All of my Superman Thoughts posts are arbitrary ideas and niche beliefs about characters I don’t own and about which my opinions don’t actually matter, but usually I can defend my beliefs well enough. Not so this time. This time it’s really just an idea I had and liked:

Jon Kent should be a psychiatrist.

Jon is the child of Clark Kent and Lois Lane. In the comics that DC is publishing now, he has grown and taken on the role of Superman for Earth. In spite of certain elements of what they’ve done with him (they’ve tied him intimately to the Batman characters since the beginning, and you know I don’t like that) I like Jon a lot.

Jon is a good chance to do things with Superman that are different from Clark. They’re positioning him as a more “activist” superhero than his father and the only problem I have there is that Clark should also be seen that way. Right now they’re exploring his sexuality. He’s Bi, as I always said I’d want to write Clark, except I would never have been willing to split up Lois and Clark to explore it. With Jon you can. But one aspect I’ve not seen covered at all and which would give us a real place to play up his differences from his father is his occupation. What does Jon want to do with his life outside of superheroing?

Well, as I said above, I think he should go into psychiatry. He could become a Superman for Mental Health, as it were. When Marvel’s superhero psychiatrist, Doc Samson is written to my liking, he’s the type who still has to get into superfights and stuff, but he does it with the intent to help the person he’s fighting. He cares deeply about deescalating and talking. Obviously one doesn’t need to be a psychiatrist to do those things (when Clark is written well, it’s true of him), but doing it as a profession is different.

With Clark, investigative journalism is the perfect choice. It’s a story engine that lets him seek out the corruption in society and find ways to help people. With Jon, psychiatry could be the same thing. It just fits, and it’s different from his father.

I know I have no way of getting this to happen, but I’ve now put it on the Internet and that’s a start. If Jon ends up a reporter like his parents, they’ve failed the character.

I worry that, when I frequently repeat my refrain about how I don’t want any Darkseid in my Superman stories, I make it sound like I don’t want any of the contributions that Jack Kirby made in his Jimmy Olsen run to carry on into Superman stories. That’s not true at all!

I’m actually a huge fan of Jack Kirby’s work and I think any superhero franchise that has the opportunity to draw upon his imagination, it would be a mistake not to. It’s just that I consider the New Gods a separate franchise altogether, so I don’t want them to pollute one another. Similarly, I don’t care to see Guardian and the Newsboy Legion in Superman, because they ought to be allowed to stand on their own, not that I expect DC to ever be brave enough to try that (and I love those kids). But Kirby definitely put things into Jimmy’s book that I think belong in Superman:

To start, there’s the whole of the DNA Project (except, as I’ve said, for their Newsboy Legion connection). If Superman is, as I believe ought to be, an aspirational figure meant to show what the “Man of Tomorrow” should be like, then the DNA Project is a natural accompaniment to that idea. They are scientists in the employ of the government trying to create “men of tomorrow” with their science. There’s a whole race of “better” people called the Step-Ups who have essentially been created by the military industrial complex and who became hippies. And, of course, there are the less human “DNAliens” they create, such as Dubbilex, who is a fun character I absolutely think deserves to show up more often. (Naturally after some continuity revisions in the DC universe, the DNA Project would become known as Cadmus and would be responsible for cloning Superman to give us the 90s iteration of Superboy as well.)

Related to the DNA Project is Dabney Donovan. He’s one of many mad scientist villains you can have in Superman, but science is one of the key themes, so you can never have too many. Donovan’s particular brand of cloning and genetic modification gives him a niche to stand out against the rest. And his finest creation, the planet Transilvane, is simply a wonderful concept and the fact it has not yet been crossed over with Kandor in some story is a shame.

And it goes on. I’ve already mentioned that I think the books should keep Morgan Edge around, although I’d want him to use the post-Kirby characterization. Intergang has had iterations on television and (I think) in comics that had noting to do with Darkseid so that’s fine as the name for fancy sci-fi gangsters for Lois and Clark to deal with. Heck, even the Outsiders biker gang gives Metropolis something that resembles a common crime story element but with a more sci-fi take. I’m just saying, there’s plenty of things in Kirby’s short Jimmy run that are more than welcome in my idea of Superman books. Just not Darkseid. I can’t reiterate this enough. Let the New Gods have their villain.

This isn’t going to be a particularly deep one, but I just want to say I think that the Superman villain called the Annihilator and Annihilator Junior should come back.

In one multi-part story in the Silver Age comics, the Annihilator was Karl Keller, a Nobel prize winning chemist who used Kryptonian chemicals to fill his body with explosive energy that made him powerful enough to defeat even Superman (because, as I’ve said, people who think Superman is too powerful are too lazy to remember you can just make powerful foes). Annihilator used his powers for a successful supervillain career and, on a whim, adopted a teenage criminal named Pete as his son. They did crime together, even managing to conquer America. It couldn’t last of course, and Annihilator soon realized that the biochemical process that empowered them was bad for their health. He tried to warn Junior, who assumed the old man was turning on him. In the end, somehow Junior was de-aged to a toddler and Annihilator, now reformed, got a chance to raise him right this time. It’s as dumb as the comics of that era always are, but it doesn’t mean there’s not potential for real stories there.

As far as I’m aware the characters have only appeared since in a Jimmy Olsen book that was going for comedy and treated them as jokes. That’s fine, that book was fine, it’s fine. But these characters don’t need to be jokes.

All it would take is for a story that treats the characters more seriously than a Silver Age Superman comic. That’s not difficult. We can keep the idea that Karl is a brilliant scientist who dislikes Superman (a bit overused, but it’s fine), but we need to establish that he’s been raising Pete for more than a week. If he’s a single father trying to raise an adopted son who has been getting into trouble, you wind up with a villain who can go up against the Man of Steel but who has more complicated motives. Does Karl want to keep Pete out of the life of supervillainy? Maybe that could work. Or we could position Karl as an opposite of Pa Kent, actively teaching his son to abuse his power. I’d probably go with that latter take, because it was the fact that Clark is also an adopted child that made me think it’d be good to have the Annihilator(s) around for stories about adoption and family.

Of course, we also need to give them a Super-Pet. Some sort of Annihilator Ferret or something? Look, we can take the stories seriously and still have goofy fun, okay?

The easy joke about Lois Lane is something like “If she’s such a good reporter, how come she can’t tell that the guy she works with is Superman except he’s wearing glasses?” This is all well and good when done in jest, but sometimes people who don’t care for Lois will use this as actual evidence that she’s not a good reporter. The temerity!

Over the decades of Superman’s existence we’ve had almost every kind of story play out with these characters. More often than not these days, Lois does find out that Clark is Superman. I don’t know that there’s been a Superman continuity for decades in which Lois doesn’t find out Clark’s secret identity (actually, maybe the Superman Returns movie, but I legitimately don’t recall). When people mock Lois in this way, they’re actually mocking the Silver Age Lois, which is probably still the most iconic version of the character, which is a shame because it’s not the best by any means.

But even that Silver Age Lois was suspicious that Clark and Superman were one-and-the-same, right? You Loismockers have to admit that. And how did Silver Age Superman escape her suspicion? He used robot duplicates, hypnotism, amnesia, shapechangers, time-travel, and all manner of other Super-Schemes to throw her off the tail. Superman had to use these high-concept deity-level tactics to avoid being found out by Lois Lane, ordinary human reporter. And she was STILL suspicious of him. If anything, Lois Lane’s inability to prove the Clark-Superman connection in that era is a sign that she’s capable of rivalling a human god in a grand intellectual game. Lois Lane is not a bad reporter, people. She’s a super-reporter.

Hey, last month I did the #JimmyOlsember thing on twitter again. But I don’t do content that isn’t ultimately intended to go on this site, so now I shall bring it back here.

2 December:

Some people would be fazed by being transformed into a fire elemental, but Jimmy’s on a hot streak and knows he’ll get a column out of it. (Don’t worry, his watch is fireproof.)

4 December:

That time Jimmy got turned into a pickle he didn’t make a big deal out of it.

6 December:

Jimmy is going undercover on the miniature monster planet Transilvane, to get a story but also to justify to Ron Troupe how much money he spent on neck bolts last year.

8 December:

The bad news: Jimmy’s mission to Transilvane has gone off the rails. The good news: He won the election!

10 December:

Well, Jimmy’s physical form has been completely devoured by tiny machines and his consciousness now resides in a cloud of nanobots. Still, he can’t miss today’s meeting, or the Chief will really get angry.

12 December:

Jim’s evil side has been released by a transporter accident and is now running around as a supervillain! But Lex Luthor won’t take kindly to a new crook moving in on his turf.

14 December:

I think we can all agree that the Mr. Action Arctic Assault Action variant costume is more just an excuse to sell a different action figure and will probably never actually be used.

18 December:

And now Jim is a puppet who has control of one of Ron Troupe’s hands. Let’s hope this can somehow help him investigate that counterfeit toy ring.

20 December:

Mxyzptlk needs a human to represent him in court to fight all those parking tickets, so it’s a good thing he can infuse Jimmy with the Spirit of Justice.

22 December:

Naturally, Jimmy isn’t allowed to participate in the Metropolis Underground Supervillain Fighting Tournament, but who anyway, this new Boxing Mummy seems to be taking the lead.

30 December:

The Wicked Warlock cursed Jimmy to become a pumpkinheaded monster! Honestly, it’s the kind of thing Jimmy doesn’t even notice anymore.

31 December:

Jimmy accidentally mixed some fountain of youth water into his werewolf serum. Oh well, now this literal cub reporter can get that interview with Krypto he wanted.