What's your favorite version of Krypton?

[Bored at 3:00AM]

I have a hard time with this one because there are so many versions of Krypton that I like, so I tend to favor the amalgamated Krypton from Post-Infinite Crisis simply because it has all of the stuff I love, but none of the stuff I don't. Basically, Buffet Krypton. Not as good as a singular vision coming from a great creator, but rather a collection of great concepts that any creator can use and build upon.

In terms of Jor-El, I really like Brando's potificating, but I'm also partial to TAS Jor-El's more man of action approach. I like to view them as older and younger versions of the same guy.

I like the aesthetics of Byrne and Snyder's Krypton a lot. The mad science experiment gone bad on a planetary scale.

Morrison's Krypton is the one where I'd like to party.

[manwhohaseverything]

I loved Snyder's krypton. But, i wanted the planet to be a lot more chaotic in terms of wheather, gravity, number of moons... Etc

[Vordan]

I’m partial to Johns idea of merging the Kryptons together as well


Krypton is a balancing act. It needs to be utopian enough that we can feel sorrow for it dying, but also dystopian enough that it seems plausible for it to die as a result of its own actions. So in that regard while Byrne had some cool ideas, Krypton being a hellhole that Kal is better off for not knowing strikes me as going too far.

Now in terms of aesthetics? New 52 Krypton looked damn cool to me:

[manwhohaseverything]

New52 krypton is based on precrisis design. Right? I like the sunflower or the sun symbol being used for jor el.

Very adam strange.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

(the New 52! Superman) He's alive again, and back in the jeans n' t-shirt, hopping around the Multiverse. They brought him back in Sideways and even got Morrison to return for his dialogue.

[manwhohaseverything]

He's alive again, and back in the jeans n' t-shirt, hopping around the Multiverse. They brought him back in Sideways and even got Morrison to return for his dialogue.

If they use him again,I fear they will just treat him like the guy who flys. That's not something i am looking forward to.That Superman is da champ.lol!!!

#supermangonebeatyoass
#manofsteelkeepinitreal

This was reay funny.

[Kuwagaton]

I've gone on before about liking the hard 80s science fiction aspects, but I don't seem to credit Mignola much. Not only did he entirely nail what Byrne had written, but I think that work rivals Amano's Final Fantasy in timeless fantasy elegance





And shout out to another longtime favorite, Doug Wheatley.

[Riv86672]

I’m a Byrne era sterile Krypton guy. That Krypton really emphasized both Superman’s alien nature and his nurtured humanity. A really good Krypton story from Byrne’s run was Superman 18...:





Supes gets a glimpse of what might have been, if he hadn’t been the last son of Krypton.
Drawn by Mike Mignola to boot.

[Adekis]

Pre-Crisis Krypton is basically just middle America with Flash Gordon tech and ridiculously smart citizens - to the extent that the first time Superman and Jimmy go into the Bottle City of Kandor together, they meet a man named Nor-Kann who identifies himself as Jor-El's "college roommate"! Because I guess on Krypton they have college, just like on Earth. Because it never really occurred to the writers that Krypton wouldn't be exactly like America on a social level. And so I think pre-Crisis Krypton is lacking in some of that truly alien culture that I think might be worth having in an alien world from an SF franchise.

At the same time, it's just so joyful? There's so many cool things about pre-Crisis Krypton, so much wonder and beauty, and coupling that with the way Superman kind of constantly mourned Krypton in his heart in those days, I think the idea of that Krypton, and so many of its incidental details - the Jewel Mountains, the Fire Falls, the glass forests, the "winged ones", the telepathic bloodhounds - is really worth keeping in mind for any other version. It's beautiful, and so utterly sad, because Kal-El will never get to see its wonders with his own eyes. I think Silver Age Krypton is the heart and soul of Krypton, which many other versions have kept - and more have kind of forgotten.

[superduperman]

Probably Birthright. It was very much the "utopian" Krypton without being cheesy about it.

[Jim Kelly]

I guess I'm the odd one out here, because I like the version of Krypton from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. The Buck Rogers aspect of it is a virtue--if it's cheese, it's a fromage á point paired with a vintage wine. As far as translating Kryptonian terms into English words we can relate to--that's what science fiction does. I remember some interview with Julius Schwartz where he said something like, in reality, aliens would be giant gas clouds that we couldn't comprehend, but science fiction makes aliens human-like because we can understand that.

A story has to work on a human level and relate to our own experience. The purpose of science fiction stories isn't really to do a deep dive on actual science, it's to tell Twilight Zone type stories that comment on our own world and what we are doing to it. The science is the decoration that makes these morality plays attractive to our eye.

Mort Weisinger (along with Schwartz) was a science fiction fan, then an agent for those writers, then an editor of science fiction pulp magazines and finally a comic book editor. He knew science fiction and hired science fiction writers--guys like Otto Binder and Edmond Hamilton, who created some of the most indelible science fiction concepts for Superman. If they broke the rules of science, they knew which ones they were breaking and they did it intentionally for the purpose of telling a story that kids could enjoy. Most of today's writers aren't science fiction writers and they just make stuff look weird and strange as though that's what science fiction is supposed to do.

But I can go along with the idea of amalgamating the different looks of Krypton into one whole. My solution is that Krypton has a long year with many seasons. As the climate changes, the clothes change and the culture changes. In Virgina Woolf's ORLANDO, she describes a period of the little ice age and the changes to the culture because of that. So I can see Krypton in the dead of Winter being a very different place from what it is in high Summer.

[Vordan]

Eh can’t really agree that science fiction isn’t really about the science. Some scifi leans much more on the “hard” side of things, and it’s absolutely is mainly about the science.

[OpaqueGiraffe17]

I’m a Byrne era sterile Krypton guy. That Krypton really emphasized both Superman’s alien nature and his nurtured humanity. A really good Krypton story from Byrne’s run was Superman 18...:





Supes gets a glimpse of what might have been, if he hadn’t been the last son of Krypton.
Drawn by Mike Mignola to boot.

I’d tone down the Vulcanish emotion repressing culture but I do like how they doubled down on the cautionary tale angle. Had a interesting history and lore behind it with the clone stuff. And I think it has the most interesting aesthetic.

[Jim Kelly]

Eh can’t really agree that science fiction isn’t really about the science. Some scifi leans much more on the “hard” side of things, and it’s absolutely is mainly about the science.

I could have expressed my point better. Science is important to science fiction; it provides ideas that can be the springboard for a story. But at a certain point, the writer has to abandon the deep science for the sake of telling an engaging story.

I've read science fiction that goes hard on the science and I find these books boring. I'd rather read a book where the writer just uses some science to motivate the story.

For example, on spaceships, most of the science fiction stories do a terrible job of explaining artificial gravity. RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA maybe comes the closest, because the ship is so large that the forces created are near to plausible--although, of the Arthur C. Clarke books I read, that's the one that one that bored me the most. The gravity created in his 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is not correct according to science, but that was a much better book, in my experience.

Ray Bradbury's MARTIAN CHRONICLES is not good science, but it's great literature. I love Kurt Vonnegut, but his science is just fantasy and has little to do with reality. The problem with science is that it imposes so many physical rules on the universe, that the writers have to break those rules to get their heroes through space and time.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

I loves me some Silver Age Krypton and I am sorely pissed that DC screwed the pooch when Loeb & Kelly brought that Krypton back and merged it with Byrne and anime. That was a great Krypton.