Warworld Saga – Then and Now

Superman has been here before. Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s emotion, darkly lavish Warworld Saga has Superman facing a time in his life that he’s never seen before, but the setting is familiar. As the saga reaches its midgame, it’s an interesting time to look back at a previous epic-length story that covered a bit of this ground before, how they compare, and how they differ.

In 1989, the creative minds behind Superman took a big gamble, moving the hero off-planet for an unprecedented span of time. That storyline, aptly referred to by an early issue’s title, “Superman in Space,” had Superman serve a self-exile from Earth for a whopping 13 issues, plus a bit of the issues before and after. Crossing three titles, it was a full six months in which Superman was not seen on our planet in his solo books, years before the death storyline, before any comparable story had removed a signature DC character from their main setting for so long.

The relevance of that story to Johnson’s current one is in the time they both spend on Mongul’s Warworld. While “Superman in Space” was a much longer storyline than this one, it devoted considerable prelude to many preliminary events and adventures before getting to Warworld, a place first introduced in a 1980 multi-issue arc in DC Comics Presents. It also gave large parts of its issues – including one entire issue with no appearances of Superman at all – to the supporting players back in Metropolis, developing those characters in a way that set up the subsequent Triangle Era’s storytelling that made Superman just the lead character in an ensemble cast.

In the early issues of Superman’s exile, he teleported from one venue to another, visiting no fewer than six different planets, spending some time in three different spaceships, and otherwise menaced while in deep space by alien amoebae, an asteroid bombardment, and one star that he got too close to. Some of these were full-fledged adventures, others more momentary experiences to get the man reflecting on his past sins and his traumas. In the big picture, what that storyline did was take the post-reboot farmboy Superman and give him just a pinch of the space-faring worldliness (universeliness?) of his Bronze Age self. It was a success for developing the character, though certainly a failure of his plan to remove himself from any situations where he needed to handle his powers responsibly.

Almost half of the story, however, involved Warworld. Quite unlike the premise of Johnson’s story, 1989’s Superman was taken there alone and against his will, picked up while unconscious by the pilots of a scavenging spaceship and auctioned off as cargo.

At that point, however, the stories to a considerable extent converge in theme. Superman awakes to find his fellow captives looking to pilfer items of value from his person. His powerful physique leads his captors to choose him as a contestant to fight in Warworld’s combat arena. And he finds, among Warworld’s captives, a surprising and important link to Krypton’s past. Though a mere captive, he becomes a symbol of resistance and hope that upends the social order of Warworld from the bottom up. These are all shared between the 1989 story and Warworld Saga. For that matter, those themes are mostly shared by the 1960 historical fiction film Spartacus. And if you want to trace these things further back, there’s the 1950 film Ben-Hur and the actual slave revolt in Ancient Rome. Perhaps equally stirring, the screenwriter of Spartacus was the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, and the public success of that film helped to end blacklisting, a triumphant irony of which Trumbo was surely aware.

Warzoons Scavenge Superman, 1989 and 2021

And so, some of the moments and images of the 1989 story are being repeated now. This is neither borrowing nor homage but sequence. Warworld was characterized a certain way in the past, and so was Superman, and so the stories have to cover some common ground. Not every reader of Warworld Saga has read the 1989 Superman titles, nor will many who have remember them 32 years later with crystal clarity. But revisiting the older story is worth it, to see how they align but more importantly how they don’t.

The 1989 Superman was a man who exiled himself because his psychological vulnerabilities made him recognize that he was a danger to the people of Earth. His values, sense of self, and identify were still being shaped. He was near the beginning of a career in which a Kansas farmboy was way out of his element. It was only in issue #22 of Superman, vol 2 – John Byrne’s last issue – in which his execution of the Pocket Universe Phantom Zoners began Superman’s cycle of uncertainty and regret that led to his self-exile in the hands of other creators. Along the way, he suffered a rather disturbing psychological breakdown, operating under a different identity, unbeknownst to himself, during a fugue state. Imagine how you’d view a local police officer who did that – probably not someone whom you’d wish to see remain on the job. In 2021’s context, for his earlier mistakes, he would already have been cancelled. (In fairness, Superman was beset by extraordinary hardship, psychic invasion, and actual voodoo before breaking down in the way that he did.) 1989’s Superman was unsure of himself, what sort of code of conduct he should follow, whether or not he had the needed self control, and moreover was ignorant even of the facts of his Kryptonian upbringing, with those prerecorded messages from Jor-El only going so far. This was a Superman far from the super-capable demigod of the immediately preceding pre-Crisis era. The Superman in Space story of 1989 sought to take that flawed hero and rebuild him, taking him a few steps back towards the demigod Superman of 1985. This was a story of redemption and growth through trial, missteps, and improvement.

In these respects, the 2021 Superman comes to Warworld on completely different terms. He is in some ways even more self-possessed than the 1985 Superman ever was. He knows exactly who he is, and he came to Warworld not by accident but on a mission. He came not alone but with a team. He came not turned inwards on his self but on the needs of others. He may have miscalculated – badly – on the matter of tactics, but he hasn’t wavered for a millisecond on the intentions of his mission. That’s not where the 1989 Superman began. It was where, at the story’s end, he arrived.

To sum up succinctly the 1989’s story on Warworld, Superman was thrown into the arena to fight as a gladiator. He won all his matches, but refused to kill his vanquished opponents. (This marked an evolution from his execution of the Phantom Zoners and a rebuilding of his pre-Crisis vow never to kill.) Finally, he beat Warworld’s previous champion, Draaga (Rocky IV’s Ivan Drago, clearly the name’s inspiration, was then only a few years in the past). When he refused to kill Draaga, Superman drew the wrath of Mongul, who entered the ring to kill Superman, which was a massive political error. By violating the strict rules of the arena, Mongul initiated a campaign of unrest against himself. He also had mixed results in fighting Superman, as their three skirmishes in and out of the ring gave them each a close win over the other, then a result ambiguous to the characters but not to the readers when Mongul attempted to kill Superman with a ray blast from his amulet, but Superman was teleported away at the last instant, thus seeming to have died as far as Mongul knew. The two never met within the story again. Draaga himself fought Mongul and ultimately everyone fled the stage of the story – Mongul, overthrown, left to heal his wounds. Warworld itself teleported to some other part of the universe before Superman could return to enforce a revolution.

And in the story’s significant subplot, Superman learns a great deal of Krypton’s history from a Cleric who was on the planet long before the time of Jor-El. The Cleric was himself not a native of Krypton (enforcing the concept in 1989 that Superman was the last surviving Kryptonian). However, there was substantial backstory about Krypton’s evolution and how it went through dirtier and more sordid eras in its past before becoming the sterile world of Byrne’s – and Donner’s – visions. This also introduced the Eradicator artifact, a sort of power ring with a surly mind of its own, which has become an enduring feature in Superman’s storylines. It is intriguing that Warworld Saga also includes Kryptonians who come from a time before Jor-El, suggesting a role that they may play in changing Superman’s concept of his own origins, like the Cleric did in 1989.

It’s a pleasure and informative to re-read first the 1980 DC Comics Presents story that introduced Mongul and Warworld, and then the 1989 story before picking up Warworld Saga. Seen one way, it is one long ongoing story, representing three of the most essential of many Superman–Mongul stories. In Superman’s current stay on Warworld as in 1989, he is commanded to kill for Mongul’s pleasure, and as in 1989, he refuses. This commonality across the decades is true despite the fact that the continuity has rebooted, with the pre-Crisis Supergirl an essential part of the first story, and the Byrne characterization of Superman being an essential element of the second. There are little winks in Johnson’s writing to the past, such as Mongul declaring that he will go conquering “flying his cape from our spear,” just a little less brutal than the previous Mongul dreaming, in Alan Moore’s “For the Man Who Has Everything,” that he will place Superman’s head “upon a spike and goes out to trample a world, carrying it before him, his hideous standard.” 

But, beyond the shifts in continuity – the tweaks in the biographical details and history of the DC Universe – one sees an incredible increase in sophistication from 1980 to 1989 and from 1989 to 2021. Johnson’s first remarkable innovation in this story was when the Phaelosians conveyed that they saw their chains as an honor – a culture of slavery that runs so deep, is so bleakly enforced, that its own victims embrace their subjugation, calling it “wearing iron.” To the same effect, the refrain, “So say the dead” shows Warworld’s inhabitants perversely celebrating the premature and brutal death that awaits many of them. Johnson writes dialogue to the character’s mental world, with Chaytil referring to Superman as “The master of Starro! The master of Darkseid!” and in so doing says much about how existing DC characters are part of the culture of one another, and makes some interesting choices in doing so (e.g., Darkseid but not Brainiac). Likewise, Johnson’s characterization of Manchester Black, of Mac, of Midnight – these sparkle.

I have often reflected on how so many great works from DC emerged in the years after 1985, and set a high bar of creativity and quality that has not often been matched or exceeded. However, looking at this one story – this one place and setting, comparable situations – across 41 years, it’s clear that the monthlies now are capable of greater things than one of the better innovative stories from those very years just after DKR and Watchmen. Even if we suspect that we know where the plot may be going – that Superman will end Mongul’s rule – everything we’ve read so far suggests that the way Johnson gets his story gets to its end will be a pleasure to read.