It’s very easy to become bored –– disheartened –– actually depressed –– when you are reading about the planet Krypton before it blew up. It’s such dull stuff. And at the crux of this energetic maelstrom of dishwater, the eye of this vortex of banality, is none other than Jor–El, the father of Superman.
Partially it is because we have read the origin story of Superman so many times that we would as lief eat a pincushion as read it once more. We wish these superficial marionettes conjured up before us like so much trivial vapour would vanish. And this is, indeed, what generation after generation of writers has been striving – and failing – to accomplish, and will continue to do so from now ’til time immemorial – until, no doubt, the Earth itself blows up in a manner very like the one that did for planet Krypton. In World of Krypton all of Jor–El’s many well-trod scientific endeavours and breakthroughs are explored in tedious detail – the Phantom Zone, anti-gravity thrusters, etc. Nothing too dull or trivial it seems.
One of his more eccentric “brainwaves” is in the field of, shall we say, criminal rehabilitation. It doesn’t make sense to me. Jor–El recommends that criminals should henceforth be placed in suspended animation and launched in bubbles into orbit in the planet Krypton’s immediate atmosphere. There they can float above the planet until they have served out their sentences.
I fail to see the advantage in this. How exactly does it profit the polis, sage Socrates? It seems downright perverse to me – contrary – unwholesome. Need I point out what is obvious to the followers of one FRANK CASTLE’s many adventures, that the essence of capital punishment is that it is punishing – even if it is not always capital. If the malfeasant miscreants are in suspended animation (being brainwashed by rehabilitating subliminal mind-control tapes, incidentally – but I shan’t even pursue that rather boring course of leftist critique here) then they are not actually awake to appreciate the wrong that they have done. What's the significance of time passing if you're asleep? It makes of the prisoners mere Rip Van Winkles. They’re put in the bubbles and then they wake up and come out of the bubbles. It’s like having your wisdom teeth extracted.
Also, floating about unconscious in solitary bubbles above Krypton’s surface they are under no threat whatsoever from grisly prison rape, which is –– I naively thought –– the cornerstone of Western civilization’s deterrents against lawbreaking. The threat of prison rape is, in fact, the single greatest deterrent against wrongdoing in existence. Without it, the world would be in inchoate, antediluvian anarchy.
The reason why Jor–El's crackpot scheme prevails is because of the alternative that is even more outre. The solution offered by Jor–El's competitor, one “Tron–Et” (his real name apparently), is the ingenious “Matter-Dissolver”. This –– as you might imagine –– succinctly “eliminates the problem of the criminal.” If Frank Castle was a denizen of Krypton (– idea for a Marvel/DC crossover event ––) he would surely be a keen subscriber to Tron–Et’s peculiar philosophical tenets.
Or not: unfortunately this canny device is discredited in the end when it turns out that “Tron–Et” is himself a master criminal who wants to annihilate all the criminal lackeys who worked for him before they can be put in Jor–El’s rehabilitator-capsules.
Tron–Et is frightened – “reasonably” enough – that these erstwhile henchmen might emerge from Jor–El’s bubbles older, wiser and reformed. His “sensible” fear is that on clambering, like newborns a-birthing, from the bubbles and after only a rudimentary snack, the former lackeys would go directly to the criminal courts and tell the judge that Tron–Et was a criminal kingpin.
You can see how a thing like that might happen.
Hence the “Matter-Dissolver.”
Hence the success of Jor–El’s prison-capsules.
I see that I have taken up quite enough of your time. And I can see from your faces, having read this far, that you agree with me entirely – Krypton and Jor–El are very boring.
AFTERTHOUGHT
[This afterthought is really only for you comics jagoffs out there in the wide, disappointing world. It occurs to me now, as I write this, that the origin story of Superman has some resemblances to the origin story of Galactus. Superman is the last survivor of a dying planet –– for Galactus it is a dying multiverse –– but the “core myth” (and pardon the dreadful pun) is the same. It’d be like that story where it was intimated that the Phantom Stranger is actually the future son of Superman and Wonder Woman cast back through time.
As I said, dull stuff in the dry diggings, which I very much regret having to say, but sometimes – as an academic – or as a lapsed academic I should say! – I have to “publish” my findings, desiccated and loathsome as they are, to add them to that infinitely expanding, pulsing pool of knowledge we call HUMAN CIVILIZATION. This pool of knowledge is, as Jor-El would no doubt attest, our only hope for the endurance of a sensitive society.
That and the vile spectre of the ever-present threat of prison rape.]
