Through the years of the Golden and Silver Age, we learned a few more details, and occasionally visited, but not often. Krypton remained a shadowy, mysterious place, where extremely muscular people in capes lived in stark white crystal palaces under a red sky, and were named after the Hebrew word for God. It was a dream world. It was Heaven.
The new tv series Krypton (2018-) is set in Heaven.
Except it's a horrifying dystopian society. No crystal palaces, no capes. And it stars Superman's grandfather.
Huh?
At ths point I'd be looking askance at Adam, but Grandpa means another alien, Braniac (Blake Ritson, below).
The High Council also wants to know about this research, and interrogates Seg-El's parents about it. They are killed,leaving Seg-El and Adam on the run from the law. Fortunately, Seg-El's buddy, comic-relief bartender Kem (Rasmus Hardiker) is willing to hide them.
Whew. And that's just the first episode.
The end game is making sure that Seg marries the right woman and gives birth to Jor-El, who will give birth to Superman, who will save Krypton...um, I mean go to another world after Krypton is destroyed.
I just got through one episode. There is a nice Seg-Adam gay subtext, and according to Shaun Sipos, Episode #6 contains a hint that Adam is bisexual in order to "ruffle some feathers,"
In 2018, do you really need to hint around? And why will a bisexual character upset people? We've had plenty of gay ones.
I'm not waiting around to find out. The mythology is too hefty to bear.
C-.
To be fair, before Crisis, some half of Krypton was in a city in a bottle in the Fortress of Solitude.
ReplyDeleteSuperman and Jimmy Olsen actually fought crime there as Nightwing and Flamebird. Yes, it was a Batman parody. Yes, Dick Grayson and Bette Kane would be given the appelations later, with the former being the sexiest male character in comics. (He even gets raped twice in the comics. Heterosexual rapes. Both are poorly written by people I know can do better.) Flamebird doesn't have as much of a story. But she is Bruce's cousin, just like Katherine Kane, Batwoman. They were created to quash gay rumors, which is funny on at least two levels.
Of course, one of Wolfman's goals in Crisis was to remove all Kryptonians but Superman, so all that continuity was erased from existence some time ago.
Anyway, bisexual men are still a bit taboo. Remember, the straight world got used to lesbians as sex objects, gay men as overly flamboyant (but strangely perpetually single). Bisexual men don't fit in that. We might have girlfriends. We can be sex objects for everyone, but it's been nearly 50 years since Trekkie zines coined the term "slash" and still people don't get that a few dudes in my past (and liking some dudes today) don't make me any less attracted to women.
And I hate to say it, but gay guys haven't helped. How often have you heard guys say bisexuality was just a transition to being fully gay?
Finally, there's Hollywood. Gay villain tropes never went away, they just became bi villain tropes. Much easier than giving your villains realistic motives, I guess.
One more thing: Black Adam? I know they brought a lot of Bat villains (Deathstroke, Ra's al Ghul) into the early Arrowverse, but I never thought they'd use Shazam villains, mostly because Shazam was an acquired title. (But, you read Charlton as a kid, Blue Beetle was a major recurring character in the Brave and the Bold cartoon, and is a Titan in the DCAU.)
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