Lois and Clark stayed in the Far North till 1953, moving the contents of the Secret Citadel to the Fortress of Solitude. He constructed a giant key, that weighed tons, that only he could lift, and a huge door only he could open. The rest of the Fortress was buried under fifty feet of solid rock. In addition to Doc's devices, he added his own touches---his superhuman exercising equipment, a robot who could play super-fast chess with him, a huge metallic diary that he enscribed with his own superhard finger. (After Supergirl landed, and she taught him formal Kryptonese, he inscribed it in Kryptonese, to keep up his fluency in the language.)

He occasionally visited the States, deploring the growing "red menace" hysteria and found out that Joe McCarthy, in a special closed session of his committee, had summoned the Justice Society and demanded to know their real names. (As part of several government committees, he had been advised on the real existence of the JSA.) The JSA had retired rather than give up their identities to a bully like Joe McCarthy.

Good for them, Clark thought. He remembered how in the twenties he had met repeatedly with Skorvsky. If McCarthy ever found out about his past...

Secretly, through his connections with other reporters, he leaked some information---not about McCarthy and his associates' homosexuality, which he felt was not any of his business, but about how McCarthy and Roy Cohn had abused congressional privileges to try to keep assistant David Schine from being drafted. There's not much that can be hidden by a good reporter with x-ray vision and super-hearing. The well-known columnist Drew Pearson published the story, but Clark---an old friend from the forties--- supplied him with many of the facts. Edward R. Murrow, another old friend from the news game, gave the finishing touches to McCarthy's political obituary on his TV program SEE IT NOW, on March 9th, 1954.

Other parts of the government Clark still had fairly good relations with. In 1953 Crick and Watson cracked the genetic code. Later that same year, a special government project contacted Clark through his JSA connections. They wanted to take genetic samples from Superman, to see where he was different from normal humans. By comparing a humanoid split by hundreds of thousands of years from regular mankind, they would get clues that would enable them to make genetic engineering a reality much sooner than they would otherwise do, give them a several decades' head start.....

The project was called the Cadmus Project, or more simply, the DNA project.

In two years, they made giant strides in genetic engineering. To the point where Lois felt it reasonable to ask a question....

She and Superman had long ago consummated their relationship, but she wanted a child. She knew it would be dangerous for her to carry a child full term, and that Clark was relatively infertile with human women. Could they work on making a Kryptonian-earthling hybrid, raised in an artificial womb that might be tough enough to endure the child's kicking?

Sperm samples and eggs were left in the geneticists' care, and in 1955, they decided to return to the profession they both loved, reporting.

They joined a NYC paper--not necessarily the same one they had worked at before. Still, to the writers of the comic stories, the paper would always be called the Daily Planet. The TV show, still running, ensured that. (Clark rather enjoyed the show, padded shoulders and cheesy special effects and all.)

They posed as the niece and nephew of the original Lois and Clark. Seven years is a long time in the newspaper business, there had been numerous hirings and firings. Lois had adopted a new shorter hairdo, which Kurt Schaffenberger would immortalize, and Clark, though much the same, looked in his mid to late twenties, which, considering he was really in his low sixties, was a pretty good way to throw someone off the track.

They encountered a new editor---a relative of the Perry White they had known---and a copy boy who rapidly gained the status of cub reporter, who was a relative of the Jimmy Olsen they had known. (Unfortunately the first Jimmy had been drafted and died in the Korean War....)

Lois joined first, a few months before Clark applied. This "Perry White" put him through a series of tests. Clark claimed he was such a fan of the "Planet" he could recall every headline it ever had. Reading the headlines off the files in the newspaper morgue with his x-ray vision, he calmly went through those, and then proved himself in several other "tests" White gave him. Then he was hired.

Though they had consummated their relationship, Clark and Lois weren't formally married, partly due to Lois' independent streak. She liked having a place of her own, and her own independence. She smiled knowingly at the way the comics sometimes portrayed her as a man-hunting, marriage-happy shrew.

The young second Jimmy Olsen seemed to be in a habit of getting into the most ridiculous scrapes. Superman gave Jimmy the signal-watch on his word to keep the existence of Superman confidential. Jimmy, who had been raised on the Superman radio and TV show, was awestruck, and promised.

Lana Lang had been inserted into the fictional Superboy series by Bill Finger in 1950. Finger got his information from his source, Bruce Wayne, and made her a fictional version of the woman Wylie called "Anna Blake". Anna Blake/Lana Lang had married another man than Hugo/Clark, and her granddaughter, Lana Lang II,(her father had been a second cousin of her mother), showed up in NYC (which the writers called "Metropolis" to see if Clark/Hugo's relative could help her get a job.) She became a newscaster, and a rival for Superman's affections, resembling her grandmother very much.

Otto Binder was the main Superman writer of the early to late fifties. He knew something about the existence of comic book heroes...he was, after all, the main writer for the Captain Marvel stories, where he got the kernel of the story from Billy Batson, who as a kid tended to exagerrate, and felt no compunction about exagerrating things further. He took a different tack with Superman, but he had no direct source for the stories, so much of what he wrote was fictional. It was only in the later fifties that he got a source in the young Supergirl, writing to the comics and making suggestions under her "Linda Lee" cover identity.

Siegel was rehired about 1957, and of course he is a much more direct source.

Neither Whitney Ellsworth or Mort Weisinger, the respective editors in the early to late fifties, knew of the real existence of Superman. Often Weisinger would take suggestions from Siegel or from Binder's correspondent "Linda Lee" and assign other writers to the actual stories, as would befit a purely fictional character.

Over the next two years, both Lois and Clark (Lois joined the paper before he did) established themselves as solid reporters. Then, in April of 1957, Clark spotted a rocket coming down. He changed to Superman and tried to intercept it in time, but it came down too fast. He grimly went through the wreckage, not expecting to find the passenger alive...

"Don't worry, Superman! I'm alive without a scratch!"

The speaker was a fifteen-year-old girl in a modified Superman outfit, with a short skirt.

She tried to explain she was from Krypton too, but Superman replied, "That's impossible. I was the only survivor when Krypton exploded long ago!" A statement hard to reconcile with the numerous stories of Krypto, Mala the super-outlaw, and Phantom Zone villains, the bottle city of Kandor, which would have happened in his past under any conventional Earth-One chronology...if we didn't know those were fictionalized additions. "Besides, you weren't even born at that time! To add to the mystery, why are you wearing a super-costume like mine? How did you know my name? How can you speak the earth language, English, so well? And...and...?"

Kara, which was her Kryptonian name, started to explain. A large fragment of Krypton had been flung free from Krypton by its explosion, with a city on it. As later stories explained, it was encased in a weatherproof, airtight dome. However, much of its surface was turned to Kryptonite, weakening them. (Later it was explained it was anti-Kryptonite, since Silver Age Kryptonians supposedly weren't affected by Kryptonite under their native conditions. Actually, it was normal Kryptonite, and all the inhabitants of what Otto Binder called Argo City had super-strength and powers similar to the early Superman's.)

Unfortunately, the remains of a destroyed planet in the same solar system can cause a lot of debris. Kara's father, Zor-El married a woman named Alura and had a daughter...Kara. When she had grown into girlhood, meteors pierced the airtight, self-sealing dome...and put holes in the leaden shield. They had used up all their supply of lead. The inhabitants of the city were doomed.

It would happen slowly. They would have a month before the kryptonite radiations had totally poisoned the air. Zor-El worked for a rocket by which his daughter, at least, could escape, while Alura, who was evidently an astronomer, to find a civilized world they could send her to. They were able to observe Earth, and even Superman, with their advanced telescopes. Knowing he was from Krypton, Alura made a super-suit for Kara so Superman would know her for a Krypton girl, and then Kara was shot into space to escape the doomed city.

Then they found out about their family relationship---that Kara was his cousin, that Zor-El was his uncle.

In perhaps the happiest moment of his life, the two cousins hugged. But Superman knew it wouldn't do for Clark Kent to suddenly have a teenage girl living with him, that people would talk, and that she would need time to get used to earthly life. They constructed another identity of her, Linda Lee, and introduced her to Midvale orphanage. There she acted as an unseen "guardian angel"...a role Superman did in Metropolis...but in this case, even the few who knew of Superman's existence in the goverments of the world didn't know of Supergirl.

Superman did introduce her to Lois (though that was never shown in the comics) and Lois was instantly taken with the young Supergirl.

A few months after Supergirl landed on Earth, Lois and Clark got news from the DNA project---that they could create, they thought, a Kryptonian-human hybrid to be raised in an artificial womb. When asked what name to give her, Lois chose "Kara", naming her after Superman's young cousin.

Supergirl got interested in the comics and TV shows about her cousin, how he was simultaneously a famous fictional character, yet operated secretely. She wrote privately to the comics, and Otto Binder got hold of some of her suggestions to introduce a "Supergirl" into the comics. At first he did a totally fictional story where Jimmy Olsen wished on a "magic totem" for a Super-Girl, who very much resembled Kara. When that was well received, they decided to take Linda's suggestion and add a "cousin" of Superman as a new Supergirl. Whether Otto Binder had any suspicions that the letter writer was not just a writer with good ideas, I have no idea. Certainly he felt free to alter her suggestions any way he saw fit.

It's also to be noted that after Kara's landings, many of Siegel's writings, at least, expressed a much greater familiarity with Kryptonian culture. "Superman's Return to Krypton" by Siegel, for instance, although with a fictional premise---Superman really didn't go back in time to see his parents, rather it was the tale of his namesake, Jor-El's assistant Kal-El, who fell in love with Lyla Lerroll. Yet it was Supergirl, raised in a Kryptonian culture, who was the source of many of these stories. (Siegel, at least, was clued in to the reality of Supergirl.)

Soon after Kara's landing, Superman had his first encounter with Brainiac, in February of 1958. Again, this story was "leaked" to Otto Binder by the letter-writing Linda Lee. Binder made numerous changes in it. Though it is true that Superman fought an alien whose force shield was too powerful for him to pierce,

...While on a flight with some reporters, there was plenty of exagerration. For instance, the ship they were in was a jet, similar to the X-15, going into the higher stratosphere, not all the way to space. Nor did even Brainiac have the power to shrink entire cities and put them into bottles---it would take more energy than there is in the Milky Way Galaxy to do that, and cube-square effects would make the environment very different than what we were used to.

It is true that he intended to "bottle" cities. What he would do is have them scanned down to the last molecule. So exacting a scan destroyed the city he was focusing on---but a smaller duplicate is built, a nanocity that was exact down to the last detail, even with moving nanobots who represented the original people. They were duplicates, not the originals.

Obviously he did not shrink and bottle New York City, Paris, London, etc. That is a charming, imaginative idea, and he would have destroyed them and built nanoduplicates of them, except that Superman tricked him first into going into a suspended animation "sleep". He also found a small city that was a duplicate of the city of Kandor, destroyed by Brainiac. There were no living Kryptonians in there, yet it was also a despository for Kryptonian knowledge and culture, as the small humanoid nanobots duplicated the life that their original models lived on Krypton. He took the bottle city to his Fortress, to preserve and make observations on Kryptonian life.

Neither Binder nor Siegel (who chronicles Supergirl meeting Brainiac's great-great-grandson) give the slightest hint that Brainiac was a living computer, an android. That seems to have been solely Edmond Hamilton's idea, to match that of the real computer called "Brainiac".

In July of 1958, he fought Metallo---John Corben. A murdering reporter who suffered a fatal accident, a Professor Vale gave him a robot body. (Professor Vale at one time had worked with Dr. Robert Crane, the first Robotman, and Professor Horton, who created the Human Torch.) Corben needed a power source, either a uranium capsulte every day, or kryptonite, whose energy could last indefinitely. However, by using fake kryptonite, he accidentally killed himself. Yet his brother would someday cause a great deal of trouble for Superman.

In August of 1958, Superman met Titano. A chimp who had been sent on a space flight, he was near a collision of both a uranium meteor and a kryptonite meteor. When he landed, he started to grow---but it took him weeks to reach his full size, by devouring all the food his masters would let him. Nor did he exceed twenty feet in height, the cube-square law making any greater size unfeasible. Binder, the author, changed both how quickly he grew and how tall he grew, to add drama. He fought Superman, but was docile around Lois, who had befriended him as a chimp. He also possessed kryptonite vision which endangered Superman. Superman eventually suceeded in rendering him harmless, and with the help of a Legion time-bubble, sent him back to the days of the dinosaur, where he would fit in better...

This was a perfect example how the fictional Superman had overwhelmed the real person. Binder in his story made Titano the size of a skyscraper, not twenty feet tall. He made Titano grow to that size in seconds, not over weeks of steady growth, without explaining how the mass was acquired. Superman, at the end of the story, throws Titano across the time barrier---ignoring the fact that Titano would have been reduced to flaming, screaming ashes from friction or had his bones pulped from the acceleration of going from zero to lightspeed in seconds....nor could Superman send his super-vision across the time-barrier afterwards. The exaggeration of the writers in the years he had been gone had made the fictional Superman into just a little weaker than God. I'll try to seperate the fact from the fiction/exaggerations, but bear in mind that Superman's strength and powers were still, for the most part, as described in Action #1.

In September of 1958 Superman helped beat back the Appellax meteor-beings who were going to decimate Earth to decide who should be the next Emperor of their home planet....with the aid of other heroes. Out of that grew the United Nations-supported "Justice League of America" created by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammerskjold--- which he felt much more at home with than the Justice Society. There was at least one other alien on it, plus a "Green Lantern" whose weapon was actually a bit of advanced alien technology. Save for Wonder Woman, none of the members were mystically-oriented, and the Justice League tended to specialize in fighting alien invaders who followed in the wake of the Appellax invasion.

At first he kept a little aloof from the other members, but finding more in more in common with them, he joined in more and more. Batman, an old friend, another carryover from the Justice Society, did also.

Towards the end of the decade, Superman met two "brothers"---similar, but unlike--- who opposed him. The first was Bizarro, which will take a little bit of explaining....

As revealed in a Jerry Siegel story, General Zod tried to take over Krypton by making unliving duplicates of himself, with a machine that makes imperfect duplicates. Although it is not true that Zod was put into the Phantom Zone---he was doubtless destroyed with the billions of others on Krypton when it blew up...there might be some truth to the idea of the young Clark finding a cache of Kryptonian super-weapons. He may not have found the Phantom Zone projector, but he may have found a device that makes imperfect duplicates. Unsure what to do with it, he took it to a local inventor/crackpot called Professor Dalton. Now, there are numerous errors and fictionalizations in the original Otto Binder story, including an atom bomb decades before they were really invented. They made an imperfect, bizarre duplicate of Clark by accident---sans costume--- and they attributed his great strength to the fact that he was a monster, not to Clark. After he was destroyed (being vulnerable to the remains of the exploded machine that created him), the tale of Bizarro was so fantastic that it joined the Sasquatch and the Jersey Devil and Moth Man in small town folklore...

Yet years later, Luthor heard of it, and figured out the truth, and tried to recreate the ray from Dalton's notes. In February of 1959 he recreated Bizarro, this time as a duplicate of the adult Superman, including costume. To his chagrin, Bizarro would not obey him, and instead brought Luthor to justice....but Bizarro was as hated and feared as ever. Lois eventually made a Bizarro-Lois to be his companion....

Bizarro had an imperfect duplicate of Clark's Legion flight-ring, so he flew into space with his bride...but he didn't land on an entire planet and remake it. He had only the powers of the original Superman, so he couldn't fly faster-than-light, and a planet, even if a horde of Superpowered beings remodeled it into a square form, would soon collapse under its gravity and become round again. They did find a small asteroid or planetoid in our solar system and built an airdome and a city there, populating it with duplicates of themselves. They remodelled the asteroid, which was small enough to form practically any shape, as a "square" world. They found that children were possible, although they would look "disgustingly" normal until they got to toddler status, when they would change to the crystalline Bizarro appearance. Bizarro would return again and again, like a dimwitted brother who was both humorous and menacing. (Consider---Bizarro had the strength and belligerent lack of intelligence of the Hulk, and the speed of Quicksilver---and on his world, there were hundreds just like him.)

Somewhere in space, on a small planetoid, coal is used as money, street sweepers scatter dirt on the streets, cold dogs are considered a delicacy, alarm clocks signal when its time to go to bed---a place where Christmas presents are given on July 4th, Fireworks are shot off at Thanksgiving, and December 24 is Halloween Eve. Where the big crime is to do anything--perfectly.

Binder wrote the original few stories about Bizarro, doubtless getting info from "Linda Lee", but Siegel was to follow up on them in the sixties, and become the main writer of the humorous "Tales of the Bizarro World".

In November of 1959, Clark met a twin "brother" much more chilling, and much more dangerous. Again, a bit of explanation is in order. On the way between Krypton to Earth, when Kal-El's ship spanned the unimaginable gulf between stars, it ran into an alien spacecraft. The umimaginable energies of the ship created an energy-duplicate of Kal-El's ship, including a duplicate of Kal-El, which also landed on Earth. The duplicate had all of Clark's power and appearance and mind, but if one looked past the surface, one would see he was a seething being of energy.

He was raised by a gangster and his moll. They saw the power he had, and intended to cash in on it.

According to Siegel's story, he shadowed the famous Superboy and even tried to usurp's Clark place for a while. Since Superboy was never a famous figure, that was doubtless a fictionalization. Yet the confrontation between the adult Super-Menace and Superman was more or less true. Immune to kryptonite, he almost succeeded in killing Superman---but then he realized that his foster-parents (who must have been over eighty years old at this point) had been using him, despised him, and thought of him as a freak. He returned to his energy state, destroying his foster-parents and himself at the same time....

My question is---Superman really landed on earth in 1892. Super-Menace would have been a grown man around 1912. He didn't meet Superman until 1959. What was he doing in the time inbetween?

How puzzled were he and his parents when Siegel and Shuster first published the Superman comic strip---about a character so like the Super-Menace, yet dedicated to fighting evil? What would they think when they found other criminals had actually come across Superman?

I suspect that Super-Menace functioned as a superhuman non-costumed hit man for decades. That perhaps Bart Hill (the first Daredevil), the super-strong Black Terror (but not in Superman's class), perhaps the Fighting Yank, and numerous other super-heroes who did not survive the forties or fifties---may have been victims of Super-Menace. He kept away from most of the Justice Society, knowing there was strength in numbers, but picked off the minor heroes one by one....

Nor would the organized heroes would have forever been safe. Eventually he would have gotten to, say, the new Flash, or the new Green Lantern---except luckily, Superman stopped him in time.

Super-Menace also may have been responsible for some puzzling deaths in the news. For instance, Kid "Twist" Reles was due to testify against Lepke in the Murder Inc. trial. In a hotel, constantly guarded by five or six cops, he nevertheless took a dive out of a sixth floor window. It may be that Reles himself tried to escape and the wire couldn't hold his weight---but why did not of the police detectives wake up and realize what was happening? It sounds more like a superhuman agency tossed him out and then at super-speed left that "evidence" in case there were questions....you can see more here at "Divine Retribution". Superman and one of the heroes wouldn't have done it, since Kid "Twist" was going to blow the whistle on the whole Murder Inc. organization. Nor would Kid "Twist" tried to seriously escape, since his police protection was all that was keeping him alive...

One might note one chilling fact: George Reeves, who portrayed Superman so well on TV, was killed on June 16 1959. Could that have been a warning to the real Superman? A..."I'm going to get you, but first let me show you what can be done?"

Reeves had received a number of death threats from a jealous ex-girlfriend named Toni Mannix (who was the wife of an MGM executive with connections to the mob). After his car mysteriously lost control and crashed it was discovered that his brakes had been tampered with. On the night of his "suicide" he had an argument with his fiancée (Lenore Lemmon) about her wild party life and wilder "friends". She had also come downstairs and told her guests that "he'll shoot himself" (although when later questioned by the police about this statement, she denied ever having said it).

Later, George's body was found upstairs in his bedroom. There was a gunshot wound to his head and the gun at his feet. He was naked, still wet from having just stepped out of the shower (which was suspicious enough) but the coroner had found no powder burns on his head, meaning the gun would have to have been fired from at least 3 feet away; pretty difficult for the person who wants to kill themself. His body was found flat on its back, and in suicides, the body is almost always pitched forward. Furthermore, investigators found TWO bullet holes in the ceiling. When the police questioned Lemmon regarding the holes, she told them that she had been "practicing"! In addition, three previous attempts were made on George's life.

Amazingly, neither Lemmon nor Mannix was brought to trial. Perhaps the investigators were scared off by Mannix's mob-connected husband, but most people with any intelligence, and who knew the kind of life-loving person George was, know without a doubt that he was.... murdered.

Perhaps Super-Menace combined two jobs in one, and killed Reeves for Toni Mannix or Lemmon, making it look like a suicide? Or perhaps he did it solely on his own, and Mannix and Lemmon are totally as innocent as the police finally ruled they were. It's odd that, with his super-strength, he would resort to something as simple as a gun, but there's no other way he could make it look like a suicide. As it was, he deliberately left enough clues that it wasn't a simple suicide to give Superman pause and wonder if someone was "stalking" him...

With the death of his "evil" brother, and with a dimwitted bizarre one who showed up every so often, Superman was ready for the sixties.

PARTIAL LIST OF SOURCES:

Of course, TARZAN ALIVE and DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Philip Jose Farmer.

Those interested with comments, suggestions, things I have forgotten, things I messed up, contact me at...
E-Mail:al.schroeder@nashville.com

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Speculations Copyright © Al Schroeder. Superman is owned by DC Comics, Warner Communications, and the Siegels. All other characters copyrighted by their respective owners.