on a temporary emblem Superman wore in the 40s for a few issues.
And his history tells of a Superman Secundus who fathered the lineage of Supermen that carry the name in the future.
Well, Kal-El could well be that Superman Secundus.
And in the end, Kal-L’s happy ending is there. It saves DC1M and Kal-L’s place in “continuity” while freeing up the monthly Superman from the certainty of a happy ending that DC1M provided.
A “Heaven” with dying wife and two kids is no send off for Kal-L. Merging seems unlikely. Death is depressing.
But if he flies off into space never to be seen again and we learn that he is the celebrated champion of universe in the distant future, with Lois at his side again, it seems like a nice kind of closure for the character.
