Jon Kent: Man of Tomorrow?

They married 58 years after they first met. Superman and Lois Lane certainly had a long courtship, so it’s not surprising that they took another 19 years before having their first child.

For decades and decades, the status quo of Superman and Lois Lane turned so slowly you might have thought it was going backwards, and in fact, sometimes it did go backwards. They had fake weddings, imaginary story weddings, weddings on alternate Earths. In one line of stories, Superman had a son whom we saw and a wife who seemed to be Lois but whose back was always to the camera. They had a son on the last page of a famous imaginary story, an adopted son who was written out of history, had Jon Kent in a reality that was written out of history, and there were so many stories whose reality was considered to be imaginary or not, or hinted to be imaginary or not that even a DC editor couldn’t possibly keep track of which stories were asserted when to be real.

For over half a century, writers made Superman into the ultimate bachelor wary of commitment, and even now that he’s definitely married with a son, if you wanted to collect the issues where revealing his identity to Lois, the engagement, marriage, and birth occurred, you’d end up with a curiously thick stack where those events happened, then were altered or revised. However, if you want a quick summary of the lifetime that never actually unfolded in a single version of continuity, there’s an 11-panel spread in Action Comics #976 that gives you the latest story of how Clark and Lois met, married, and had a child. Then the way that their son grew up in space, on an alternate Earth, and in the future is another story or two.

Then, suddenly, in four years, Jon Kent was born, grew up, and became Superman, sort of replacing Chris Kent, sort of replacing Connor Kent, sort of replacing both teenage and then adult Clark Kent.

I establish all of this curious timeline to set the context for today’s big news regarding Jon Kent’s one-panel kiss, which has been and will be variously portrayed as either the biggest cultural change in comics or no big deal at all, and for those seeing a cultural earthquake in it, will be variously portrayed as a very good thing or a very bad thing.

And given the shifting pace of change over Superman’s 83 years, I see it as a very precarious thing. What happens now has an undeniable tendency to unhappen or rehappen. Just as DC was for decades extremely reluctant to allow Clark to commit to Lois, DC is now extremely reluctant to allow anything to happen without a high chance of unhappening. And they have, I believe, creatively painted themselves into a corner. One way or another they have to change their ways, and I’m not sure that decision makers inside the company see that yet.

When the news about Jon Kent’s orientation broke last month, I thought of Sam Zhao as a cautionary tale. Do you remember the name Sam Zhao? Does anyone?

In 2012, the New 52 version of Earth 2 introduced an old-yet-new version of Alan Scott, young and in his prime like the original was back in 1940. Very soon, we learned that Alan Scott was a gay man with a partner and fiancé named Sam Zhao, who promptly died (one issue after his introduction!), then was resurrected as a sort of elemental spirit. Sam Zhao’s last appearance was in 2015, Sam having lost, in rapid fashion, his life, his planet (literally destroyed), and then their entire plane of reality. The 2012 Alan Scott was erased. The previous Alan Scott (it becomes tedious even to enumerate all the previous Alan Scotts, who were variously discontinued, killed, resurrected, renamed, banished to Valhalla, and so on) then became a sort of symbol for the destructive retcons of the DC Multiverse, with Dr. Manhattan’s erasure of Alan Scott’s life as Green Lantern becoming retroactively the single symbolic act of creating the pre-Doomsday Clock timeline. Dr. Manhattan brought that timeline back. But then even Doomsday Clock didn’t happen, and even the timeline after Doomsday Clock has now unhappened, and that was only 2019! Then for good measure, the current version of Alan Scott (who closely resembles the post-Infinite Crisis Alan Scott) earlier this year came out as gay like it was new (because in a sense it was). Sam Zhao and his version of Alan Scott are buried deep behind multiple numbers of destroyed past realities, like a sheet on a bulletin board papered over by newer announcements many times. And so I say, beware to Jon Kent, or to Jon Kent’s creators.

Sam Zhao was [that specific] Alan Scott’s Lois Lane, but Lois Lane remained Superman’s love interest for decades and Sam Zhao appeared alive on only three pages of one issue. And in various ways, Sam Zhao is a Lois Lane for our times, while Jon Kent is a [2012] Alan Scott for our times. DC’s creators want to do something momentous and meaningful with Jon Kent as they did with Alan Scott, but the persistence in sticking out creative decisions is a proclivity or capacity that DC has perhaps lost.

Let’s look at the timelines again. DC took 77 years from the introduction of Superman to the introduction of Jon Kent as his then-infant son, but only 6 years from the introduction of Jon Kent to his succession as the Earth’s primary Superman (and, making more headlines, as a bisexual young man). That’s a remarkable acceleration, and in the new, accelerated DC, a “Lois Lane” might only survive three pages. Sam Zhao’s entire planet was destroyed within two years, and his timeline gone soon after that. To turn this pragmatic, let us identify, finally, what caused this acceleration, from Superman revealing his identity to Lois back in 1991, through Superman’s death, resurrection, their marriage, and all the many reboots that made Lois and Clark’s marriage and Chris Kent and Sam Zhao come and go – big events drive sales.

This is the corner into which DC has painted itself. They, and many readers, celebrate the ascension of Jon Kent, and his identity, and what that means for representing so much of humanity on the stage of DC’s historical flagship property. This is the gesture made halfheartedly nine years ago with the immediately-doomed Sam Zhao. This gesture is at odds with the reality (or metareality) within DC since about 2006, that accelerated and increasingly accelerating change is a booster shot needed for keeping the readership reading. If DC now shuffles Jon Kent off to the limbo where Chris Kent, Sam Zhao, and the 1978 marriage of Earth Two Superman and Lois dwell, they retract a major statement of representation. If they lock Jon Kent in as he is today, they lose the creative strategy that has defined the last 15 or so years of DC, to reinvent constantly. One of these has to go.

There is, perhaps, another way. To consider yet another major DC brand’s invention and reinvention, the main Flash in DC Comics was Barry Allen for thirty years, but then changed hands four times in three years, when in 2006’s Infinite Crisis Wally gave way to a brief interlude with Jay Garrick, then Bart Allen, then Bart to Wally, and Wally back to Barry. But then Barry stuck around for a while. Let’s forget for a moment that along the way, Wally switched dimensions, Bart died and was resurrected (along with his friend Connor Kent, who is another character coming and going through a wildly-revolving door), and then “Wally” was reintroduced as a boy with the same name but another race, came back to our reality, became a tormented and possibly homicidal cinder of his former self, but then became a healthy and happy superhero and the main Flash again… Yes, there is another way, a return to stable timelines and realities, but as the case of the Flashes demonstrates, DC has neither the proclivity nor capacity to take it.

Let us add one more undeniably true observation of pragmatics: Nobody planned any of this mad scramble of timelines and characters and lives and deaths. A writer may have a year or two planned, but that writer moves on, and the juice that has kept sales up necessitates 180° turns when the next writer comes along. This isn’t any one writer’s or editor’s decision. Continuity has become a blender set to “liquify” and perhaps nothing can survive it for long, though every now and a second 180° turn undoes a previous one and we end up, for a while, back where we were, and so Alan Scott is re-introduced to us as gay – twice.

Jon Kent’s orientation is too important of a statement for DC to erase the way they annihilated Sam Zhao, but the blender’s slicing and dicing blades haven’t stopped for anyone. Jon Kent’s timeline or reality or status will change, and there’ll be 180° turns – plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. In 2031, DC Comics will most likely still have a Jon Kent, and he’ll most likely “still” be LGBTQ, but will he be in the main Superman title? Will his life be rebooted back to conception and birth and start up from scratch again? Will he, like Alan Scott, come out twice? And will anyone, in 2031, be able to tell you who Jay Nakamura was?

Superman: Doomed, Chapters 1-3

In the New 52, some events in previous continuity happened, and some events didn’t. Bane broke Batman’s back, and Hal Jordan became Parallax, but Doomsday never killed Superman. The end of Grant Morrison’s Action run showed a Lois and a Jimmy who remembered Doomsday having killed Superman, but that wasn’t the New 52’s Lois and Jimmy, so this story is breaking new ground.

Superman: Doomed is a crossover event with its first three chapters all going on sale the same day, so readers need to be careful to follow the reading order to avoid spoilers, which this review contains in abundance.

In 1992, Doomsday was introduced for the very purpose of killing Superman. His abilities were revealed as the story progressed, but his origin was left as a mystery, with such details as his state of confinement left unexplained. They were probably better left a mystery. Subsequent stories resorted to hackneyed reveals and a painfully illogical “power” (that no one can defeat him twice) borrowed from the 1970s origin of the Calculator. Everything that made Doomsday intriguing and mysterious was stripped away in story after story, until nothing remained of the character but a way for writers to introduce, cheaply, a moment where the reader thinks, “This is bad.”

Superman: Doomed removes, at least initially, most of the characteristics of the 1992 story except for the creature’s appearance. We begin, in 2014, by knowing that Doomsday had a past on Krypton, although this past comes to us through an intriguingly doubtful story-within-a-story told to Kara by Zor-El in Batman/Superman #3.1. In a major alteration of the character, this Doomsday feeds off the lifeforce of nearby beings, more akin to the Parasite, and left the entire population of Smallville in a coma and killed many other people elsewhere. Also unlike the original, this Doomsday is able to teleport, and specifically avoids fighting Superman. Again unlike the original, this Doomsday is beaten physically without too much trouble, being ripped in half by Superman at the end of a battle which goes from place to place before concluding in Smallville. As the most significant alteration from the original character, this Doomsday is a sort of infection which is now inside Superman, and he must summon the willpower to fight the infection or he will have, in effect, lost the battle by becoming the next incarnation of the very villain he physically beat.

In what we’ve seen so far, the story has a few flaws. The art surrounding the battle in Superman: Doomed #1 was unusually chaotic and confusing. It was difficult to tell whether punches were being landed, dodged, or thrown the other way. When the battle moved to a new place via teleportation or conventional movement, the motion and the motives were largely left uncommunicated except by narration boxes. Superman decides to take the battle away from humanity, but this only seems to apply to one brief portion of the battle, a few punches taking place on a nicely-rendered landscape of Venus. Before and after this, the battle takes place on Earth, with no explanation for why Superman abandoned his strategy to fight far away from potential victims.

An important characteristic in Superman’s moral make-up is his reluctance to kill, and when the story brings this up, it does so briefly. Superman implicitly decides that killing Doomsday is worth it, but then relishes it when Wonder Woman asks him to bring her Doomsday’s head. If the story is to redeem its potential, it needs to revisit this decision in more detail, as the decision itself was dispensed with rapidly as it occurred.

At this point, the story is one of internal struggle against what is in effect demonic possession, Superman’s inner nature battling a contagion, a dynamic which has been used many since 1960s stories that used red kryptonite to advance that plot. More recently, 52 Aftermath: The Four Horsemen showed Superman resisting the slowly-growing influence of a similar evil demigod while his allies tried to help him. Superman: Doomed will be a thorough disappointment if it aspires only to repeat that plot but with more PR this time. It may likewise repeat the “Bad Superman” of Superman III, the “Doomsday always comes back stronger” from the creature’s first go-around, and we’re left to see going into chapter four if the story has something new to add.

A different plot which is getting more attention is the tension between Lois Lane and Wonder Woman as rivals for Superman’s love interest. Decades of tradition placing Lois Lane (almost always) in that role have been on hold in the New 52, with Wonder Woman owning Superman’s heart for over two years now (versus about two issues in post-COIE continuity). If the Superman-Wonder Woman relationship is meant to tear away easily, leading to a triumphant renewal of the Superman-Lois relationship, then this event might be the place where it happens. On the other hand, the things Superman and Wonder Woman have in common as warriors should apply more in this story than most others, and we’ve already seen how Wonder Woman is more at place than Lois in most aspects of the story, although Lois has the byline for the articles that start each issue.

The story has asserted that Superman, as Doomsday’s target of choice, is the strongest being on Earth, with nary a word of contradiction regarding Shazam, Supergirl, or Martian Manhunter. We know from solicits that Superman will lose the battle against the Doomsday infection before he ultimately wins it. We will see as the story unfolds if it can win the battle against duplicating older stories with no real purpose or originality.