The Superman 2000 Pitch: The Fortress

This is possibly my final commentary on the excerpts from the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer Superman 2000 proposal. Chad Nevett and I have almost run out of bits to excerpt, and he'll probably wrap up the discussion later this week with one final segment. Here's my (probably final) new excerpt, from the section of the proposal titled "The Fortress" with some commentary by me (just to clarify, the block quotes come from the pitch, and the other stuff between the block quotes are my comments):

Superman's super-intelligence and increased speed of perception, etc., has left him with more time and brain cells to fill, so the Fortress becomes a place of baroque activity once more as Superman becomes the hobbyist par excellance, the polymath who's interested in EVERYTHING. The Fortress becomes trophy room, laboratory, gymnasium, observatory--the perfect hangout for the ultimate being. Let's see the Fortress stuffed with incredible artifacts from all space and time. The Titanic hangs from the ceiling (Supes and Lois dine in the great staterooms, overlooking the wonders of the Fortress).

Superman's laboratory contains the Superman Molecule, where Superman engraves his personal diaries using heat vision through special goggles which reduce its bandwidth. The stories on the Superman Molecule are all told by Superman himself and allow us to see the world via his incredible senses: "The alcohol on his breath killed exactly 15 billion bacteria. There was no way I could save them. I did my best to patch up a liver malfunction during a microscopic high-speed scan of his body..."

Geoff Johns has reclaimed some of the spectacle of the Fortress of Solitude in his Action Comics run, but Morrison's All-Star Superman has really taken advantage of the Fortress as Superman's ultimate laboratory/hang-out. Either this section of the pitch was written primarily by Morrison, or he was heavily inspired by it, because you'll see that this Fortress aspect of the Superman 2000 proposal deeply informs his recent Superman work.

Elsewhere lies access to The Phantom Zone Vault, with its weird maps of this odd, infinite region of unspace originally used by Kryptonians to house artifacts and weapons. (The Phantom Zone sectors currently mapped by Superman include the site of Prometheus's Crooked House and the region where the White Martian Mothership is docked. The Zone will be colonized by the 30th century and become known as Tesseract Space.) The idea here is to emphasize the outrageousness of Superman's Herculean pastimes--he's seriously making maps of an infinite region of apparent nothingness. In the same Vault, the Phantom Zone Telescope is a machine which allows Superman to observe the eerie world of Phantom Supermen left here after THE KINGDOM.

Superman's Impossible Room opens into a transtemporal flaw. Here, Superman is able to rendezvous with his descendants, members of the Superman Squad from upcoming eras.

The Infant Universe of Qwewq, saved from Wonderworld by the JLA. This microscopic, living universe needs "care and feeding" and Superman spends long hours observing events here. He even descends into the nanoscopic Earth of Qwewq for occasional adventures as "Hyperman," the only superhero in that universe. (Qwewq is OUR universe, though we never mention it, and here, in our real world, Superman has adventures on a planet where he can never, ever reveal himself or tell people who he is or what he is.)

The Superman Squad members from the future. Qwewq as our universe. These are spot-on references to what Morrison has just done in All-Star. One wonders if All-Star #12 will involve Superman entering our world as "Hyperman."

There's a Krypton Museum which has a huge floating globe of the lost planet reconstructed from the holographic memory traces in the resonant atomic structure of Superman's rocketship (whose metal, being part of the atomic structure of lost Krypton, "remembers" the atomic structure of lost Krypton. Superman and his robots are now sophisticated enough to perform archaeological forays into ambient molecular memory and slowly reconstruct the glorious landmarks of the doomed planet). "You can even see Fort Rozz, Krypton's Mobile Arsenal, and there's the Quantum Jungle moving rapidly across the face of the planet..." etc.

Huge solar batteries collect the Antarctic sun during the long summer days. Sometimes, Superman bathes in the rays of the huge solar collector. Suspended between the giant mirrors, Superman could perhaps even super-charge his cells with extra solar power before a serious battle.

The Living Library is Superman's complete DNA record of every species he has ever encountered.

Close by will be Superman's Bizarro Habitat, where Superman keeps poor, deformed creatures mutated by the attack of the Cube Earth--Bizarro dogs and cats and rhinos, whatever. He tries to make their pitiful, illogical lives as comfortable as he can, all the while seeking an antidote to the Bizarro plague.

The Fortress also includes titanic memorial statues of Jor-El and Lara, a Gallery of Foes, new upgraded versions of Kelex and the other Fortress robots, Superman's JLA Boom Tube generator and anything else that occurs as we proceed. Fragments of his rocket. The Electro-Supes suit. His "Hyperman" costume. A "KLTPZYXM" word balloon left by Mr. Mxyzptlk. The emphasis is on cool stuff. A Fortress we can do cutaway diagrams of again. The ultimate treehouse. The greatest den known to man.

The more I read this, the more obvious it is that this is deeply Morrisonian. This is his version of Superman, as a fetishist of the fantastic. This Fortress is far more vast, though, than anyone has ever expressed in any comic book story. Johns hasn't taken the Fortress this far, and even Morrison hasn't taken it as far as he and the team proposed here. It certainly celebrates the wonder of the Superman universe, and that's something that was missing from the character throughout the late 1980s and 1990s.

Chad Nevett With More on Superman's Villains

Continuing our back-and-forth look at the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer Superman 2000 proposal, Chad Nevett has posted the bits about the three great "Anti-Supermen": Bizarro, Brainiac, and Lex Luthor.

I actually disagree with Chad about the Luthor as businessman idea. I think that was one of the things that destroyed the character in the 1980s and 1990s. I didn't mind it at the time, but in the past two weeks I've read the Elliot S! Maggin Luthor and the Luthor from Stuart Immonen's graphic novel, and Maggin's ultra-genius super-scientist Luthor is such a fascinating character--much more interesting than the bland businessman Immonen is saddled with. In the novels, Luthor has multiple identities so he can create super-weapons, hide them in plain sight as works of contemporary sculpture, and then bid up the prices. Then, when someone outbids him, he makes a ton of money, then when he needs to super-weapons, he knows which museum to find them in--and he just waltzes in and steals them.

Luthor as a business man is too plain. Too desperate. Too simplistic.

The Superman 2000 Pitch: Lois Lane, Mrs. Superman

I've been commenting on excerpts from the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer Superman 2000 proposal for weeks, and so has Chad Nevett. Here's another small except of the rejected proposal, from the section labeled "Lois Lane, Mrs. Superman" with some commentary by me (just to clarify, the block quotes come from the pitch, and the other stuff between the block quotes are my comments):

Lois brings us to the second major phase of our approach. Everyone’s in agreement that the marriage and the emphasis on soap opera no longer seems to be working as well in the current market as it once did and that a major part of our imperative should be to restore the Clark/Lois/Superman triangle. This is, to our collective mind, one of the most if not the most important reader-identification elements to the character--and yet, we have to find it again without putting the All-American icon through a divorce, without killing anyone, without sullying this grand romance known the world over.

Sounds familiar, no? Well, Joe Quesada and Spider-Man weren't the first to deal with these kinds of thoughts.

By the way, the "second major phase" line implies a first major phase, and that would be the return to a more powerful Superman, as I've outlined in previous blog posts. But it's worth noting that the team thought that the Lois/Clark dynamic was the second most important aspect of the comic. Honestly, Superman has been married for most of my comic book reading career, so that seems like the natural state for the character as far as I'm concerned, but in my current Elliot S! Maggin obsession phase, I've been reading a lot of Superman stories from the Bronze Age, and I forgot how essential those "oh, I secretly think Clark is Superman, but he can't be because there's Superman standing next to Clark" scenes really were. They happened a lot. And it did add some tension to the story. But a married couple with a secret life is also a kind of sexy tension too, so I'm not sold on the notion that the "triangle" is what's most important about their relationship.

How we dissolve the marriage and still be true to the fact that it happened is the one instance where we’ll have to sail close to the cosmic reboot dock--more on this below--but hopefully this time the change will be organic and satisfying and will have a magical, romantic feel rather than the cold, surgical procedures of the previous era’s retconners.

According to Morrison, in a relatively recent interview about All-Star Superman, this bit of the pitch was amended before the final proposal was submitted. Apparently, the "dissolve the marriage" idea was ultimately abandoned, but in this version of the proposal, it's a significant part of the Superman 2000 concept (and what Morrison says in that interview refers specifically to the ideas outlined here). And, as you'll see, it is a very familiar approach to creating a kind of new day, a brand new day, if you will, for a married superhero.

Our absolute conviction is that we’ll have failed in our job if readers cheer when Lois and Superman are split. Everyone will be EXPECTING this to be the first thing we do. We have to make them love Mrs. Superman and THEN take it all away. This has to be universe-shattering romantic overload and when it’s over, it has to break every heart in the land. If it doesn’t, if we do it and nobody cares, we do a disservice to the Superman/Lois relationship. Now that this has happened, we can’t and won’t treat it as just a mistake without making it at least as meaningful a farewell to the Byrne/Jurgens era as Alan Moore’s Krypto deathscene was to the Weisinger legacy. We honestly feel pretty strongly that Lois Kent and the marriage deserve our best efforts before we get rid of them.

Did "One More Day" accomplish this for Spider-Man? Did the story itself make readers love Mary Jane and that caused the uproar when the marriage was taken away? I don't think so--I think that there's no way comic book fans would ever cheer about a major superhero marriage being removed. So Morrison and company really didn't need to worry about that, but the notion of showing exactly what is so powerful about the love between Lois and Clark is a good one.

First thing we must do, however, is shake up the relationship and define its quirks and boundaries anew.

Stage one: split Clark and Lois by sending her off around the world as the Planet’s foreign correspondent. This gives us a whole new arrangement of relationships to play with below).

Lois and Clark are now physically separated. They still meet often, taking the occasional romantic weekend in the revamped Fortress (see below). He makes her breakfast in bed in a manner of seconds with ingredients from all around the world, waltzes with her through the Aurora Australis, etc. A dream, an idyll, but for their own amusement they play a game whenever they meet as Clark and Lois, sniping and sparring like Tracy and Hepburn. Lois and Clark thus become a little edgier, while the love of Superman and Lois becomes grander and more heartbreakingly poignant.

I'm not convinced that such an approach would make their love seem "grander and more heartbreakingly poignant" just because they're not hanging out in the apartment all the time, but the foreign correspondent approach is a good idea. Was that ever used by another Superman creative team?

As we approach mid-year, we unleash our Big Story. The unthinkable has finally happened. Luthor and Brainiac, working together, have finally unearthed the secret of Superman’s dual identity----and they tell the world.

In Maggin's Superman work, his exposed identity was a regular plot point--and Superman would always clean it up by the end of the story. But, wow--the similarities to One More Day/Brand New Day continue, don't they? Maybe Millar whispered some of these ideas to Quesada when he joined Marvel. It's not just "Birthright" and All-Star Superman that ended up with the ideas from the Superman 2000 pitch--it was Spidey as well..

Superman is totally and irrevocably exposed for the first time, and the consequences are more disastrous than he ever imagined. In less time than it takes to tell, his personal life has been destroyed as souvenir hunters snatch everything in his office and apartment; his parents have been hospitalized by a vengeful Parasite; the Daily Planet has likewise been leveled by his enemies, with Jimmy and Perry barely able to escape with their lives--maybe. And Lois may as well just paint a target on her head. For sixty years, we’ve been telling readers why Superman’s secret identity is important. Now we show them.

And that’s just the opening salvo.

And Bendis's Daredevil too...

The Luthor/Brainiac team intensifies its efforts to manifest a global threat. Brainiac turns Earth’s sun red to drain Superman’s powers. Luthor trips triggers he’s had in place for years, all while pitting an ever-weakening Superman against a phalanx of his greatest foes while the Man of Steel wracks his brain trying to figure out not only how to save Earth but how to get his--and, more importantly, Lois’s--life back.

And "Avengers Disassembled." But, enough of my snark. Here's the grand finale of what they had planned for Lois and Clark:

Ultimately, Luthor’s threat becomes so grand that it threatens all of spacetime--including the Fifth Dimension, forging a tense alliance between Superman and Mxyzptlk. With superhuman effort, Luthor and Brainiac are thwarted--but not before Brainiac gets his revenge.

Memories, as science is only now theorizing and as Brainiac has known for years, are not electrical in nature. They are, in fact, actual chemical deposits in the brain. And what is chemical can easily be turned to poison.

Brainiac has adjusted Lois’s chemical memory of Clark’s secret identity so that it’s killing her.

The poison memory can’t be removed. It can conceivably be masked--Superman has more than one magical ally who could erase Lois’s conscious memory of his identity, who could facilitate a reality in which Clark and Lois were married without Lois being aware of her husband’s double life--but deep down, Superman knows that’s too risky. He can’t live with her, can’t be her husband, can’t share her life. She’s too sharp. No matter what he does, no matter how on guard he is, she’ll stumble onto his secret eventually, and when she does, it will be the death of her.

With no other conceivable option, Superman turns to Mxyzptlk. Sure, says Mxy, I can fix this--but only by altering history so that she NEVER knew. So that there was never a memory TO poison.

Unacceptable, says Superman. You have the power to fix this more simply. You don’t have to go that far.

Untrue, counters Mxyzptlk. Despite what I may or may not WANT to do for you...when I’m in the third dimension, I’m INCAPABLE of doing anything BUT mischief.

So the offer’s on the table, the clock is ticking on Lois, and together, she and her husband make their tragic decision. Though Lois would rather spend one day with Clark’s love than a lifetime without it, he swears to her that they’ll be together again when the time is right. For now...they have no choice but to erase their lives together so that Lois might live.

Mxyzptlk weaves his spell. As night falls around the globe, people will begin to fall asleep--and as they do, the world will change and Clark’s secret will be restored. People will awaken without any memory that Clark Kent and Lois Lane were ever married, were ever together. Clark and Lois have until sundown to enjoy one last, perfect day.

And so long as we live, we will never again see two people so much in love as we do that day.

Eventually, however, the violet dust of twilight settles across the city. It’s happening. Their arms wrapped around one another as if they’ll never touch this way again, Lois and Clark begin to fall asleep. With a last kiss, they drift into slumber...

...and when dawn breaks across Metropolis, Clark Kent exits his bachelor apartment at 344 Clinton Avenue and makes it to his Daily Planet desk just in time to catch the latest in a long line of caustic barbs from rival reporter Lois Lane. She has her sights set on Superman, thinks Kent for the millionth time. If only I could get her to love me as Clark...

Memory poison and Fifth Dimensional magic instead of a deal with the Devil. But still, eerily similar to the Spider-Man situation, isn't it? And by "eerily similar," I mean "pretty much exactly the same--a memory wipe."

What do you think the reaction would have been if the Superman 2000 crew actually decided to do this for real? Would fanboys have been in as much of an uproar? I don't know--it seems like it could have been possible to pull off if the story was epic enough.

Your thoughts?

Chad Nevett on Superman's Foes: Superman 2000

A lot of readers have been coming here for the Superman 2000 action, so I'll direct your attention to Chad Nevett's recent post on a few members of Superman's rogues' gallery. He excerpts a bunch of brand new paragraphs from the rejected proposal, and he offers a bit of the ol' commentary.

My thoughts regarding the Superman villains discussed in the pitch: Anyone who can propose an interesting version of the Prankster is pretty special.

The Superman 2000 Pitch: Clark Kent

I've been commenting on excerpts from the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer Superman 2000 proposal for weeks, and so has Chad Nevett. Here's another small except of the rejected proposal, from the section labeled "Clark Kent," with some commentary by me (just to clarify, the block quotes come from the pitch, and the other stuff between the block quotes are my comments):

Priority One is to make Clark Kent different from Superman. For too long, they’ve been exactly the same guy with zero contrast between them. Clark doesn’t have to be an overblown drama-queen wimp, but neither can he be so super-successful he has the world in his pocket. We must not forget why he was created in the first place--to be a touchstone. To be the half of Superman which readers can actually relate to because we all (Jesus, especially comics readers) want to believe that even though we may be put upon and bullied by the world from time to time, we know what those who pick on us or look down at us don’t--that if they could see behind our glasses, they’d see a Superman. In short, we’d like to use Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent as a base, but lend him enough dignity so that he’s not the total Reeve cartoon.

In the most recent issue of Action Comics, Geoff Johns and Gary Frank return Clark Kent to an almost exact duplicate of the Christopher Reeve version. In All-Star Superman, Morrison and Quitely differentiate between Clark and Superman, but the ridiculously massive muscles of Superman are barely contained by Clark's suits. It's a comical image -- almost the equivalent of Wally Wood's "Superduperman," but it works to show the awkwardness of the Clark character. In John Byrne's depiction, Clark was a well-adjusted regular guy, and so was Superman. This bit of the pitch, like most of the other excerpts, is largely based on jettisoning Byrne's vanilla-ification of the character.

Clark is the creation of Superman's memory and imagination. His eyes can see through skin and stone and light years; only memory tells him what it was like to simply see and he can only imagine what it would be like to need glasses. Still, Clark is his cherished link back to his human upbringing and the ethical structures forged in the Midwestern dream of Smallville. Without Clark, Superman knows, he might have been inclined towards detachment, aloofness, alienness. As Clark, he can walk among people, meek, quiet, unnoticed, learning all the time. From this perspective, the secret identity becomes something more like the human disguises gods would don or the rags kings would wear when they wanted to walk among the ordinary and the merely human. Without even a hint of condescension, Clark is eternally delighted by humanity. A man whose perceptions so routinely unlock mysteries and secrets genuinely loves to be confronted by the only thing in the universe which can actually surprise him.

Unlike Tarantino's commentary on the Clark/Superman duality in Kill Bill, the Morrison/Waid/et al pitch sees Clark as "delighted by humanity." His human disguise is not a mockery of homo sapiens, but a way to infilitrate and appreciate from within. Superman isn't literally able to see (such as we understand the concept) human behavior, but by being with humans, and perhaps by being a bit strange and watching their reactions, he can feel what it's like to be human, and that's what keeps him grounded.

And so, Clark is where he goes to sit on seats and drink coffee and watch TV. Sometimes, Clark sits in his apartment listening to alien music and watching sunspot activity with his telescopic vision. Other times, he relaxes simply by observing with reverence the actions of ordinary humans in extraordinary situations. Whatever, he's always busy. Even when he's just sitting still. And Clark allows Superman to do stupid little stuff with his powers, like getting back at Steve Lombard or whatever.

Speaking of Steve Lombard, he's back in the newest issue of Johns's Action Comics as well. Do you think Johns is cherry-picking from his buddies' old Superman pitch? It certainly wouldn't be a bad idea, would it?

Clark’s also the sob sister of the Daily Planet, if not of all Metropolis. Despite his attempts to keep a low profile, compassion radiates from him, and people pick up on that almost unconsciously. Friends and total strangers alike constantly confess their plights and problems to poor Clark. They don’t want advice. They just want someone to listen, and no one listens better than him. This aspect of his character naturally opens up the occasional avenue to the smaller human-interest story which can be investigated by Clark the reporter and by us the writers.

Super-empathy? Someone so attuned to every wavelength of energy would surely have great empathy, and with his super-patience, he would be the perfect "sob sister." Who uses that term, though? That's pretty sexist, isn't it? I can't remember ever hearing it in real life. It sounds like something out of a Cary Grant movie.

One final little note, which has nothing to do with the fact that Grant wrote "Animal Man" and Millar’s a veggie, but is a matter for pure logic. Clark eats bouef bourginon? The man with a code against killing eats murdered animals? Regardless of his farm upbringing, can we justify a Superman this aware and attuned to life in all its forms being a carnivore? Though there’s no need to make a direct, on-stage issue of it, file this thought away; his diet would be beans, pulses and windfall, if anything, and his body would be capable of extracting maximum energy from these simple foods if not solely from the sun’s rays.

Chad Nevett commented upon this bit over at his blog already, but I thought it worth excerpting as the conclusion of the "Clark Kent" section. It is strange to think that Superman would need to eat like normal humans, but I'm not convinced about the vegetarian aspect. If he grew up on a farm in the midwest, would he really be averse to eating meat? I don't see how a code against killing has any relation to vegetarianism, do you? I don't kill people, don't want to ever kill people, and don't even want to kill animals. But if the meat is already prepared, I will eat it without a second thought. I think most people are like this, no?

Superman and Miracle Monday

In a post last week, I quoted from the vetoed Superman 2000 pitch from a decade ago, and one of the lines referenced Elliot S. Maggin's 1981 Superman novel, Miracle Monday: "The scene with Superboy and the grasshopper in Miracle Monday nails it beautifully; this could be the world’s scariest living being, a detached, scientific observer with the ability to experiment upon us all."

My copy of Miracle Monday arrived in the mail today, and even though I'm only two dozen pages into the book, I've already read the bit with the grasshopper, so now I can shed some more light on what Morrison, Waid and company were talking about (for those of you, like me, who had never read this long-out-of-print novel; and let's be honest, that Miracle Monday reference in the pitch probably came from Waid, right?).

The Superboy and the grasshopper sequence begins with Jonathan Kent waking up from a nightmare in which he, fearing Superboy would be worshiped as a messiah, begins digging up the Kryptonite meteor. "The man certainly did not want to kill his son," writes Maggin. "Fathers do not kill their sons. He did not even want to punish him. He only wanted to talk to him--to make him listen, the way a boy ought to listen to his father." It's a startling scene, even for a nightmare, as Jonathan Kent realizes that Superboy is too powerful, too inhuman to be allowed to reign over humanity, so the father begins digging for the chunk of extraterrestrial rock that will destroy his own adopted child. That's a lot of heavy subtext for a mass market novel billed as a tie-in to the Superman movie sequel, and the nightmare is the thing that begins the book. And it gets creepier, as Jonathan Kent digs up the Kryptonite and a hand springs up from the earth, pushing the shovel and the father away. Superboy rises out of the ground, menacingly:

"The boy glared at the man, raised the shovel over his head like a broadsword."

Jonathan wakes up, but what an image! Demonic and Oedipal--it surprised me to read such a depiction of Superboy in the opening sequence of the novel, even if it was just a dream.

But the dream sets up the grasshopper scene, for Jonathan's fears are not quickly forgotten, and he sees young Clark sitting with a microscope peering at "a cross section of a grasshopper's nerve ganglia." "I dissected him myself with my fingernails and my microscopic vision," says Clark, enthusiastically, and given the context of the previous scene, chillingly.

The scene continues as Clark uses his own super-intellect and his "weird optic nerve" to project the magnification so Jonathan can see a single molecule of a virus attached to the grasshopper's nerve cell wall. The scene is laced with unease, as Jonathan thinks the dead grasshopper is a sign that Clark has no regard for life, but sees all living things as part of a science experiment he can conduct at will. It's the first sign of his nightmare coming true.

The reality is that Clark had found the dead grasshopper, along with dozens of other dead ones, in the fields, and he dissected it to find out what had killed it. To prevent it from happening to other grasshoppers. To save lives.

The point of the scene, in the novel, is to establish the very human fear of someone like Superboy/Superman using his unstoppable powers unchecked. And to emphasize that even with all of his immense power, Clark Kent would never even consider hurting any living thing, no matter how small.

No wonder Miracle Monday--or at least this one bit of it--was cited in the Superman 2000 pitch. I don't know if Maggin's book is any good overall, but that opening sequence captures the essence of Superman perfectly. Superior, detached, possibly frightening, but deeply humane, and deeply good.

The Superman 2000 Pitch: Superman

I've discussed the "Concept" and "The Writing Process" involved in the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer proposal to revamp Superman for the 21st century, and Chad Nevett has discussed the proposal's concept of a vegetarian Superman and the cyclical nature of the superhero genre. Now, I'm going to move on to what the uber-crew had to say about Superman himself (with my commentary). The block quotes come from the Superman 2000 pitch:

Superman is defined immediately by his increase in capability. This is a more powerful Man of Steel, a Superman with a much keener intellect and curiosity. Suddenly there’s more to learn, more to do, further to travel and a greater responsibility than ever before. At the same time, one of the first effects of his increases in power is to make Superman a little more remote (but only as he takes time to understand the changes which have affected him). After the initial shock, Kal is more Superman than ever before, with a corresponding tight focus on the character and his incredible adventures. Now is the time to make Superman very definitely the star of his own book and to play down the sprawling soap opera subplots.

This notion of a MORE powerful Superman is in stark contrast to what John Byrne did to depower Superman in the 1980s. And that's the point, of course. This Superman for the 21st century is supposed to be everything the Byrne Superman was not--powerful, distant, incredible. Byrne focused on the SuperMAN, while Morrison and company proposed the SUPERman.

Superman’s character is one we all feel we know intimately. The scene with Superboy and the grasshopper in Miracle Monday nails it beautifully; this could be the world’s scariest living being, a detached, scientific observer with the ability to experiment upon us all. Instead, this brilliant Kryptonian brain was introduced to the noblest of human values and somehow those great powers were put to use in the service of an ethical code the Kryptonians would have been impressed and startled by.

I haven't yet read Elliot S! Maggin's Miracle Monday novel, but I've ordered a used copy (it's long out-of-print) and I've heard only good things about it. Has anyone here read it? I wonder if it informed All-Star Superman the way it seems to have informed Superman 2000. I'll get back to you on that one.

To that end, we’d like to balance out his battles with Brainiac and Luthor with stories which thoroughly explore those values, stories allowing him to return to his roots as a champion of the weak and oppressed. Even more so than for Batman, Green Lantern, Flash--all his peers and contemporaries--Superman’s job is to fight for and inspire those who cannot fight for themselves. His job is to make this world a better place and to help all men realize their potential as supermen.

Further to this, it’s important to keep in mind the Superman/Christ parallels WITHOUT being obvious and heavy-handed about them. Superman has to think differently from us, and when we see into his head, we should be shocked by the clarity and simplicity of his brilliance and compassion. This is a god sent to Earth not to suffer and die but to live and inspire and change the face of the galaxy by his deeds and reputation. This is the man who will take time out from stopping Mongul’s plan to crash Alpha Centauri into our sunsystem just to save a drowning dog or dry the tears of a child.
We also see Superman as the ultimate communicator--invulnerable to pain, he needs none of the physical defensive postures we take for granted and so would be incredibly relaxed and open--the big smile, the instant handshake, the conviction that everyone he meets is to be regarded as a friend until he proves otherwise. Superman should be indefatigable and trustworthy. No more "Bad Superman" or "Crazy Superman" stories for a while.

This is far more of the Silver Age notion of Superman's goodness than anything we saw in the Bronze or Modern Ages. But even in the Silver Age, Superman could be, well, a dick (there's a whole website about it, isn't there?), so this Superman 2000 concept of the character is more of a synthesis of all of the character's best qualities (not best as in "coolest" or most "commercial," but best as in BEST), than it is a return to basics. It's a return to what the character always aspired to be, but writers always wanted to give him flaws to keep the character relatable. Morrison and company wanted to make Superman ideal, so we could aspire to him, not so he could make us feel good about our own flaws.

His curiosity and kindness are childlike in their purity but he should also be frighteningly quick and clever. The combination of contradictory qualities adds to his slightly removed air. The eyes go vague when he looks at your electrical field for a second and gets the idea for an oscillating defensive forcefield based on the rhythms of your pulse rate. Sometimes he seems not all here, but it’s only because he’s much more here than we can sensibly hope to be.

This bit seems to nail the kind of Superman that we're currently seeing in All-Star Superman, doesn't it? That "frighteningly quick and clever" being who is more than we can ever hope to be. That's what makes him Superman. He is the paragon, not of humanity, but of the ideal of humanity.

More from Superman 2000 each week, until Chad and I run out of stuff to say.

The Superman 2000 Pitch: The Writing Process

I've commented a bit on the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer concept for Superman 2000, the famously rejected pitch that might have revitalized the Superman franchise for a new millenium, and Chad Nevett has looked at what the pitch had to say about Superman's dietary habits and morality, and today I'll take a look at what the guys had to say about how exactly they would all team up to write Superman. How would that have worked, anyway?

According to the final section of the pitch, titled "The Writing Process":

Project: Superman 2000 includes a new and different approach to the very way the comics are created.

The four of us would like to pool our talents in a unique way. We’re less interested in seeing each Super-book assigned to one writer as we are in putting everyone’s individual talents to their best use every week. Morrison and Millar are headmen, full of new and refreshing ideas; Peyer and Waid write from the heart with an emphasis on dialogue and characterization. No more round-robin scripting where some guy’s always stuck writing Chapter Three; instead, scenes and scripts fly back and forth across the Great Pond, and instead of duplicating past dynamics where good writers are introduced into the Superman Collective and then sometimes forced to subsume their individual styles and visions, the adventures of Superman are chronicled by a group of like-minded scribes who were friends before they were partners, who know they share a common vision, who are willing and eager to work as a unit for the good of their own hero.

It's a whole new way of writing comics, but it's not without precedent. In broad strokes, it’s similar to the way in which soap operas are crafted. Different writers are responsible for certain characters, plots and subplots, all according to their particular passions and specialties. We're still ironing out the details of the actual process, and we're all aware that any editor's heart would freeze solid at the sound of the names Morrison, Millar and Peyer in connection with anything that requires, oh, a weekly deadline...but since Waid meets his deadlines with an almost Catholic-guilt ferocity, he’s volunteering to be the Rob Petrie of this little Alan Brady Show--the writer who'll filter all the work and make dead certain it's on the editor’s desk when it's supposed to be. As much as he values his professional reputation, he’s willing to stake it on this thrilling and potentially revolutionary process. In the end, we know we can come through with stories the readers will be as excited to see as we will.

Hmmm...what a strange and revolutionary notion--a team of comic top-notch comic writers working in unison (sharing each issue by crafting subplots and character beats, and taking advantage of what they each do best) to create what would have been, in essence, a weekly comic. Not surprisingly, when this same writing process was actually tried, half a decade later, with DC's 52, both Morrison and Waid were involved. (Millar was at Marvel by then, and Peyer was pretty much out of comics at that point.) And I think it worked quite well on 52. Far, far better than whatever writing model was used for Countdown (supposedly Paul Dini as head writer an a rotating cast of writers on sequential issues, but I'm not exactly sure that's how it really happened--there seemed to be a lot of editorial influence on the nature of the series--far more than we saw in 52).

It will be interesting to see if Busiek and company can pull of a successful weekly series with Trinity, a comic which is scheduled to hit shelves today. One would think that a weekly series would be incredibly difficult to pull off, but not because of the writing. The drawing is the slow part. The writing should, in theory, take less time. But it doesn't work that way, does it? Everything is always harder than you think it will be, and when Morrison and company proposed collaboration on a weekly Superman series, they had no idea what they were in for. Ask Morrison or Waid if they'd ever do what they did on 52 again, and see what they say (note: it's not happy thoughts about ever doing anything of the sort, ever again).

The Superman 2000 Pitch: The Concept

In 1998, Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Mark Millar, and Tom Peyer pitched something called "Superman 2000: A plan to revitalize the Superman franchise for the newmillenium." The pitch was rejected, for mysterious reasons, although Mark Waid discussed why he was forbidden from writing Superman in a 9/29/2000 interview with Warren Ellis:

WARREN ELLIS: I've been given to understand that when you and Morrison were turned down in your bid to take over SUPERMAN, you were informed that, in fact, you would NEVER be allowed to write the Superman books. What did that mean to you personally? What is the condition of your relationship with DC and Paul Levitz following it?

MARK WAID: What did that mean to me personally? You cannot IMAGINE the frustration. No, I mean it. You think you can, but you can't. The one job I'd been working towards my entire life--and I'd just been told point-blank that not only could I never have it, but I couldn't have it for any reasons that were just or made any logical sense--at least in part because someone at DC had point-blank asked me for a proposal and then failed to speak up when another someone decided I was simply crusading for a job that wasn't available, violating the freelance code, and acting in bad (and punishable) faith. Doesn't matter that that wasn't true; since when do truth and politics go hand in hand? Welcome to the real world.

Presumably the zeal with which Waid and the others pursued the job of revamping Superman caused such friction that the proposal was summarily rejected, even though it was filled with great ideas (some of which Morrison has since used or altered for his current All-Star Superman series). But as Waid points out in the interview, this was a pitch that was requested by DC editorial, and not just an example of freelance gunslinging.

According to the pitch, the proposed revamp was intended to, "honor each of Superman’s various interpretations and to use internal story logic as our launching pad for a re-imagined, streamlined 21st century Man of Steel. The 'cosmic reset' notion has been replaced by a policy of 'include and transcend' with regard to past continuity." "Include and transcend" has been a hallmark of Morrison's approach to superhero work--just look at his current Batman run where all of Batman's past adventures are considered part of the character's psychic background--and it's almost exactly what he's doing in All-Star Superman right now. If accepted, the "Superman 2000" idea would have been an all-inclusive continuity embrace, instead of a traditional "white-event" reboot (as we've seen repeatedly in The Legion of Super-Heroes--although perhaps Geoff Johns's "Legion of Three Worlds" is an example of the "include and transcend" philosophy, or at least the "include" part. Whatever the reason, the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer Superman was never meant to be, and it's too bad, because it could have possibly made the mainstream Superman titles more interesting and important than they had been in years.

Here's a small example of the type of approach the "Superman 2000" team would have used, taken from the section of the pitch labeled "The Concept":

The key to the initial concept lies in a radical but organic reversal of the currently accepted logic of the Superman/Clark dynamic.

In our interpretation, Clark Kent isn’t what Superman really IS, Clark is what Superman WAS--until he reached his teenage years and began to realize what all those years of soaking up the Kansas sun had done to his alien cells. Superman’s story here is seen as the tale of a Midwest farmer’s son who BECAME AN ALIEN shortly after puberty. Suddenly young Clark doesn’t just know his Ma and Pa through sight, touch, sound--he knows the exact timbre of their pulse rates, he can look at their DNA and recognize their distinctive electrical fields and hear the neural crackle and release of chemicals which tell him they’ve changed their minds about something.

And he can do all this, he can scan the entire environment in an INSTANT, with levels of perception we can only imagine.

That’s gonna turn anyone’s head around a little.

This is someone who by any stretch of the imagination is no longer just human--except for the part of him, the ethical, humanitarian base nurtured by the Kents, which forms the unshakable foundation for everything Superman is BUT WHO IS WHAT SUPERMAN CAN NO LONGER BE. Or, in other words not our own, "...who, DISGUISED as Clark Kent, fights a never-ending battle..."

As originally conceived by Siegel and Shuster, Clark becomes a cherished, poignant masquerade: mild-mannered, thoughtful, humane Clark. When Superman is being human, Clark is his template but this is a being no longer confined by gravity or pain or mortality and his experiences as Superman are experiences on a level of existence we can only hope to imagine.

So, in order to accomplish the transition to this new take on Superman more easily, our rationale is this: it’s been established that Superman’s powers are a result of solar energy saturating his cellular batteries. It’s even been suggested that his powers will increase through time as he absorbs more of our sun’s radiation.

And that’s just what happens.

As part of his alien maturation process, Superman crosses a second, critical threshold of solar radiation absorption and suddenly wakes up three times more powerful and three times smarter.

This changes everything.

Not a radical change of the status quo, but an interesting enough approach, isn't it? It wasn't just about making Superman more powerful, it was about making Superman more aware. Transcendent.

UPDATE: Chad Nevett just posted a different bit from the "Superman 2000" pitch over on his blog. Read what he has to say about a Vegetarian Superman HERE.