It was finally time for Superman to propose marriage to spunky prize-winning investigative reporter, Lois Lane. Only he had to propose as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent. One of the innovations John Byrne had made in his reboot of the Superman mythos a few years earlier was the concept that Superman didn't want to get romantic with Lois Lane while using his Superman persona - he wanted her to become fond of Kansas-farmboy-turned-ace-reporter Clark Kent, a "normal guy" whom she could see as more of an equal. If she did fall in love with him, it wouldn't be because of his phenomenal strength and the way his name was mentioned in the headlines every week whenever he saved the city (or the state, or the country, or the world, or whatever) from yet another nigh-unstoppable supervillain.
This was a major change from the way it had been for decades, where the general attitude had been "Everybody knows Superman and Lois Lane are very fond of each other, whereas Clark Kent is perceived as a first-rate journalist but a pretty boring and occasionally laughable wimp in his personal life, if he has one at all." Christopher Reeve's portrayal in his first Superman movie captured the stereotype of Clark very, very well. The concept that Lois considered Clark to be beneath her because of his lack of gumption was first established in the original Superman story which was produced by his co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and first saw print in what is now the most valuable collectible comic book in existence: Action Comics #1. (I believe one of the reasons it's so valuable is that no more than three or four copies in Mint/Near Mint condition are known to exist in the world today, since nobody knew at the time that someday it would be a collector's item. Nobody took comic books that seriously in 1938.)
Byrne changed all that when a big DC event called "Crisis on Infinite Earths" gave him an excuse to toss out a lot of rather silly old Superman continuity and start over with a new perspective.
By late 1990, it appears that DC had hit the point where they were ready to have Clark pop the question. (Of course, Superman, being as bright as he allegedly is, wouldn't pop the question until he figured he had an excellent chance of getting the desired response.) The panel in which she accepted was printed in Newsweek before the comic book actually hit the stands, giving people time to get ready to buy it the day it appeared (which is what I did).
In reading the introduction to this trade paperback collection just now, I learned something I had never guessed at the time I was buying this storyline off the stands in late 1990. The original plot outline called for a gradual buildup to a situation where it was logical for Clark Kent to propose marriage to Lois - and for her to think it over carefully and say NO! But somewhere along the line during a story conference, writer Jerry Ordway expressed doubt at the validity of this concept, and suggested they could have her say Yes at the critical moment instead. They all knew this was a risky maneuver that would permanently change the dynamics of the Superman/Lois/Clark triangle even if the engagement later fell apart, but they decided to go for it. I think they were right, even though I understand why Charles Schulz of "Peanuts" fame once said that the greatest mistake in newspaper comic strip history was probably when Al Capp finally had his hero Li'l Abner marry Daisy Mae, the girl who had been hopelessly in love with him since day one of his comic strip. Schulz felt that finally letting her hook him destroyed the main premise of the strip that had been good for so many suspenseful and humorous near-misses for decades previous, and that the strip never quite recovered from the drastic alteration in the circumstances of the hero.
(But they had better not marry Batman off in their regular continuity, is all I can say. Superman is sufficiently cheerful and wholesome to cope with family responsibilities, but the brooding dark knight of the Gotham shadows is more than any wife and children should be expected to put up with. Excuse me . . . am I digressing again?)
Anyway! Let's discuss the title of this storyline! In the pre-Crisis, pre-John Byrne era, kryptonite came in all colors of the rainbow. Green kryptonite (the most common) sapped Superman's strength and could make him deathly ill. Gold kryptonite would remove his powers (or those of any other Kryptonian type) permanently. Red kryptonite was the real wild card: each time he was exposed to a particular chunk of the stuff for the very first time, it caused some sort of random change in his mind and/or body which lasted for exactly 24 hours. Such as making him a giant, or incredibly tiny, or fat, or whatever the writers wanted to come up with for a good visual effect. After the first exposure, however, he could handle that particular piece of Red K with his bare hands in the future with no ill effects, as I recall, but the NEXT time he ran into another piece of Red K for the first time he'd suffer from some other fascinating 24-hour-transformation! (Can you say "Incredibly Convenient Reusable Plot Device"? I thought you could!)
Byrne did away with all that. One tiny little piece of green kryptonite had made it to Earth, and that was it. Lex Luthor eventually got his hands on that piece and had it carved to resemble a gemstone which was then set in a ring which he wore on his right hand to make Superman keep a respectful distance away from him. However, sometime before this storyline, Luthor discovered he had miscalculated slightly. Exposure to a piece of Green K could weaken and even kill Superman in short order, but the amount of the radioactive output was so small (unless you had Superman's unique physiology) that Luthor had figured an Earthman had nothing to worry about. BUT it turned out if you wore a piece of it day and night for several months, the cumulative exposure to all that radiation just might give you cancer. By the time Luthor realized what was wrong, his hand had to be amputated and replaced by a bionic one - and it turned out that was just a stopgap measure; the cancer had already spread into the rest of his metabolism by the time they chopped his right hand off. That's his situation as this storyline opens, and he's bitter about it. Naturally, he blames the entire thing on Superman!
However, the Superman writers wanted to dust off the Red Kryptonite concept just once, but since they didn't want to restore the idea that the stuff (along with lots of other colors) had resulted from the explosion of Krypton, they needed a different origin for it this time. Such as some powerful supernatural entity synthesizing the stuff from scratch as a practical joke.
Accordingly, at the start of this storyline, a bright red rock shaped like a skull bounces off Luthor's head as he's visiting the cemetary (a long story I won't go into). It talks to him. Suddenly a cute little purple derby hat materializes atop the rock and Luthor says, "Mxyzptlk!"
Mr. Mxyzptlk is an imp from "the fifth dimension" who seems to have vast supernatural powers to change things around in our own world, and is dedicated to making mischief, especially to annoy Superman. Mxy (to abbreviate his unpronounceable name) says helpfully, "Here's the deal -- this rock will make you and Super-Dupe physical equals! It's your chance to go toe-to-toe with our "pal"!" The only catch is that under no circumstances must Luthor tell Superman that Mxy arranged the whole situation.
The rock delivers as promised when Luthor puts it to the test - Superman is teleported into Luthor's office (soaking wet and gasping for breath) - and after a minute Luthor realizes that the "physical equals" thing is true but not in the way he expected. Superman's powers have been stripped away from him and he's now got to face the world with the metabolism of a normal human being! Luthor celebrates by beating Superman up and then calling for corporate security guards to toss him out the front door. Luthor doesn't just want Superman to die, he wants him to suffer the suspense of wondering which of his many old enemies will find him first after word gets around that he's no longer bulletproof.
Being the man of action that he is, Superman insists upon going out to fight a couple of those old foes when word comes that they are stirring up trouble. He's armed only with some hi-tech doodads from a scientist friend, and pure guts and ingenuity. I figured he was insane to take such risks against people who had previously given him a run for his money when he was at full strength, and I'm not sure I have any need to change that opinion now. But somehow he got away with it. (My guess is that the writers were trying to demonstrate that it isn't just being faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a charging locomotive and so forth that makes Clark Kent's alter-ego worthy to use the adjective "Super" as part of his name.) Of course he got his powers back eventually, but it was after he'd had some time to adjust to only being able to move around with the normal strength and speed of a human being that he presented a diamond ring to Lois and popped the question. Just after he got his powers back, he bumps into her again as Clark and she tells him she's decided.
My best guess at the time was that somehow DC felt it more appropriate if he proposed to her as Clark while he really was "just Clark," being more of an equal instead of vastly more powerful than she was at the time, and with no knowledge of when or if he would ever regain his powers. Later, at the time he got married, they put him through this whole "lost-my-powers-and-have-to-cope-with-life's-problems-as-a-mere-mortal-man" scenario all over again! I'm sure there's a very deep philosophical meaning to this, but draw your own conclusions as to the details of what it means.
The next two "chapters" of the ongoing Superman saga (he was in three monthly titles at the time and stories jumped from one to another in rotation, so that it was kinda like having one ongoing serial that just happened to publish new installments three times a month) are included in this volume principally so that we can see Lex Luthor finally die, beating the slow lingering painful death-by-cancer in favor of a quick crash while piloting an experimental supersonic aircraft of his own design.
Really. He died. Destroyed in the crash. Deep-sixed. Daisy-pushing time. Suicide. He finally quit. Superman will never be troubled by his most famous enemy again. Honest!
Don't you believe me?
All right already! Have it your way! He came back later! Cloning, and all that! In fact, in the current Superman comic books that have been coming out since the Presidential Election last year, a new and improved Lex Luthor won as a third party candidate and is now sitting in the Oval Office being hailed by one and all as President Luthor! Now there's a scary thought for you!
These stories were pretty well-written, especially considering that three writers (one for each monthly book at the time) had to coordinate their efforts to keep all the plot threads neatly synchronized. Roger Stern, Jerry Ordway, and Dan Jurgens. Likewise the art is first-class. The continuity here happened eleven years ago (although it's been less time than that from Superman's perspective) but if you want to add a copy of the eventful occasion when Clark Kent finally proposed marriage to the lady he'd been crazy about for years, you won't feel you completely wasted your money on this volume. Granted, the wedding itself turned out to be several years (our time) in the future, what with Superman getting killed and staying that way for quite some time before coming back from the dead (Lois must have felt that some men will do anything to avoid making a real commitment!) but it did eventually happen and I think the intention is to leave Lois and Clark as a happy couple for a long time to come. Of course, I've been wrong before!
I gave it four stars because, while the storyline was touching and made a lot of people happy, it just wasn't so brilliantly done as to make me feel the need to reread it every year or so ever since it was published. It feels a bit more like a slice out of an ongoing soap opera than like a complete "graphic novel" in its own right which would have a beginning, middle, and end. (It is possible that I would feel differently about that if Lex Luthor's death in the last installment here had turned out to be a real ending for that character.) One other problem is that, as this collection ends, Clark still has not told Lois that the man she is engaged to marry leads a double life as Superman, the Man of Steel. He knows he ought to do it, now that she's fallen in love with him for himself, but hasn't worked up the nerve. (He did get around to it a couple of months later.)
The statistics: For those of you interested in knowing exactly which comic books comprised the storyline which was collected in this volume, they were (in chronological order):
Superman #49
The Adventures of Superman #472
Starman #28
Action Comics #659
Superman #50 (the official finale of the Krimson Kryptonite story)
The Adventures of Superman #473
Action Comics #660 (Luthor dies in a plane crash, sort of)
In reference to the "Starman" comic, I should mention that this is the Starman series which began in 1988 under the guidance of writer Roger Stern and starring a hero whose real name was Will Payton and ran a few years (about three, I think) before it was cancelled, and not the newer series which came later, written by James Robinson featuring new hero Jack Knight (using the same superhero name) which began in 1994 and is still in print today. If you go looking for this Starman issue in the friendly neighborhood comic shop, it will have the words "Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite Part 2/A" as a banner across the bottom of the front cover so that Superman fans would realize the storyline had done a crossover into a book featuring another superhero entirely. You can't miss it!
Also, the series which had originally been called "Superman" was altered to "Adventures of Superman" for reasons I never fully understood in the mid-80s. At that time they started a new comic book with "Superman #1" on the cover. The 49th and 50th issues of the original Superman title would have come out sometime in the 1940s and are probably worth thousands of dollars by now. You want ones with a cover date from 1990 on them, if you're trying to duplicate the contents of this trade paperback by seeking bargains on the individual issues that were later collected here. Just thought I'd clear that up!
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