Multiversity Lights the Menorah: Night Two

From the desk of Brian Salvatore, friend to all the Jews:

L’chaim! The Multiversity Comics staff is a multicultural bunch, and wanted to spread around the holiday cheer to our chosen brethren with our new series: Multiversity Lights the Menorah!

Each night, at sundown, we will light a candle on the Menorah and tell a tale of a story, creator’s run, or general theme in comics that, much like the oil that lasted eight nights for the Israelites, went on for far longer than any of us could have expected. L’chaim! The Multiversity Comics staff is a multicultural bunch, and wanted to spread around the holiday cheer to our chosen brethren with our new series: Multiversity Lights the Menorah!

Each night, at sundown, we will light another candle on the Menorah and tell a tale of a story, creator’s run, or general theme in comics that, much like the oil that lasted eight nights for the Israelites, went on for far longer than any of us could have expected. Saying the blessing on the second night of Hanukkah is Gilbert Short, who will be telling the tale of the (never-ending) New Krypton Saga!

So, grab the shammus and light the second candle, Gil!

Click here to relight the first candle.

In the mythos of The Last Son of Krypton, there was always a lingering question: “What will come of the Bottle City of Kandor?” Sure, we knew the city would eventually be re-enlarged due to its occasional appearance in the pages of Legion of Super-Heroes, but it was one of the things that drove Superman in the Silver Age. What was to become of the city? When would he ever restore it? We finally got an answer in 2008 when Supes rescued Kandor from Brainiac and restored it to its original size in the Antarctic. What followed was an adventure that included intrigue, alien politics, human xenophobia, and lots and lots of Kryptonians.

Just a few of the illegal aliens

When I say a lot, I do mean a lot. As in 100,000 Kryptonians a lot. When one of them could theoretically take over the world, and 27 of them TRIED once before; it’s not much of a stretch to think that humans would be leery of any more K-People arriving on Earth. Perhaps Lex Luthor was even right about Superman being an early Invader! How’s that for a kick in the head? It’s a complicated plot, that’s for sure. The DC Superman editors seemed to know this because they decided to tell the story over an 18 month period along all of the Superman Family Titles running at the time; Superman, Action Comics, Supergirl, and they even created a book JUST for Clark to appear in while he served as General Zod’s right hand man called World of New Krypton (and after Geoff Johns relaunched Adventure Comics with Conner Kent, a fifth book was added to the narrative). If you just asked yourself “then how a book called Action Comics could exist without Superman, let alone a book CALLED SUPERMAN, this was your chance to see exactly how that could happen.

The very idea that this story could be so exhaustively told is quite frankly astounding. Told in a serialized format over no fewer than NINETY-EIGHT SEPARATE ISSUES plus 4 one-off specials called World’s Finest starring the Superman and Batman Families teaming up together (though is Guardian REALLY in the Superman family?). This was the storyline that chugged on no matter how much people didn’t really care anymore.

Why would they either? When fans say they love the Superman Family, they more often than not mean the core family, meaning Clark, Kara, Peej, and Conner, along with Krypto. But instead of books that starred them coping with the arrival of the New Kryptonians exclusively, we were also “blessed” with the inclusion of the Kryptonian Nightwing (not Dick Grayson, more like a Soap Opera Aged Chris Kent) and Flamebird (who bore a striking resemblance to Jean Grey’s Phoenix) along with everyone’s favorite Non-Kryptonian Kryptonian Lar Gand, otherwise known as Mon-El. The DC Editors found a great way to make the Superman books totally inaccessible from the end of 2008 through May of 2010. Maybe they thought that The Clone Saga needed company.

The story was so needlessly complicated who WOULD want to read it. On one hand you have Project 7734, a US Military Project that conveniently looks like “hELL” upside down (provided you’re looking at it in digital), and on another you have some flimsy prophecy about the Nightwing and Flamebird using their powers to…do something. I can’t really remember what it was. You even had General Zod played in a slightly more sympathetic light as the genius military leader of a world that came back from extinction only to be threatened by another species (again!). The stories just went on forever until it was mercifully put to its end in the Better-Than-The-Rest-Of-The-Arc-But-Still-Kind-Of-Mediocre-Event War of the Supermen.

In the end, Superman stood victorious over…someone (New Krypton was destroyed by Earth, but Supes had to take on Zod again to save us), but didn’t really feel like he won anything at all. So he went on a quest: a quest to reacquaint himself with America. And we all know how well that turned out. But to be fair to that story, if your Lead In was this long, bloated and weak, wouldn’t you be log, bloated, and weak too?

No words move a book off the shelves faster than “Featuring Mon-El and Guardian”