Kingdom Come or Dark Knight Returns?

[Kurosawa]

You're just all kinds of presumptuous, ain't you?

Let's see...would you like seeing someone having a character you created humiliated and degraded?

[Mat001]

His position is placating the government when it should be standing up for truth and justice.

Which is why he let's Bruce go, after he realizes that he's not dead. Clark heard Bruce's heart start beating again, before Carrie could dig him up. He used his X-ray Vision and recognized Carrie. He winks at her and walks off. Thus, Clark did not lose the ethical battle. He stuck with his ideology. He only went to Gotham, because as I said, he knows that the government will kill Bruce. We see it the minute his helmet comes off. Clark does his best to prevent that by making sure that they don't get the shot.

I care less about Superman losing the physical fight and more about how the series present Superman as losing the ethical fight. Superman has lost his share of fights, but he does not and should not lose many ethical disputes. One can debate who is right and wrong in their dispute in DKR, but the book sympathizes with Batman and portrays Superman as a complete sell-out and literally as a pet to Reagan.

Clark only sold out because of Kandor being threatened. And even then, he still disobeys the President by not turning Bruce in. At least he didn't quit, like in "Kingdom Come" and like Bruce did. He stuck with it for ten years.

[Kurosawa]

Which is why he let's Bruce go, after he realizes that he's not dead. Clark heard Bruce's heart start beating again, before Carrie could dig him up. He used his X-ray Vision and recognized Carrie. He winks at her and walks off. Thus, Clark did not lose the ethical battle. He stuck with his ideology. He only went to Gotham, because as I said, he knows that the government will kill Bruce. We see it the minute his helmet comes off. Clark does his best to prevent that by making sure that they don't get the shot.



Clark only sold out because of Kandor being threatened. And even then, he still disobeys the President by not turning Bruce in. At least he didn't quit, like in "Kingdom Come" and like Bruce did. He stuck with it for ten years.

Both are out of character, IMO. And Waid should know better. At least Miller pretty clearly doesn't know much about Superman and doesn't care for the character.

[Aquacatlungfish]

That piece of crap is one of the most disgusting comics ever printed and is a pure insult to John Broome and Gil Kane.

Get over yourself.

[Kurosawa]

Get over yourself.

Not my fault that those guys and their work is nothing to you. It matters to me, so seeing their characters degraded makes me angry.

[T Hedge Coke]

Aquacatlungfish, let it go. Kurosawa's made it clear he's not interested in discussion, just here to insult people who aren't here and those who are, unless they agree with him completely.

[Mat001]

Both are out of character, IMO. And Waid should know better.

He was helped by Maggin and Waid did know better, which is why he wrote KC like he did.

At least Miller pretty clearly doesn't know much about Superman and doesn't care for the character.

Except if he didn't care for Superman, he wouldn't have drawn the covers for "The Secret Years, used him "The Dark Knight Returns", "The Dark Knight Strikes Again", in "Batman And Robin The Boy Wonder" and wouldn't have said that he had planned to write a solo story. He also understood Superman's character placing his desire to continue to save people, which is why he agreed to join the government, rather than fight against them. And later on, did so to protect his daughter and Kandor. Was even willing to sacrifice himself to protect them against Brainiac. Not to mention that at the end, he disobeyed orders.

[Lexrules]

While I agree on DKR was not a good characteristic of Superman I did like Kingdom Come and a darker future that was to come for Superman. It was a path I could see him taking if he had given up on the fact that his work was for nothing and he had lost the one thing in life that kept him going.

In other words I think he would retire like in Kingdom Come over becoming a Government stooge like in DKR.

[Kurosawa]

Aquacatlungfish, let it go. Kurosawa's made it clear he's not interested in discussion, just here to insult people who aren't here and those who are, unless they agree with him completely.

So having Hal Jordan act like a fool and be assaulted by a kid pays respect to John Broome and Gil Kane in exactly which way?

[dupersuper]

I have you on ignore

I bet you have a lot of people on ignore...

ASBAR #9 was Dick Grayson's finest hour.

He's had finer.

Pretty much, yes it is. Too bad you don't respect Siegel and Shuster and their creation like you do Frank Miller.

That piece of crap is one of the most disgusting comics ever printed and is a pure insult to John Broome and Gil Kane.

It's a wonder you read any new books, with all the "insults" to late creators.

So much he got permabanned from another forum.

Only 1? Rumbles? Community?

Kurosawa's made it clear he's not interested in discussion

Truer words were never spoken.

[Lorendiac]

DKR, both as a comic and for Superman's portrayal. He really doesn't do anything terrible in DKR, but KC Superman is a jerk and too self-pitying for my tastes.

I can't argue with that!

I bought and read KC as it was first coming out, and I was very disappointed by the way it handled Superman's personality. Everything that follows this paragraph is cut-and-pasted from what I said in another discussion thread, six years ago!

************************************************** *********************************

By coincidence, yesterday I reacted to someone else's comments about Kingdom Come on another forum. His basic argument appeared to be that Kingdom Come was long-winded and pretentious because Alex Ross was bound and determined to show us, at great length, that "classic" superhero concepts were much better than 1990s Image-style "superheroes."

That was his attitude. Mine was a bit different. Here's what I said:

*****

Of course, the ironic thing here was that, from where I stood when I bought the miniseries as it came out, the plot of Kingdom Come seemed to "prove" that Alex Ross saw "classic" old-fashioned superhero Superman as "Mister Crybaby, the Clueless Quitter."

How did the backstory go? Magog killed the Joker. Magog stood trial for this. A jury of his peers ruled that it was a justifiable act of violence, all things considered. Superman was so heartbroken at hearing that a single court decision had made what he judged to be a mistake that he threw a childish super-tantrum and flew off into oblivion for the next several years, rather than lift a finger to help anyone the next time any Global Catastrophe was threatening to wipe out zillions of people.

Sometimes I hear about cases in the criminal justice system that were not resolved the way I think they should have been resolved, but I don't dump all my responsibilities and run off to be a hermit in a cave because of it. (Does this prove I'm a better person than Superman?)

Eventually Superman gets the word that Kansas has just been nuked. "Gosh!" he says. "Even though I had single-handedly prevented such things from happening a thousand times before, it never occurred to me that when I quit being Superman for awhile, this might happen due to my absence!"

So we've established that he's a Crybaby, a Quitter, and Utterly Clueless about the probable consequences of his own absence from the scene for an extended period.

Eventually Superman decides to resume an active role in the world, and clean up the huge mess that the younger generations of heroes and villains have made of things, as he sees it. (Of course, if he had stuck around to provide an example to the younger heroes, and share the benefit of his greater experience with them, there might not be such a huge mess needing to be cleaned up in the first place.)

And Alex Ross's "epic" was supposed to persuade me that Superman was inherently better than those courageous young whippersnappers who, during Kal-El's nice long sulk -- "Go away! Somebody hurt my feelings and I refuse to come out of my room!" -- had actually been risking their necks on a daily basis as they tried to maintain some degree of law and order and to keep the lid on the supervillain population? If that was Ross's intention, then he did a fantastic job of shooting himself in the foot!

The story was that the Joker broke out of Arkham and opted to go to Metropolis, where he unleashed his Joker venom in the Daily Planet newsroom. Clark did his best to inhale the gas and get rid of it, but a number of people had been killed including Jimmy Olsen. Clark returned too late to rescue Lois, who was bludgeoned to death by the Joker. Clark and Bruce then went on a massive manhunt for the Joker and caught him. As he was being escorted into the courthouse, he was killed by Magog.

Mat001: I remember reading your reply to my post just before Thanksgiving, and I remember thinking: "Hey, giving this a proper response will take a lot of time, and what's more, it's been awhile since I reread 'Kingdom Come.' So my reply will have to wait until after I've brushed up on the details" . . . and then, what with the long Thanksgiving weekend and all, I kept forgetting to follow through on that plan.

Well, better late than never!

I agree with the part I just quoted from your post -- a nice synopsis of the bare facts of what had led up to Magog's notorious trial (ten years before the main action of "Kingdom Come").

But I disagree, to some extent, with your interpretation. (Granted, your interpretation is probably an excellent explanation of the way Mark Waid and Alex Ross wanted us to interpret those events, so it wouldn't be fair to blame you personally for any flaws in the plotting!)

The problem Clark had was that the law states that a criminal in custody, who is being compliment, cannot be killed by anyone off the street. It was vigilante justice, which is why Clark took Magog into custody and was later upset when the jury found him not guilty. And it was more than the jury doing that, but that the people supported Magog's actions. When Magog challenged Clark to a fight, he took off for the Fortress as he saw that the world didn't need him anymore. That nothing he did mattered and since he was still grieving over Lois, he was more than willing to do this.

Here are a few of the things which were wrong with Clark's reaction and how it was handled by the KC creative team:

1. There is no such thing as Joker being "a prisoner in custody who has been rendered harmless for the foreseeable future." There is only such a thing as "Joker is currently being called a 'prisoner' by incurable optimists who have not yet realized that The Joker can and will go on another killing spree whenever he feels like it! After which, he will probably be 'captured,' 'imprisoned,' and eventually will 'escape' to murder dozens more civilians in his next killing spree! Rinse and repeat, for as long as The Joker remains alive!"

By the time of that scene in KC, Joker had probably been "confined" by the authorities, in a prison or asylum, on literally a hundred (or more) occasions -- and he has never had any trouble breaking loose and killing people again whenever he felt the urge.

Ergo, anyone who killed Joker at any time, under any circumstances, would be committing "a simple act of self-defense" because it had been proved, dozens if not hundreds of times, that Joker is never harmless; he is always ready to kill again at the drop of a hat! Such details as "he's been searched for weapons and none were found" and "his hands are cuffed behind his back" and "he's surrounded by armed cops" make no difference to the fact that he can, at any time, break free somehow and commit another murder! Ergo, if you are face-to-face with The Joker, you are face-to-face with a homicidal psychotic whom any reasonable person would realize was a clear and present danger to your own life, right then and there!

We were never told exactly what defense Magog offered in his trial, but I strongly suspect it went along those general lines. And I think the jury made the right call in that special set of circumstances -- if only because there was room for tons of "reasonable doubt" regarding whether or not the Joker was a "helpless prisoner" instead of "an immediate threat to the lives of everyone in the vicinity."

To clarify my feelings about "vigilante justice": In real life, suppose I were on the jury in a case where a self-appointed "vigilante" had unquestionably done, to a captured murderer already surrounded by cops, what Magog did to Joker. (The example of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald springs to mind. Oswald was in police custody at the time.) If the defense didn't manage to make a good case for an insanity plea, then I know I would vote to find that vigilante guilty of Murder One -- unless he offered persuasive evidence that on dozens of previous occasions the "forces of law and order" had previously had that same known murderer "in custody," and that on dozens of occasions this known murderer had managed to escape at will and kill again, and therefore there was every reason to believe that he do so again, possibly in the next five seconds, if he wasn't stopped!

If the defense could prove all of that -- which has never happened in a criminal trial in real life, and probably never will -- then I'd vote for "Not Guilty by reason of self-defense when facing a man whom the entire world knows is ALWAYS ready, willing, and, most importantly, ABLE to commit homicide at the drop of a hat, whether he's currently 'a prisoner' or not! In this unique case, there was no such thing as the 'victim' being 'rendered harmless' and 'safely in custody.'"

2. Surely this could not be the first time that a jury, and/or the general public, has endorsed a decision which Clark found appalling. Remember all those times the Post-Crisis Luthor beat the rap? (For that matter, remember the time he won a presidential election?) Since when is Clark such a hopeless crybaby about the discovery that our court system is less-than-perfect in the outcomes it produces, and that sometimes his personal opinions are not identical to those held by a majority of his fellow citizens?

[Continued in next post -- I ran afoul of the character limit when I was trying to cut-and-paste what I'd written all at once in Notepad.]

[Lorendiac]

3. Granting that he was upset by what happened, Clark's decision that the world simply didn't need him any more makes absolutely no sense. It doesn't matter whether or not the common people of Metropolos thought Magog was more in tune with their needs than Clark was. It doesn't even matter that in that particular instance, it was absolutely true that Magog was more in tune with their needs than Clark was! (Naturally, all through KC, Waid and Ross made sure Clark never admitted that Magog had successfully prevented Joker from committing any further homicides of innocent civilians -- a miraculous achievement which Clark, Bruce, the entire U.S. justice system, etc., had consistently failed to achieve across a period of decades!)

But seriously: Since when does Clark believe that opinion polls "prove" who is right or wrong; who is needed or redundant; who is good or evil? In mainstream continuity, if Superman found he was sagging in the polls, I would expect him to say: "Apparently I haven't done such a great job of presenting my core beliefs to the public. Or maybe I've even made some honest-to-goodness mistakes which they are perfectly entitled to hold against me?" But I wouldn't expect him to just run away and hide in a cave for the next several years.

P.S. Until I was rereading a portion of "Kingdom Come #2" just now, I'd forgotten the little detail of the piechart on the front page of the Daily Planet, telling us who Metropolitans thought "best defends their future." Magog 77 percent -- Superman 18 percent.

4. Even granting for the sake of argument that Clark might have gone on a Super-Sulk for awhile after being upset by the jury's verdict, I really don't see it lasting ten years before Clark began to come to his senses. Wanting to take a "vacation" to calm down and recharge his (psychological) batteries is one thing. Hiding for several years and ignoring any threat to anyone else in the world for all that time? Not likely! (Unless he'd been brain-damaged, somewhere along the line in his previous super-slugfests?)

Eventually Superman gets the word that Kansas has just been nuked. "Gosh!" he says. "Even though I had single-handedly prevented such things from happening a thousand times before, it never occurred to me that when I quit being Superman for awhile, this might happen due to my absence!"

So we've established that he's a Crybaby, a Quitter, and Utterly Clueless about the probable consequences of his own absence from the scene for an extended period.

It was only nuked because Captain Atom's containment suit was ruptured. It wouldn't have mattered if he was there or not, as such an act was destined to happen with such a volatile power and such a flimsy containment suit.

There's a huge assumption there. Fatalistic, too. You seem to be saying: "Whether Superman had been there or not, it was inevitable that Captain Atom was going to zoom in toward Parasite for some incredibly futile hand-to-hand combat, and was going to be turned into a mushroom cloud in short order as Parasite ripped that containment suit wide open, releasing all that energy at once."

That is the exact opposite of the impression I remember getting about that confrontation when I first bought "Kingdom Come #1" (as soon as it came out).

But to be fair, I've just now gone back and reread the relevant pages to check exactly how the situation was presented to us.

In the bit in "Kingdom Come #1" where Diana had just persuaded Clark to catch up on recent world news, he hears the following soundbites (among others) from the news coverage regarding the clash between Magog's Justice Battalion and The Parasite:

"Witnesses characterized The Parasite as fearful

"Claim his pleas for mercy were ignored"

"Speculate that tragedy might have been averted had Magog relented"

"His surrender refused, Parasite unleashed a desperate salvo towards the nuclear-powered Captain Atom."

After looking that over, my position remains what it always has been. Waid and Ross were trying to tell us the following: "The tragedy only happened because good old Superman wasn't there. The hot-tempered heroes who were on the scene just went rushing in against Parasite without anything remotely resembling 'an intelligent plan' -- nor did they seem to have any kind of a clue about what Parasite was capable of doing to them if they moved in too close -- nor did they pay any attention to what Parasite was actually saying as they all tried to pulverize him!"

In other words . . . if Superman had been on the scene, things would have gone very differently, for various reasons:

1. Superman has fought The Parasite many times and has acquired a very good grasp of what that purple freak can or can't do. He would have formed some sort of plan which didn't involve several high-powered heroes basically handing their own powers over to Parasite on a silver platter.

2. Specifically, Superman would never be so moronic as to encourage Captain Atom to get anywhere within a hundred yards of Parasite, because Superman would be aware that Cap's containment suit might not hold up so well against the things Parasite could do to it at close range (possibly with the help of superpowers he was simultaneously draining away from other heroes in the vicinity, not to mention weakening Cap himself in the process).

3. Superman normally manages to keep his temper under control -- and is bright enough to realize that clobbering people is not always the best way to protect any civilians in the vicinity. He has even been known to pay some attention to what an enemy is actually saying. Ergo, he quickly would have picked up on the fact that Parasite sounded scared and frustrated, rather than murderously angry, and thus might well have tried to "talk him down" like a hostage negotiator instead of moving straight to the "brutal slugfest" portion of the program. ("Okay, Parasite, now that I'm here, suppose you tell me exactly what you want. Maybe I will agree that it's doable. Maybe we don't have to hit each other at all!")

So! If the seasoned veteran known as Superman had been on the scene, he never would have allowed Captain Atom to go anywhere near a panicky Parasite, and thus the containment suit would not have been ripped open in the heat of the moment, and thus a bunch of costumed heroes who were blindly following Magog's lead would not have died in a mushroom cloud, and thus Kansas (and portions of neighboring states) would not have become a radioactive wasteland.

I believe all of the above is pretty much what we are supposed to infer was going through Superman's mind right after he caught up on recent events and belatedly realized that his presence had, in fact, been needed in the world even after Magog's trial. That's exactly why he makes his big comeback in the last few pages of KC #1 -- determined to do his best to make up for lost time so this won't happen again, the same way the nuking of Kansas wouldn't have happened in the first place if he had been on the job at the time!

My problem with it is that Superman ought to be bright enough to have anticipated that something along these general lines was very likely to happen, sooner or later, if he wasn't around to stop it! After all, he's stopped other huge catastrophes in the past -- many, many times -- and he obviously had zero faith in Magog and anyone who was inclined to follow Magog's example -- so what made him assume that Magog and his followers couldn't possibly mess up horribly the next time a potential catastrophe was looming on the horizon?

[Mat001]

Mat001: I remember reading your reply to my post just before Thanksgiving, and I remember thinking: "Hey, giving this a proper response will take a lot of time, and what's more, it's been awhile since I reread 'Kingdom Come.' So my reply will have to wait until after I've brushed up on the details" . . . and then, what with the long Thanksgiving weekend and all, I kept forgetting to follow through on that plan.

Well, better late than never!

I agree with the part I just quoted from your post -- a nice synopsis of the bare facts of what had led up to Magog's notorious trial (ten years before the main action of "Kingdom Come").

You should definitely read that "Thy Kingdom Come" one shot and if you can find it at a library, Maggin's novelization.

But I disagree, to some extent, with your interpretation. (Granted, your interpretation is probably an excellent explanation of the way Mark Waid and Alex Ross wanted us to interpret those events, so it wouldn't be fair to blame you personally for any flaws in the plotting!)

Fair enough. But it's less interpretation on my part and more what they wrote.

Here are a few of the things which were wrong with Clark's reaction and how it was handled by the KC creative team:

1. There is no such thing as Joker being "a prisoner in custody who has been rendered harmless for the foreseeable future." There is only such a thing as "Joker is currently being called a 'prisoner' by incurable optimists who have not yet realized that The Joker can and will go on another killing spree whenever he feels like it! After which, he will probably be 'captured,' 'imprisoned,' and eventually will 'escape' to murder dozens more civilians in his next killing spree! Rinse and repeat, for as long as The Joker remains alive!"

That's not how Superman sees it compared to Batman, but only because they had differing points of view throughout the years. Even having dealt with the Joker both solo and with his involvement in team dynamics, Clark still believed in the notion that a criminal like the Joker is contained until he escapes and causes problems. This is Clark following the ideals of the law, if not the wording of the law. Bruce saw the Joker in Arkham as a breather until their next encounter. Magog was just more cynical in his view which is why he did what he did.

By the time of that scene in KC, Joker had probably been "confined" by the authorities, in a prison or asylum, on literally a hundred (or more) occasions -- and he has never had any trouble breaking loose and killing people again whenever he felt the urge.

Since it was Metropolis, the Joker was obviously either being held at Stryker's Island, or at S.T.A.R. Labs.

Ergo, anyone who killed Joker at any time, under any circumstances, would be committing "a simple act of self-defense" because it had been proved, dozens if not hundreds of times, that Joker is never harmless; he is always ready to kill again at the drop of a hat! Such details as "he's been searched for weapons and none were found" and "his hands are cuffed behind his back" and "he's surrounded by armed cops" make no difference to the fact that he can, at any time, break free somehow and commit another murder! Ergo, if you are face-to-face with The Joker, you are face-to-face with a homicidal psychotic whom any reasonable person would realize was a clear and present danger to your own life, right then and there!

However, that only applies if the criminal attempts something that warrants necessary use of lethal force. The Joker had not made any attempts to escape or to attack anyone. Vigilantes are not accepted by the law. Vigilante justice is also looked down upon unless there is a good and sufficient reason to be lenient. If the Joker attempted an escape and a private citizen with a legally owned firearm on their person chose to do something, then the courts would take that into consideration. They would not accept it any other way. Which is what happened when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, a few days after the death of John Kennedy. Ruby went on trial for the murder of the man who killed the President and was sentenced to life in prison. Ignoring conspiracy theories as to why Ruby did what he did, the evidence supported the notion that Ruby was acting as a vigilante seeking vigilante justice.

We were never told exactly what defense Magog offered in his trial, but I strongly suspect it went along those general lines. And I think the jury made the right call in that special set of circumstances -- if only because there was room for tons of "reasonable doubt" regarding whether or not the Joker was a "helpless prisoner" instead of "an immediate threat to the lives of everyone in the vicinity."

Magog pretty much used that and the jury only acquitted him because they let the personal tragedy cloud their judgment.

To clarify my feelings about "vigilante justice": In real life, suppose I were on the jury in a case where a self-appointed "vigilante" had unquestionably done, to a captured murderer already surrounded by cops, what Magog did to Joker. (The example of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald springs to mind. Oswald was in police custody at the time.) If the defense didn't manage to make a good case for an insanity plea, then I know I would vote to find that vigilante guilty of Murder One -- unless he offered persuasive evidence that on dozens of previous occasions the "forces of law and order" had previously had that same known murderer "in custody," and that on dozens of occasions this known murderer had managed to escape at will and kill again, and therefore there was every reason to believe that he do so again, possibly in the next five seconds, if he wasn't stopped!

I just read this part and had made the comparison earlier. Didn't know that you had.

If the defense could prove all of that -- which has never happened in a criminal trial in real life, and probably never will -- then I'd vote for "Not Guilty by reason of self-defense when facing a man whom the entire world knows is ALWAYS ready, willing, and, most importantly, ABLE to commit homicide at the drop of a hat, whether he's currently 'a prisoner' or not! In this unique case, there was no such thing as the 'victim' being 'rendered harmless' and 'safely in custody.'"

It just really depends though. Juries are infallible and as I noted, the trial was in Metropolis and not Gotham. The jury probably was a bit biased.

2. Surely this could not be the first time that a jury, and/or the general public, has endorsed a decision which Clark found appalling. Remember all those times the Post-Crisis Luthor beat the rap? (For that matter, remember the time he won a presidential election?) Since when is Clark such a hopeless crybaby about the discovery that our court system is less-than-perfect in the outcomes it produces, and that sometimes his personal opinions are not identical to those held by a majority of his fellow citizens?

Lex never went to trial on Earth-22. Though events were similar in many ways to Earth-0, there were differences as well. When Lex did get off in 1997, Clark didn't blame the jury, but rather Lex for his underhanded deception. He did get mad at the public for voting for Lex, which is why he went out to Saturn and lashed out in anger, smashing debris. His heart break here wasn't just the trial, but public opinion which had shifted out of favor of the old guard and in favor of the flavor of the month. That the public didn't want heroes who inspired them, but anti-heroes who were more interested in killing and maiming than inspiring hope.

[Mat001]

3. Granting that he was upset by what happened, Clark's decision that the world simply didn't need him any more makes absolutely no sense. It doesn't matter whether or not the common people of Metropolos thought Magog was more in tune with their needs than Clark was. It doesn't even matter that in that particular instance, it was absolutely true that Magog was more in tune with their needs than Clark was! (Naturally, all through KC, Waid and Ross made sure Clark never admitted that Magog had successfully prevented Joker from committing any further homicides of innocent civilians -- a miraculous achievement which Clark, Bruce, the entire U.S. justice system, etc., had consistently failed to achieve across a period of decades!)

But seriously: Since when does Clark believe that opinion polls "prove" who is right or wrong; who is needed or redundant; who is good or evil? In mainstream continuity, if Superman found he was sagging in the polls, I would expect him to say: "Apparently I haven't done such a great job of presenting my core beliefs to the public. Or maybe I've even made some honest-to-goodness mistakes which they are perfectly entitled to hold against me?" But I wouldn't expect him to just run away and hide in a cave for the next several years.

P.S. Until I was rereading a portion of "Kingdom Come #2" just now, I'd forgotten the little detail of the piechart on the front page of the Daily Planet, telling us who Metropolitans thought "best defends their future." Magog 77 percent -- Superman 18 percent.

4. Even granting for the sake of argument that Clark might have gone on a Super-Sulk for awhile after being upset by the jury's verdict, I really don't see it lasting ten years before Clark began to come to his senses. Wanting to take a "vacation" to calm down and recharge his (psychological) batteries is one thing. Hiding for several years and ignoring any threat to anyone else in the world for all that time? Not likely! (Unless he'd been brain-damaged, somewhere along the line in his previous super-slugfests?)

Nope. His decision was based on the attitude that if Magog and the new generation wanted the responsibility for saving the world, then that's what they get. Including all the baggage that came with it. Hence when Clark finally confronted Magog, what Clark suspected was true. That he couldn't handled the burden that came with being the hero everyone looked up to. He didn't keep the other heroes in line. He didn't keep himself in check when going after the Parasite and when it all went to hell, Magog himself quit and tried to blame it all on Clark, rather than taking responsibility for his actions.

There's a huge assumption there. Fatalistic, too. You seem to be saying: "Whether Superman had been there or not, it was inevitable that Captain Atom was going to zoom in toward Parasite for some incredibly futile hand-to-hand combat, and was going to be turned into a mushroom cloud in short order as Parasite ripped that containment suit wide open, releasing all that energy at once.

Not so much because of the Parasite, but because Cap's suit was way too fragile and it was only a matter of time before it was ruptured and he couldn't get into space to explode his energy.

After looking that over, my position remains what it always has been. Waid and Ross were trying to tell us the following: "The tragedy only happened because good old Superman wasn't there. The hot-tempered heroes who were on the scene just went rushing in against Parasite without anything remotely resembling 'an intelligent plan' -- nor did they seem to have any kind of a clue about what Parasite was capable of doing to them if they moved in too close -- nor did they pay any attention to what Parasite was actually saying as they all tried to pulverize him!"

In other words . . . if Superman had been on the scene, things would have gone very differently, for various reasons:

1. Superman has fought The Parasite many times and has acquired a very good grasp of what that purple freak can or can't do. He would have formed some sort of plan which didn't involve several high-powered heroes basically handing their own powers over to Parasite on a silver platter.

2. Specifically, Superman would never be so moronic as to encourage Captain Atom to get anywhere within a hundred yards of Parasite, because Superman would be aware that Cap's containment suit might not hold up so well against the things Parasite could do to it at close range (possibly with the help of superpowers he was simultaneously draining away from other heroes in the vicinity, not to mention weakening Cap himself in the process).

3. Superman normally manages to keep his temper under control -- and is bright enough to realize that clobbering people is not always the best way to protect any civilians in the vicinity. He has even been known to pay some attention to what an enemy is actually saying. Ergo, he quickly would have picked up on the fact that Parasite sounded scared and frustrated, rather than murderously angry, and thus might well have tried to "talk him down" like a hostage negotiator instead of moving straight to the "brutal slugfest" portion of the program. ("Okay, Parasite, now that I'm here, suppose you tell me exactly what you want. Maybe I will agree that it's doable. Maybe we don't have to hit each other at all!")

But it was Magog's doing, because he was going in for the kill when he ruptured Atom's containment suit. Magog was doing what he and the others had been doing for the past ten years, which is kill all the villains. Forgetting the law and just dishing out vigilante justice because it was easier and quicker. That's why the only ones left are the ones we see and the heroes started turning on each other, because they were bored.

My problem with it is that Superman ought to be bright enough to have anticipated that something along these general lines was very likely to happen, sooner or later, if he wasn't around to stop it! After all, he's stopped other huge catastrophes in the past -- many, many times -- and he obviously had zero faith in Magog and anyone who was inclined to follow Magog's example -- so what made him assume that Magog and his followers couldn't possibly mess up horribly the next time a potential catastrophe was looming on the horizon?

He did suspect that anything could happen. He just stopped caring because the world stopped caring. He left them to sort out their problems and when he saw how bad it was, he chose to return because the point had been made and he believed that the world was now wanting his brand of justice and inspiration, as opposed to what Magog and his followers had dished out. What he failed to see was that those very actions were going to be damning. Norman saw it which is why he realized that matters are now worse because he got involved again.

[Francisco]

As a character The Joker is a joke. Should have been killed and never used again already.