Superman Revamp Stuff 1

Superman is the property of DC/Time-Warner/the Siegel & Shuster estates, blah blah blah.

I haven't had much opportunity to do any actual work on anything lately - mostly more notebook scribbles during lunch breaks, at holiday gatherings, etc. - but in the meantime I've been doing some more Superman-related stuff.

However, this time I've actually been doing some more radical revamping of the mythology. I know, it's blasphemy, I'm raping people's childhoods, etc., etc., but I can't help it. This time I suddenly started going off on a tangent. It had begun with the ideas for a retooled origin I had started working on, and suddenly, recently jumped into something more out-of-the-norm for the Superman fable, I guess you'd say.

In this piece, f'rinstance, I decided to depict Kryptonians as actually LOOKING like what is commonly associated with the 'known' appearance of alien beings, as opposed to being identical to humans. I also altered their naming to be less 'hyphenated', as you can see. The basic idea being played out here is, as a result of their space exploration program being crippled and abandoned as a result of a nasty revolution on Krypton (which in this case WASN'T caused by Zod - he's actually still a somewhat amiable guy by the time Krypton goes kablooie, but he DOES survive; more on that later), the Kryptonian science community focused their energies toward genetic engineering; as a result, when Jor'L selects Earth as the only feasible location for the seed of Kal'L to be born and thrive in, he devises a bio-scanning matrix inside the stardrive that will alter Kal'L's OUTER appearance to make him identical to any Earthling (actually, upon descending over Smallville it scans the Kents passing by in their pickup and alters his physiognomy to match the parameters of those scans). As a result of this genetic alteration, Kal'L's powers are not quite at the level they normally are in the comics - they're pretty much the level they were at start of the Golden Age when he could leap tremendous distances, altitudes and velocities rather than fly (this also sets up what happens later when Zod shows up on Earth, but again, more on that later...).

I redesigned the Costume to be more like a flightsuit rather than tights, with the intent of suggesting that Clark cobbled it together himself from items he'd use in his many travels up to this point amassing worldly and journalistic experience trying to make sense of his fantastic abilities and figure out what to do with them. The "cape", however, IS Kryptonian, and is actually a family sash that was stored in his birthing pod by his mother Llara.

Jor'L, of course, is very much still rooted in the Marlon Brando portrayal of the character in terms of aspects of his physical appearance (a white spitcurl, S on his chest), but he's also smaller, in keeping with both the way Kryptonians have evolved over the last billion years and with some of the known eyewitness "accounts" of aliens and alien abductions generally describe Visitors.

Now, I DID retain the Doomsday design I had sketched out previously - in fact, I lifted it DIRECTLY off of that artwork - but only after I had done another design for Doomsday that was less spiky and more hairy and looked more like the Abominable Snowman than anyone's probably idea of what Doomsday should look like. So I went back to my original re-design. Here the idea is that Doomsday is actually a clone created from the DNA of a prehistoric Kryptonian life-form akin to our own Neanderthals - I suspect that this was probably something that some of Krypton's more radical geneticists developed in addition to visiting random planets performing Byzantine specimen examinations (thus to "connect", in a way, Krypton to the various alien abduction stories here on Earth, and also providing something of an inside track for Jor'L in searching for a suitable adoptive planet for his unborn son).