Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Superman: Birthright, Issue #9 – “Krypton Lives”! In the previous installment, we get the entire full backstory of Lex’s falling out with Clark when they were teenagers. Lex never realizes Clark was always trying to be a friend. They’re both idiots.

Lex blows up his house and kills his father after trying to contact aliens.

Clark Kent rubs one out after feeling better from Kryptonite-sickness.

And the rest is history!

Superman: Birthright, Issue #9 [June, 2004]
Written by: Mark Waid
“Krypton Lives”

Cover art looks boring. I do not give a damn about Krypton and its inhabitants, and fatty fat Mark Waid cannot make me. They all look so smug. La de da, look at us, we’re smart and dead. What a tragedy.

I feel like Clark should really just cut his losses at this point. He’s barely been Superman and now everyone’s all up his butt about it. Regroup, think of a new identity and a new costume. He can be Ultraman and then maybe put on a fucking mask.

But no, always forward! What else could possibly go wrong?

Lois Lane is on the scene of the aftermath of a huge building fire. The firefighter being questioned didn’t actually see Superman, per se, but “that water tower didn’t dump itself on this fire.”

Lois Lane is on the scene of the aftermath of a major hospital hazmat spill. The doctor being question didn’t actually see Superman, per se, but “some patients – mostly those on painkillers – claimed this ‘Superman’ contained it.”

Lois Lane is…yeah yeah yeah, you just missed him. He stopped the perpetrators and then took off like a rocket once informed that he, too, had warrants out for his arrest. Same old story.

That’s the ticket though! Get in and get out before bald megalomaniacs can spike you with kryptonite juice. You can squeak by this way for sure.

NEXT! Inexplicably, Lois Lane is on a mafia ship! The ship is full of mafia men! And these men want to kill Lois Lane because she has a lot of enemies in the Giacomo Family! And I’m like, what is going on, did I have a stroke just now? Are my Superman: Birthright Issue #9 pages all stuck together with a sticky white substance, spliced in with movie reel frames of the Godfather and Casino and Mafia!, the 1998 “comedy” movie?

Anyway, they start shooting a thousand bullets at her. Superman stops by in the nick of time, somehow.

First question: you have the spunkiness of a Virgo, but is it true you’re actually…*checks Zodiac*… an Ophiuchus??

These 1920s Bugs Bunny gangsters stop in their tracks, eyes all bugged out, frowns curling around their massive, cartoonish underbites. “It’s him! Whoa! Whoa! Hold your fire! Superman, we have a message for y–”

ZAP! BZZZ! FLASH! HRRRRN!! SIZZLE! That’s his laser eyes cutting through the room. HEAT! FIITTZZZ!!

“What could you POSSIBLY have to say that I would want to hear?” Superman demands menacingly, eyes aglow with a dark, angry red hue, his adorable little spit curl dangling contemptuously over his brow.

Boss likes to wine and dine! Fast friends, I guarantee it! Heh heh. Um

These mafia dudes are really shitting bricks now. They stammer and stutter their way through their offer: when the alien invasion happens, Superman’s people are likely going to need an operations network, right? Maybe some cash flow? Mister Giacomo has him covered; he wants to start an alliance with any and all slimy, tentacled alien-types! You dig?

He’s on the phone right now! Talk to him!

Hard pass.

I can’t tell exactly what happens next, but it looks like Superman picked up this entire ship and dropped it right into Mister Giacomo’s pool at his estate. Just destroying property left and right here. He’s got Lois in tow. She looks grateful!

“That’ll keep his fat fingers out of the Hob’s Bay area for a while,” Lois says triumphantly, like she had anything to do whatsoever with solving this problem. Getting involved with the mafia in the first place is a very, very big DIDN’T-HELP-ONE-BIT kind of situation.

Now that Superman is flying Lois around, she has plenty of time to ask him all those pressing questions she has at the ready. First of all, let’s catch the reader up: Lex Luthor claims that Superman is going to lead a race of alien warmongers to invade Earth, and since he is the so-called “smartest man at this Long John Silvers”, the whole world is running with it. Cops, feds, Department of Homeland Security, United Nations, Kathy Smingers from Pahrump, Nevada, everybody.

HOWEVER, I’m Lois Lane! And I don’t think you’re working on an alien invasion at all! Care to comment?

*tap tap* is this microphone on? Hello?

So what? Everyone’s always trying to help everyone. That ain’t news. That’s 4:30am puff piece fodder!

Superman wonders why everyone is so eager to listen to Lex Luthor, even though Lois Lane literally JUST SAID that he’s smarter than everyone, so all the dumb people want to listen to the smart guy. I mean, I live on Earth and that’s definitely not how human beings work at all. We throw rocks at the smart guy here and try to push him down a well.

Everyone tries to do all sorts of manipulating for their own best interests, and Lex Luthor is just the loudest and most visible manipulator right now. After our brains get poisoned, it’s easier to be cynical than to trust someone as a knee-jerk reaction. So that’s why Lois Lane trusts Superman right now, at least, because she’s smart enough to draw her own conclusions at the moment based on the evidence she observes with her own senses.

I was just long-winded there, but it’s nothing compared to the amount of words they’ve packed into these panels. Holy Jesus.

What Lois is after is Superman’s side of the story. That way she can help filter out some of the noise from Lex Luthor. “If he’s lying, who are you? Are you an…an alien?” she hesitates, asking the big scary question to the guy who could drop her like a sack of moldy potatoes any second now if he really didn’t want to bone her so badly.

Superman says yes. But unfortunately, sister, he doesn’t know from WHERE or WHY HE’S HERE or anything else you want to know! Sucker! So you better start proving Luthor wrong some other way. For example, it ain’t fear that drives people. It’s…I’ll get back to you on that.

That Walter White is getting sloppy.

So with even less answers than when she started, Superman drops her off on the Daily Planet building roof and flies away. Lois hurries down to the main office area, learns about someone trying to report on a “flying motor yacht” but Perry White’s gonna send that guy home! He’s drunk! Heh heh.

Clark looks like he’s been there all morning, all sippin’ his coffee and checkin’ his mail without even a bead of sweat on his slack-jawed face. Readin’ the goings-on from Ma and Pa back in Smallville! The townsfolk are getting all riled up about the alien invasion! Meanwhile, the Lex Luthor Troll Farm keeps pumping out doctored photos and evidence of Superman’s nefarious schemes! Wacky shit! What a crazy world we all live in!

Clark and Martha are instant messaging each other. Martha Kent is doing her own fact-checking mission against Luthor’s wave of fake news. The photos Luthor has obtained and/or manipulated are consistent with the types of photos discovered on Clark’s baby tablet, but no exact matches. He’s getting intel from somewhere, it’s not like he’s making up Kryptonian culture and technology out of thin air and then breaking out his Crayola crayons to draw what he dreams up.

Clark’s worried that he might possibly be on Earth to spy on earthlings and he doesn’t even know it! Who’s to say Luthor’s wrong? There must be some reason he’s here in the first place! Just seems weird that they haven’t tried contacting him again.

This is sort of an adopted-child-finding-his-birth-parents scenario. Jon and Martha were worried for years that someone would swoop down from the sky and take their son. They used to plan for it, figuring out ways to hide and stuff, but also wondering if it would’ve been best to let Clark go back if his original parents had wished it.

He tells her that the last thing Luthor was doing before he disappeared was trying to make contact with whatever planet that green meteorite came from. Who knows if he succeeded at the time? I do! And, arguably, he didn’t!

“My guess is that he finally completed it,” says Clark; “it” being the “making contact thingy”. “He and I need to have a TALK.”

He really pounds those Caps Lock letters! Gonna have a TALK all right! No ifs, ands, or BUTTS.

You can kill two birds with stone here and just go see The Rock!

Lois is working in her cubicle. Jimmy stops by to gawk and fondle himself and whatever else he does that requires criminal court intervention in this scenario. She asks him how hard it would be to create fake photos of the type Luthor keeps piping to the media. “At that resolution? With that detail? It’d be like counterfeiting a twenty with a crayon,” he states. The whole photography department’s been going over them with a fine-tooth comb, and nothing looks amiss.

Lois isn’t convinced! And she’s probably right, because she’s always right. Even when it’s the mafia trying to kill her! So she asks Jimmy to get her some star charts and get that mirror off his shoe. She’s not even wearing a dress, you pervert.

Meanwhile, at the Echo Park Observatory, Lex is spending mucho dinero for government officials to scope out Superman. Good thing it doesn’t take long. They see him after Hour 2 streaking through the sky like a big blue and red cruise missile. Hurry, blow that fucker up before he gets away!

Speaking of cruise missiles, they launch a barrage of them at the blue/red streak. The blue/red streak dips down to the ground, causing the missiles to detonate near another stationed squad! They probably all died, too. Captain America would’ve never redirected missiles at military targets!

Lex is speaking with the army general about “alien incursion monitoring machines” and “wormhole technology” for the White House, which will surely help George W. Bush tee off from his toilet and land on the green from seven miles away.

They get rocked by the explosion, and everyone all but piles on top of the bald wimp. “Men, secure the site! Luthor must be protected at all costs! Go! Go!” HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HIKE!

That cueball is so shiny and tempting, don’t you just want to get your hands on it and crush it like a goddamn egg?

Superman always gets what he wants, and in seven nanoseconds he’s face-to-face with the twerp. He ain’t even scared! “No witnesses?” Luthor growls with his bared teeth? Ha! Like an egg, sir. Like a goddamn egg. Time for that TALK.

Let’s get down to brass tacks: what’s your problem, dude?

“You mean Project: Krypton?” Luthor asks, amused.
“‘Krypton’? What is that? Some new weapon of yours?” Superman asks.

See, now look here, this is a classic ignorance tactic, except Superman is actually ignorant! That’s why it looks bad. You never want the opponent to think that you’re trying to make it look like you don’t know anything! Flimsy.

Except Luthor isn’t even smart enough to realize that Superman isn’t smart enough. Luthor really, truly, actually believes that Superman doesn’t know what Krypton is! But he should! I would.

Luthor starts cracking up at this. “Oh! OH! This is just the best day ever!” he cries with unbridled glee! Positively tickled!

“Krypton? A planet? Andromeda galaxy? Orbiting a Class M3 red star? Hello?” Luthor scoffs, “It’s your birthworld, Superman.”

Lex Luthor just cannot contain himself. Superman has no fucking clue. This is beautiful. He gets to be the bearer of bad news, right now, in person! He gets to see his dumb face! He gets to see him cry! He gets to see him take out his Superman Gun and shoot himself in his Superman Dome!

“Ready? Okay. Your homeworld…your race… your parents…? All dead. Gone. Scattered to the celestial winds. As far as the universe is concerned, Superman… you are completely and utterly alone.”

I’m reminded of my foray into the New 52 Supergirl, where one minute she was alive on Krypton with her family, and the next minute she found herself on Earth all alone. As a 16-year-old. THAT seems way more devastating to me. Not this entitled loser who has NO MEMORY of his fucking Kryptonian life. Why should he really care? It would be like me finding out right now, at age 34, that I was born on Betelgeuse VII. Why would I give a fucking shit? I have Malazan books to read.

But yes, as we all know, Superman finds this simply devastating. Go jump in a lake.

I got this here mostly for the priceless artwork. It’s like Leinil Francis Yu had never seen a face before in his life.

Luthor goes on to explain his possession of Kryptonian photos. All captured through a quantum aperture in spacetime, so to speak. Georgi LaForge technobabble! These images are all from the past, over 25 years ago by his estimations. Luthor’s already getting pretty good at translating the Kryptonian language and understanding their technological advancements!

And then there’s you, Superman, the loser. Loser! You’re a loser! Go find that lake!

Superman’s getting pissed now. He bashes Luthor against the wall and demands to know where the receiver is from which he’s getting these transmissions. Lex Luthor pivots and cops to poisoning Superman with kryptonite during the bridge explosion, perhaps to agitate him further? As if he didn’t already know that and go home to whine to mommy and daddy about it.

“When Krypton went boom, the blast irradiated its fragments into something so far up the periodic table there’s no atomic number for it. I own a piece. It’s harmless…to earthlings,” Luthor taunts, expressing his weird, unwarranted earthling superiority. And this piece of kryptonite could be anywhere on these very premises, so don’t even try to do anything funny or else you’ll turn all green and snot will run down your nose and you’ll look uglier than you already are. If that’s even possible! Ha!

Gordon Sumner? Now there’s a musical Sting.

So what if this is now government property? Lex Luthor wouldn’t dare just give this info to the government, displaying his intentions so brazenly. But for money? He’d do anything!

“Is that why you invented a hoax that’s causing worldwide panic? To line your pockets?” asks a fuming Superman.
“No. To discredit and destroy you. The money’s just a perk, you freak.”

And all this because Superman humiliated him during their first encounter. All this because he had the audacity to look at LEX FUCKING LUTHOR the way Lex looks at other human beings.

“You don’t get to do that. Period.”

So fuck you, hero. The entire human race is going to fear you, and the entire human race is going to thank Lex Luthor for saving and/or ridding the planet of alien scum like *shakes angry finger* THEE!

“You’ll never get people to believe that. I’ll win them over one at a time if I have to,” Superman says, verbally flailing at this point. Lex is gonna strap-on a kryptonite dildo and fuck him in the mouth soon if he doesn’t get out of there now.

Lex doesn’t even get a chance! The military busts in and trains their guns at where Superman is standing. “General! We’re in! We have the alien in our sights!”

But he’s already gone.

Headline news in the Metropolis Eagle!: “SUPERMAN ATTACKS; MILITARY SAVES LUTHOR. Scientist Claims Assault Final Proof of ‘Kryptonian Invasion’. Latest Polls: Majority of Metropolitans Fear ‘Man of Steel’.”

And then the issue ends with a Godzilla-sized robot bug terrorizing downtown.

“The Kryptonians! They’re here!”

Clark looks at the thing like “buh?”

Final Thoughts

That looks fake as shit! You can see the string attached! Boo! I want my money back!