Superman Revamp Stuff 2

Superman belongs to DC/Time-Warner/the Siegels & Shusters, yadda yadda yadda.

Another notebook scribble of radically-revamped Superman mythology, which in this case represents Krypton's esteemed minister of defense.

As I pointed out previously, Zodd (deliberately spelled with two Ds) doesn't start out as a vengeful S.O.B. - in fact, in a bit of acknowledgement to Geoff Johns, he's one of the few Kryptonians who actually believes Jor'L's apocalyptic prophecies. His starship, the Doomsday (which, as it happens, harbors a cryogenically-stored small army of cloned prehistoric Kryptonians as foot soldiers, as I reintroduced here [link] ), is the last functioning such vessel in Kryptonian airspace thanks to Jaks'R and Mahla's gleefully bloody insurrection, and is orbiting Krypton when she goes up in smoke, narrowly surviving the shock of the blast but leaving the ship irreparably damaged and mortally wounding most of the crew. In a last-ditch effort, Zodd orders himself and his surviving crew - Kuec'ZL, Faurra, Rsa and N'on - to patch back together one of their escape ships and track Kal'L's fleeing birthing matrix with the hope of ensuring its preservation at all costs; halfway through the voyage, the sputtering craft prompts the crew to initialize cryo-stasis inside their heavily-reinforced space suits (which accounts for why the suit you see above is a bit bulkier than Zodd is). The ship ultimately enters Earth airspace over New Mexico but it shot down in its weakened state; in addition, the crash causes fatal damage to the cryo-systems of Kuec'ZL and Faurra, killing them both. Zodd, Rsa and N'on, however, are kept alive and their bodies carted off by government officials from the crash-site in Roswell.

Yeah, you read that right. Roswell, New Mexico.

Now, many of you are probably realizing that this would obviously have to be happening in 1947. Which, the way I re-wrote it, it is. But this is also where I REALLY started screwing with things: Kal'L's birthing pod lands in Smallville in June of 1938 (a nod to when Superman himself actually first appeared in comics), and yet he makes his first public appearance IN the Costume in the present day. Meaning he would have to be nearly a century old, right? Well, yes, in this version, he is, without looking a day over 30; this is something of a nod to most of DC's alternate-future stories where the most Superman has aged thirty or forty years from now is a some gray hair and a few wrinkles, whereas Bruce Wayne is a battered wreck of a grumpy old man; here Clark's aging slows down after puberty, which is also when his powers start to reach their apex. This necessitates him spending many more years out in the world and even more in the Arctic where he learns the truth of his origins; it's during his Arctic seclusion that the Fortress of Solitude is sort of "built" around him while his body is lying dormant and his mind is trippin' really far out. In fact, the Fortress doesn't even "build itself" in a matter of seconds - going back to an idea I had devised previously, the booster off of Kal'L's ship crashed into the Arctic Ocean and he's dove in to reactivate it, and while he's taking his astral sojourn advanced Kryptonian nanotechnology is transforming the glacier around him into a massive extraterrestrial wonderland monitored by an A.I. named Kal-X (so named because the stardrive programs it using the stored engrams from Jor'L and those copied from Kal'L, thus for him to better acclimate to it). Kal-X is also responsible for accessing most of the world's computer networks (save one particularly well-guarded one rooting from just outside Gotham City ) to acquire new diplomas, licenses, etc. for Clark Kent so that he can start re-building his journalistic career in the present.

Well, Clark's career as a superhero ultimately puts him at odds with Zodd, Rsa and N'on, who after awakening from stasis quickly eradicate their government captors with their super-powers; worse, in retaliating against their subversions, Kal'L quickly finds himself outmatched not just by their number by by their powers themselves - he can jump far and fast and withstand machine gun fire without much damage and cause things to ignite just by staring intensely at them, but Zodd and his surviving crew are capable of sustained flight and emitting laser beams from their eyes capable of leveling entire city blocks. In other words, Clark has Golden Age-level powers, whereas Zodd has Modern Age-level (bordering on Silver Age/Richard Lester-level) powers.

Now one other thing you may have noticed here is the familiarity of Zodd's spacesuit - particularly how much it would seem to look appropriate on a certain bald megalomaniac. Well, again, going back to the ideas I had posted here [link] , this hearkens back to the idea of Lex Luthor developing a lucrative career as a brilliant military engineer, which is sort of "fused" together from both the Silver Age 'mad scientist' persona AND the modern 'wealthy industrialist' version of the character, with maybe a touch of the 'government agent' version of Lex that was intended to be in one of the many pitches for the fifth Superman film (in fact, in my previous story idea I even had Hardcastle and later Waller as government liaisons to Lex's company).