Jon's age up has been a point of contention since the got wind of the possibility what seems like so long ago. But perhaps a large source of controversy that I haven't really seen us as a community discuss in earnest is his time marooned on Earth-3.

Thoughts

Speaking for just myself: I was extremely unsure of the idea after I read issues 9 and 10 of Superman. I appreciated, if not outright loved, the concept of the trial by fire, I really dug the Ultraman dynamic, and I enjoyed the concept of him navigating a world diametrically opposed to everything he is......but 5 to 7 years of it gave me some serious pause. I had to really mull it over for a while to see where I really landed on it, and maybe get what Bendis' intention was with an idea this specific.

I'll admit my apprehension was coming in part from what I assumed the trip was like for Jon. You hear the set up, and it conjures to mind Jon having to huff it through space going on tons of unseen adventures. Technically he did do that, but you sort of expect that was mainly what he did if not all he did. So I had to battle those assumptions. The other half of why this made me pull back a bit was the fact that it was kind of a bummer to think about this kid being stranded on this awful world--trapped no less.

Then I thought "marooned", "stranded"; that how you'd describe someone being shipwrecked or, maybe more appropriately, thrown overboard and ending up on an island. Then you simply think "scale it up to Superman" and that's exactly what happened. That black hole was a spot of really bad "weather" because, like the sea, space is cruel and unpredictable mistress. Jon gets thrown overboard, and wakes up on a thrown through time on a new Earth as if it were an uncharted island. The analogy even extends to the crime syndicate scrapping over Jon like a pack of hungry dogs. These are you indigenous creatures. These are your predators.

The idea seems to be that this was essentially a super powered equivalent of the 1987 young-adult novel The Hatchet, or even 2000's Cast Away. The Hatchet being more appropriate due to it's closer parallels and focus on the coming of age of a young boy protagonist. That said, the length of time Jon spends on his "island" is more akin to Chuck's 4 years in Cast Away. Once I started to look at Earth-3 as an "island", and Ultraman and Superwoman the the big predatory creatures that our stranded young protagonist has to learn the patterns of and use his surroundings to outmaneuver it all started to make far more sense to me. Jon taking his time to move from the volcano to the first town, then the next, and so on is similar to the protagonist of on of these stranded-on-an-island novels having to slowly move from one spot on the island to another to up their chances of rescue or just survival. Even Jor-El rescuing him at the end plays greatly into the conventions of a shipwrecked/stranded story.

Even the concpet of having some sort of personal hand-up or issue before going on the trip and getting stranded is a trope of the stranded-on-and-island style story. Usually on the island the protagonist deals with manifestations or representations of their issues back in civilization, and they physically overcome the manifestation/representation and mentally overcome the actual issue. Jon pretty obviously does this with his issues of measuring up to his father and his legacy, and thinking he's destined for evil. I'm feeling pretty confident this was the intention.

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Approaching the story from this angle really, really helped me engage with it and appreciate it on it's terms, and get what it was going for. Hopefully this post/thread helps someone else here do the same.

I'd love to discuss.