Some Fantastic Place No 2: What The World Looks Like When We're Feeling Better: Superman/Batman: The Search For Kryptonite

Nothing ever looks so real and beautiful as the world does when a painful illness is passing. I recall listening to my wife's chickens scratching away at the flower beds beneath our bedroom window one summer as I was becoming able to both hear and walk properly again after an unexpected and disconcerting ear virius. Nothing ever sounded as good as those daft chickens did then. And I suspect that in the highly unlikely event that anyone will ever write my biography - I think I'd have to turn to serious levels of mass murder to inspire such a thing - the "Rosebud" moment could well be the sound of those chickens, their beaks raking the soil, their communal "buk-buk-buk" rising and falling in volume like the well-practised chanting of a chain-gang, as I realise that I can hear them.

Never liked those chickens much before. Can't say I like them that much now. But one man's snow sledge is anothers' chicken-squawking and scratching.

And I'm telling you this because it's another potential 'Rosebud' moment that caught my eye and made me think in "Superman: Batman: The Search For Kryptonite", just one panel of apples that made me glad I'd read the graphic novel and which gave me something to think about after I'd returned the book back to my local library.


Our Pleasing Moment: Things have not been going well for Superman in "The Search Of Kryptonite". Lana Lang has exploded a thousand dirty Kryptonite bombs in order to protect LexCorps store of the glowing green and radioactive material from Superman. (Don't ask. It's painfully like watching family or close friends arguing. Just go into the next room and think about the summer or something until it's over.) With the Earth now utterly poisonous to Superman, it's left to the Toyman to clean up the planet's atmosphere so that Kal-El can come home.

So far, so-so. But then, out of the blue, as we are told that the Toyman has cleared the Earth of all traces of Lana's Kryptonite - no, don't ask, because I am really not talking about it! - is a tall vertical panel of ripe apples on the branch. And that immediately slows down the narrative and forces us to wonder what's going on. Why are those apples there? And it dawns on me then that we're suddenly being shown as well as told that the Earth really is clean of Kryptonite, a difficult trick to do when all that Kryptonite was in the form of " ... a microscopic film". The story-telling shifts a little step to the left from its literal, traditional style for just for that page, and becomes something more quietly imaginative and less obvious. Coming across those apples is like tripping up when out walking while preocccupied by everyday troubles: catching your balance, you find your musing concentration is broken and all of a sudden you notice there's a world around you.

I presume that the panel of apples shows just one of the many, many views that Superman gets while scanning the world for K-particles with his microscopic vision. Or perhaps it's that Clark associates a clean, welcoming world free of K-radiatioon with fresh fruit growing in a farmyard; a Kansas farmboy might likely do so, I believe. What could more redolent to Clark Kent of a untainted and safe environment, of a good and wllcoming place to be, than the sight of healthy apples ripening in the sun?

Whatever, it's the unexpected appearance of a few apples in the story which made me smile. It was a pleasing decision by the Green and Johnson and Davis to trust there more to the imagination of the reader, and one I appreciated. I felt as if something of Clark Kent, the lonely exile living on the Kent's Farm in Smallville, had been directly communicated to my mind. It was, in its own quiet way, a fine moment.

Result: It's hard to imagine there's much that anyone can show us about Superman that we've not encountered or thought about before. Well, not anything that isn't plain daft. But the idea that Clark thinks of apples when he thinks of home, or that he looks to make sure that apples are clean and safe when he's scanning the planet for poisons; these are little 'Rosebud' moments. They evoke more than they actually explain, yes, but isn't that how memory and feelings work anyway? And it may not seem like much, because it's not as if we've discovered something spectacular, something that will reshape the Superman mythos fundamentally forever, such as discovering Krypton was a province of Hell, or Clark is part-Time Lord, or Lana Lang runs LexCorp and explodes Kryptonite bombs against Superman .... er .... no, let's not go there. (No, let's really not.) But the apples feel far more important than any universe-threatening peril. It's as if something far more important on a much smaller scale has been discovered. A little tiny detail about Clark Kent's soul.


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