Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: The Five Other Identities of Superman

I'm a big fan of Superman, a huge fan. I'm Godzilla-sized, on top of the Goodyear Blimp, eating large sandwiches. BIG, is what I'm saying. That being said, though, as much as I love the character, I have something of a shit list for the handful of stories – numbering no more than a few thousand, at the outside – that I absolutely loathe.

As a Superman fan, you have to take the absurdity and outright stupidity in stride. The fact of the matter is that, whatever your intentions going in, you're going to have to endure the occasional "Outer Space Buccaneer and her magic space dogs" or "Superman fights the Viet Cong" story, it's just going to happen.

Although it's innocuous enough, what follows is probably my least favorite Superman story of all time: The Five Other Identities of Superman. I hate it. It's ridiculous without the charm of other similar stories, pedantic without the po-faced sincerity, and also I swear to God there's a photo of artist Al Plastino striking a two-year old child in the face with a hot waffle iron in-between inking panels on this thing. SWEAR TO GOD (Note: Seriously!¹).

The only copy I have of this story is in one of those awe-inspiring DC Digest reprint volumes they used to put out in the early Eighties, alongside a bunch of other stories that ought to give this one a run for its money – Superman pretends to be a genie, Superman pretends to be a bum, yar yar yar – but for some reason, this one in particular gets up my knickers with cleats on. I'm guessing it has something to do with my general fatigue over the origin story of Superman – it's a story that was so thoroughly padded out during the Silver Age with asides and distractions that Superman should have been forty-eight and balding when he arrived on Earth. Oh wait, I forgot, one of these stories established that he was actually a hundred years old when he got to Earth, BUT THAT'S FOR ANOTHER TIME! On to this barker!

The used spaceship dealership is totally wrecked!

The whole shebang begins with Superman flying over the ocean on patrol - keeping an eye out for Brainiac skinny-dipping or Metallo raping a whale, I guess - when Green Arrow starts taking potshots at him with a siren arrow from about five miles away, to judge by the panel. When Superman flies to the island – presumably to whip Arrow's ass, I guess – he finds his pals in the Justice League gadding it up on the beach.

It kind of looks like they're there for Superman's intervention, but instead they're presenting to him a tape recording sent to Earth by Jor-El which Aquaman found in some sub-oceanic rental return bin. After EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES are spent explaining how the thing got to Earth, it's revealed that Jor-El was really into fanfic, and he's used some hopped-up computer program to create cheap-looking syndicated adventure shows based on "What if I totally sent my son to other planets instead of Earth? Would it be stupid?" I can answer that one with a Magic Eightball and no more than three tries, but let's you and I keep going…

"Let's eat him!"

I'm almost proud of them for getting this first one out of the way, as it's so irredeemably stupid. Had I been the editor, I would have saved it for the end, so as to punctuate my shame-fueled suicide. The story here is that Superman ends up on Xann, planet of giants where he's no bigger than, dare I say it – AN ATOM? Or a crayon, I guess, actually. A dinner roll, a novelty keychain. He's tiny.

So yeah, he grows up on this planet where the rest of the population blithely acknowledges a perfectly-formed grown adult who's all of six inches tall. They are SO blasé about the whole affair, as a matter of fact, that when terroristd later abduct a number of townspeople and hold them hostage in a distant citadel AND a six-inch tall flying man with super-strength saves them and defeats the bad guys, NO ONE SUSPECTS HIS TRUE IDENTITY. He's all walking around in his street clothes, "Why does no one ever see Kal-El and Birdman in the same room? Aw, no, Kal-El is too meek to be BIRDMAN!" Honestly.

A Ntann-Goat? As opposed to what?

Next, Jor-El dials up Kal-El's life on Planet Valair, which - despite sounding like a seriously cut-rate airline out of Mexico City or something – is actually a planet where all life is completely underwater. Superman ends up as some sort of cut-rate Aquaman, IF YOU CAN IMAGINE SUCH AN INDIGNITY.

Then it's to Ntann, which Jor-El describes as a backwards world and which I'd have to agree because they're obviously illiterate. Someone let the deaf kid with the harelip name the planet, evidently.

Anyway, because they're so primitive, Superman ends up becoming a cut-rate Green Arrow, and similarly on the eternally benighted planet Saruun, he becomes "The Diro," an unpowered costumed lawman wearing a costume resembling the Batman's and bearing a name resembling something that very cruel seventh-graders call unpopular kids.

"And he appears to be comfortable with allowing young Kal-El
to suckle at his man-teat, as is the way of us Kryptonians."

Of all these possible – and incredibly stupid – futures for baby Kal-El's eventual planetary zipcode, Saruun and the faux-Batman kick disappoint me the most. I was hoping Saruun would be a world where people's parents were always getting shot and folks were always swearing vengeance and also everyone had a fancy belt. "Nice belt," you'd say to a stranger, and he'd reply "Thanks, it shoots fire."

Last planet is Gangor (oy), which is exactly like Earth by way of Leave It To Beaver, except that it has a red sun and gravity so powerful that Eddie Haskell would have been compressed into a liquefied mass of blood and powdered bone. What really matters, though, is that baby Kal-El gets adopted by a scientist who shoots him in the head with a magic ray gun and now Kal-El can run super-fast. PS – He runs so fast, he manages escape velocity and dies in space. I hope we've all learned something from this story.

Jor-El only hates this possible future because
there's not enough senseless torture involved.

Anyway, Jor-El eventually checks Earth, verifies that his son will wear pajamas all day and have some sort of killer allergy to rocks, and since Jor-El is a big torture aficionado (and he'd already run out of monkeys and dogs to shoot into space), that sounded okay to him. Thus, he saved his son from being (in order) small, wet, technologically backwards, beating people's asses, and asphyxiating. Also, at the end of the story, this adds absolutely bupkiss to the Superman mythos or the understanding of it, and we're basically back where we started, except everyone in the Justice league feels really pretty much replaceable and will probably resent Superman for it from here on out.

I truly hate this story, like I hate most of the stories which extrapolate on the days leading up to the destruction of Krypton, for two reasons; the first is that it doesn't add anything to the character or the atmosphere, it just always ends up "A bunch on unbelievably wrong-headed things happened for a long time and then everyone on Krypton died but this kid didn't and now he's Superman, the end." Congratulations, we've done a lap.

You just needed Aquaman to explain something to you. Don't you feel dirty?

The second reason is because I have a damn near photographic memory for these stories, and whenever I read one I can't help but build this visual timeline of Krypton's pre-destruction days. If we take into account all the test animals Jor-El sent to their seeming, lonely deaths, and the invention of the Phantom Zone Projector and all the criminals who had to be sentenced and sent away, and the alien visitors in numbers beyond counting, and all the other errata and pointless sidetracking and, in the end, Superman's father must have had about fifteen years to try and build a fleet of rocketships to save everyone on Krypton. And yet …

Not only was he Krypton's greatest scientist and worst public speaker, he was its biggest procrastinator.

Anyway, on a whole other topic, there's another story in this book where Superboy gets infected with some crazy super-virus and has to dress up in a totally airtight super-immune mummy wrapping from head-to-toe. Lana creeps up on his secret identity, in the meantime, but Superboy takes care of that problem by letting a COUPLE of the germs with which he's infected get onto Lana (at super-speed, make your own joke about how they were transferred), and thereby causing her to suffer enough brain damage that she develops a brief period of amnesia. Hm. He gave her super-roofies. And to think, this was thirty or thiry-five years before Identity Crisis.

This story, by contrast to the other story, is pretty great because they ran out of pages to tell the conclusion and instead just wrapped it up in a single panel. It's so efficient, I don't know why they don't just do that for every comic ever. "Lex Luthor tried to kill Superman, but he didn't, and now it is … THE END."

¹ No.