The Planet Krypton
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The Pre-Crisis Krypton (1950s-1985)
A Brief History
[This section refers to a universe that no longer exists. It is the Silver Age Krypton (1950s - early 1980s) as seen through the lens of the immediate pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths stories. This is the birthworld of the Earth-One Superman. This first part was to have been the opening to an aborted Earth-One Superman profile that I still hope to one day finish.]
The planet Krypton was created by a race of cosmic beings called the Sun Thrivers. They made the super massive planet to act as a balance to their unstable home, the artificial red giant star Negus-12 [SUPERMAN #255, “The Sun of Superman” by Cary Bates]. Krypton boasted a vast array of strange geography including Firefalls, Gold Volcanos, Jewelled Mountains, and Shrinkwater Lakes. Almost ten thousand cycles ago the planet’s human population (descended from human space explorers who evolved to live under Krypton’s extreme gravity) were united by the lawgiver Ewok. He adopted the surname “El” meaning star and founded a bloodline that would dominate much of Krypton’s scientific and political history.
Krypton and the House of El advanced cycle after cycle. Sul-EL was the first Kryptonian to observe our Earth, Hatu-El discovered electricity, Val-EL explored the vast continents of Krypton and Tal-EL sculpted the planet’s government, yet of all those in the House of El perhaps the greatest lived in the final few generations. Brothers Jor-El and Zor-El were Krypton’s greatest scientists. Jor-El was the scientist who had discovered and utilised the Phantom Zone as a method of punishing criminals. He was also the scientist who first discovered Krypton’s fate.
Krypton was only ever meant to be an artificial construct and only had a finite lifespan. After ten thousand years of utopia Krypton was dying, yet the ruling Council refused to accept Jor-El’s warnings. They forced him to prepare in secret. His first attempts at creating a space craft to escape Krypton were limited - he managed to put his son’s pet dog into orbit and to launch a chimp into deep space. Eventually he managed to construct a space arc in the capitol Kandor, but the entire city was stolen by the villain Brainiac. With little time remaining Jor-El managed to construct a much smaller ship that could transport one person to safety.
As earthquakes and eruptions tore at the planet Jor-El and his wife Lara placed their son into the rocket ship. Jor-El tried to convince Lara to go with Kal-El, but she could not leave her husband. Jor-El launched the tiny craft into the heavens and it jumped though a wormhole bound for Earth. The gravity of the wormhole sucked in orbital debris including some of Jor-El’s earlier experiments. In one last death throw Krypton threw radioactive rubble far into deep space. Fragments of that rubble reached Earth as the radioactive element Green Kryptonite and a small fraction of it was transmuted by a space nebula into a strange red isotope.
Ironically the Guardians of the Universe, who had been watching Kal-El as a potential leader in their Green Lantern Corps, only learnt of Krypton’s impending doom late. Despite a valiant effort their agent, Green Lantern Tomar-Re, was unable to stop the Krypton exploding. However the Guardians were able to watch over Kal-El’s rocket and guide it safely to Earth. [SUPERMAN #257, “The Greatest Green Lantern” by Elliot S. Maggin, from an idea by Neal Adams]
Legacy and Survivors
Much of the following information is culled from a rather battered copy of the THE GREAT SUPERMAN BOOK.
The destruction of Krypton did not mean the end of the Kryptonian civilisation. Krypton’s most famous survivor was Jor-El’s son, Kal-El, who had been rocketed safely to Earth. Kal-El was adopted by an elderly couple and took the Earth-name Clark Kent. He lived in disguise amongst them for most of his life. His Kryptonian physiology and the far weaker gravity of Earth gave him powers far beyond those of mortal Earthmen and he used these powers, first as Superboy and then as Superman, to become a champion of the people. He defended them from natural disasters, alien terrorists, and criminal masterminds. He built a “Fortress of Solitude” deep in the Arctic where he could store artefacts from Krypton and other advanced civilisations. The Fortress was a memorial to Krypton. It became a focus point for Krypton’s survivors and for years was home to the Bottle City of Kandor.
Kandor was Krypton’s capitol city, but it had been “stolen” by the interstellar criminal Brainiac. He shrank the City and kept it in an unbreakable glass bottle. The Kandorian’s adapted to their imprisonment and tried to preserve as much of their way as life as possible. Ironically the kidnapping spared Kandor from Krypton’s fate, but it was years before a chance encounter between Superman and Brainiac allowed Kandor to pass back into Kryptonian control. A method for returning Kandor to its original size eluded Kandor’s best minds for decades. They created a number of methods to shrink and enlarge a single person, but the process could never be scaled up.
Kal-El regularly visited Kandor and his exploits as Superman gained him a widespread following amongst the population. They watched his adventures via “Earth Monitors” and knew of his secret identity. Kandor gained its own costumed heroes when a pair of citizens adopted the costumes of Nightwing and Flamebird (identities previously used by Superman and Jimmy Olsen). A team of highly trained Kandorians even formed the Superman Emergency Squad. If Superman were ever in trouble they’d leave the city and go to his aid. They didn’t enlarge, but they did gain Superman’s powers becoming a swarm of miniature supermen.
Jor-El had insured the survival of his own son, but he had also unwittingly allowed for the survival of Krypton’s penal population. Years before, Jor-El had developed a couple of different prison-alternatives. His first experiment was to place criminals in an orbital suspended animation pod while special telepathic systems wiped their criminal tendencies. When Kal-El’s rocket ship warped away from Krypton its wake dragged several pods with it. The prisoners later escaped, but were recaptured by Superman. The same space warp also pulled through a number of Jor-El’s experimental animal space launches. These included a monkey Beppo, and more famously Krypto the superdog. Krypto was saved by a teenage Kal-El and became a staunch ally of first Superboy and then Superman.
The practice of exiling criminals into space ended after Jor-El’s discovery of the Phantom Zone. People “projected” into the Zone became wrath-like ghosts who neither aged nor required sustenance. It was to be the prefect “safe” prison and during Krypton’s final decades many of their worse and corrupt criminals were exiled to the Zone. It survived Krypton’s destruction and a number of random occurrences allowed some of its inmates to escape. They would normally plague Superman for a time before being re-exiled by a Phantom Zone Projector in the Fortress of Solitude. Imprisonment in the Zone was not without parole and a special panel was held every year in the city of Kandor. Those criminals whose sentences were up and were considered to have reformed were returned to the civilian population and a number of them became productive members of Kandorian society.
One of the most dramatic survival stories of Krypton was that of Argo City - home of Jor-El’s brother Zor-El. Remarkably Argo City was blasted free from Krypton as a intact piece of the planet’s mantle and was protected from the ravages of space by a SPECIAL “weather dome” that Zor-El had created. Zor-El also devised a system of shields that protected the citizens from the deadly Kryptonite radiation given off by the ground beneath them (the rock Argo City sat on had been converted into Kryptonite just like the rest of Krypton). For fifteen lonely years Argo City drifted in space and people tried to continue with their lives. Yet tragedy had only been postponed and not truly adverted.
A chance meteorite shower ripped through Zor-El’s shields and Kryptonite radiation flooded the city. It wasn’t a quick end and the population slowly dwindled over a period of weeks. Zor-El and his family were among the final survivors. He was aware of Jor-El experiments with rocketry and the survival of Kal-El on Earth. Thus he constructed a similar rocket and used it to send his teenage daughter, Kara Zor-El, to Earth to join her cousin. For years it was thought that Zor-El and his wife, Alura, had perished after they sent Kara to safety. However it turned out that they had managed to project themselves into a Phantom Zone like dimension. They survived there for a number of years before they were rescued and they then took up residence in the Bottle City of Kandor.
Years of experiments finally paid off when Kandor was returned to its original size on a remote uninhabited planet. The planet circled a red star and mimicked Krypton’s original environment. Uniquely the entire star system was located on a weak point between dimensional planes, this meant that Rokyn (“Rao’s Gift”, formerly New Krypton) shifted between dimensional planes and only spent part of its time in the Earth dimension.
The re-enlargement process was flawed and large parts of Kandor that had been built after its imprisonment did not survive. However the Kandorians were resilient and rebuild and even enlarged the remaining sections. It was to Rokyn that Kal-El brought the body of his cousin Kara after she was killed in combat with the Anti-Monitor.
Future Events
The Chronicles tell us little about the legacy of Krypton following Supergirl’s death. One speculative document was unearthed by the Earth researchers Moore et al (1986, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow”). It tells of a Superman from the near future who was forced to take a last standard against a number of his more dangerous foes. The slaughter that followed claimed many of Superman’s friends and enemies and was only stopped when Superman used lethal force to stop a maniacal fifth dimensional imp. Kal-El was distraught at having to break his vow never to kill and willing surrendered his superpowers to the effects of Gold Kryptonite. It is thought that he spent the rest of his life as a normal human married to Lois Lane.
Other alternate future Chronicles tell of a series of cloned Supermen or even of successive generations of Supermen. Little firm data can be concluded from these except that Rokyn seems not to have featured in them - almost as if the trans-dimensional world had finally severed its connection with the Earth dimension.
The Crisis wiped away almost every trace of this Krypton, but elements survived in Pocket Universes and faux-Kryptons (see Page 3 of this article).
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