The Man of Steel #6 (December 1986)
The Man of Steel #6 (December 1986)
Superman goes to Smallville to visit his adoptive parents and ends up running into his real one: a hologram of Jor-El dumps the entire history of Krypton into Superman’s brain. This is seriously the first time Superman, a 28 year old man who can fly and shoot lasers from his eyes, realizes he’s an alien (up to this point he thought he was an X-Men or something).
In the middle of all that, Superman also has an awkward encounter with his childhood pal Lana, whose life he accidentally ruined when they were teenagers and he told her he could fly. Lana spent the next ten years obsessed with him and following Superman’s exploits around the world instead of, you know, living a normal life. She tells him all this and then she’s like “but don’t feel bad or anything.” We don’t see the end of the conversation but Superman probably said “I, uh… think I left the oven on” and ran away from the creepy stalker lady.
After some soul-searching, Superman comes to terms with his alien heritage but decides that, fuck it, he still thinks of himself as human and will continue protecting mankind.
And that ends the Man of Steel miniseries! The idea behind this series was establishing that Clark Kent is the real person and Superman is the costume. We know this because at one point he pretty much says “Clark Kent is the real person, Superman is the costume.” That’s the characterization most writers would stick with for the following 13 years.
Character-Watch:
We saw Lana Lang briefly on #1, but this is her proper introduction. She’d eventually get over her creepy crush on Clark… by marrying his best friend.
Plotline-Watch:
Luthor’s Kryptonite: In this issue Superman finds out his baby spaceship was stolen. That plot would finally be resolved the next month on Superman #1, starting a much longer one that will eventually lead to Lex Luthor switching his brain to a new body and pretending to be his own Australian son.
Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):
As mentioned in previous reviews, this series has seemed to trade off between big important issues, then kinda nothing issues. This is definitely a big important one, though as far as actual plot goes, not a whole lot actually occurs.
We open with the cover, introducing us more formally to Lana Lang (who had cameos in previous issues). The body language on each of these covers has really clued us in to personality, and there's a strong contrast with the confidence and vivaciousness of Lois' cover, and the vulnerability of this issue's cover.
Inside the issue we're greeted by another soaring Superman image, as Superman descends over the panorama of midwestern prairie. All the details in the following pages are very accurate to smalltown life showing Byrne can draw mundane everyday surroundings just as well as comic-booky action. I do notice on the prairie vista the same issue with some of the previous comics in this series, that some of the finer ink lines seem to be dropping off in the production process, though not as noticeably as the Bizarro issue.
Living on the prairies myself, I know that this part of the world is renowned for its living skies, and Byrne does a great job of depicting this throughout the issue, using his signature silhouette panels to good effect.
The reveal of the holographic Jor-El is appropriately jarring (RIP rhubarb pie) with the flat gray representing the black of Jor's garb a good indication of the brightness of this apparition. It's only in recent re-readings that I noticed that Kryptonians are totally hairless, eyebrows and all--as similar as his features are to Clark's, the lack of eyebrows really make him seem as alien as he is.
I always appreciate Byrne's Krypton designs, so it's great seeing Superman interacting with the foreign sterility of Krypton in his simulation/fever dream (though some of that fine line fall-off is evident on the outdoor shot of Krypton).
Byrne draws present-day Lana Lang as decidedly unglamourous in these pages, though I guess that's to accentuate the harrowing ten years she has had since Clark revealed his secret, but she looks pretty foxy in the flashbacks. In her later appearances, Byrne vamps her up quite a bit.
The sequence with Jor-El downloading Clark with knowledge is a good one, particularly the shot of Pa Kent hitting the hologram with a shovel--some great work from the colourist here. Byrne does his best to make the extremely text dense pages that follow as visually interesting as possible, and I wonder if Superman soaring around a sunrise is another nod to Christopher Reeve, clearly Byrne's template for Superman.
Like in issue #1, we end with one of the all-time best Byrne drawings of Superman, standing majestically on a mountaintop, as he affirms his humanity in his head.
This issue might be the most important of the entire miniseries, in the way it reframes Superman as nurture over nature, and posits that Superman was born on Earth (a detail that made a later what-if storyline possible). It isn't Marlon Brando's Jor-El instilling in Kal the belief that humans can be a great people so long as he is there to show them the way. Instead, Superman's moral compass and desire to help his neighbour is, like him, borne of Kansas. Plus, as Max has pointed out, it sets up a pretty nifty mystery to kick off the main Superman series, a storyline that has huge repercussions, for decades of Superman comics.
BYRNE NOTICE:
"Yes… there was some some kind of motor stimulation..." This is a guy who just woke up from what he thinks is a dream on an alien world, and this is how he phrases it in that state? [Max: Maybe some of that charming Kryptonian personality rubbed off on him?]
Byrne continues to make Clark something of a jerk in these pages. If you could choose to make the story anything you wanted, why would you choose that Clark broke Lana's heart by showing her a glimpse of who he really was, then ghosting her, for years? Later writers (Jeph Loeb in particular) cleaned this up retroactively, adopting the concept from TV shows like Lois & Clark and Smallville that Lana wanted only Clark the farmboy, and wouldn't accept the hero part of him (unlike Lois, who had come to love and accept both aspects of his personality). There are hints of that motivation even in this issue, when she says that she'd have been happier if "you were just an ordinary man, and we'd raised about a dozen ordinary kids". Even Ma Kent harbours resentment for the way Clark treated Lana, for years to come. Making it worse is that even after hearing in detail about how his actions hurt her, Clark still keeps saying he doesn't understand.
He also did not look great confessing to his mom that he'd "been contenting {himself} with her clear infatuation with Superman..." While the flaws differentiate him from the Silver Age version of the character, they also somewhat tarnish someone who should be in the running for the most moral person in the DC Universe.
Though Lana is unintentionally mistreated by Clark, she also doesn't come off great in a couple instances. She certainly doesn't sugar-coat the damage she feels Clark has done her, and admits that she considered revealing his secret to the world! That's pretty lousy! It's interesting that way in the future, during the Death and Rebirth storyline, it's Lana who suggests letting everyone know who Clark was once he dies and is quickly rebuffed.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS
John Byrne's Canadian-by-way-of-English heritage is showing, as the Kents wear sock feet at home around the dinner table. While not a hardened rule, Americans more typically wear their shoes indoors, while in Canada and the UK it is uniformly customary to remove your shoes on entry.
This is the first mention we have of Byrne's establishing that Clark's favourite dessert is rhubarb pie. He later mentions this when fighting Killgrave in about twenty issues from now. It was because of Superman's love for it in these comics that I first tried rhubarb pie, and--guess what? It's legitimately my favourite now, too! [Max: It is with shame that I must admit I’ve never tasted rhubarb pie. I’ve failed as a Superman fan.]
I'm not sure I remembered Krypton had multiple moons.
Interesting little hint of Silver Age continuity, that Lana is raised by her aunt, rather than her parents. They don't explore that much in this era, but it was a huge part of her personality on the Smallville series.
I wouldn't mind reading about Lana's years of following Clark around. Some of it is covered in the weird Manhunter story, Millennium, but not much. [Max: She got an issue in the World of Smallville miniseries, too, but yeah, there's potential for much more. Again: hire us, DC!]
Know what would have been a nice gesture, Clark? Fixing up Aunt Helen's old house.
I like that Jor-El is so different from his Silver Age counterpart, coming off harshly as he scolds Superman to "be silent. And learn." I wonder, had Pa Kent not interrupted the process, would Clark have gone full Eradicator/Krypton Man, or was downloading Kryptonian history all that Jor-El wanted to achieve?
See comments on Tumblr: https://superman86to99.tumblr.com/post/57271950445/the-man-of-steel-6-december-1986-superman-goes#disqus_thread
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