As I write this, I am also experimenting with possibilities: what will I write, what will it mean, what is its purpose? If the tone of these questions sounds excessively ponderous, then that is only a side-effect of what I wonder, here and more generally. I am noticing that although the first few sentences are beginning to accumulate, they are not leading anywhere; circular labyrinths masquerading as progress. But at least I have something, even if it is only a mess – which is to say an order whose pattern remains undefined. Even chaos can echo meaning, a sort of negative theology. And so, even without looking back I can see a stream of consciousness, and a ledger whose margins and tables assume no rules (mark no errors), and are satisfied by the fact of content. (Because one thing will lead to another).
Superman has been tracking a series of clues, a path that now leads him to a laboratory (in the middle of nowhere, or so I imagine, like those survivalists who build nuclear fallout shelters, far away from the frightening spread of television and popular opinion). Inside is a corpse (the sense of isolation intensifies), and beyond more doors, a greater shock for the protagonist: photographs covering walls and documents, all of Superman. This scene haunts me, so many deep and long-nurtured emotions and beliefs, that it is like a deep well, at the bottom, where there is no sky and the air is a suffocating blanket.
Then Clark Kent wooing Lois in the park; a bank robbery near-by, a strongman named Metallo; Superman appears; they fight; and fight; and Superman is weakening; and Metallo is killing.
There is a dark metronome that ticks behind Luthor’s eyes: hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. It never sleeps, and it never eats, but it is always hungry, which means it’s always angry. Superman cannot be killed by Metallo. It is Superman’s fate to be killed by Luthor. Luthor rips Metallo away, incidentally saving Superman, but really intending only to postpone the execution so that the executioner may be replaced.
In the midst of these events, the reader discovers the story of Metallo and the mad scientist who feared for all his life that Earth would be invaded, and then had his infinite fears confirmed by the discovery of the Kryptonite capsule and the alien invader Superman. Against his paranoia and fears, the scientist retrieves a car crash survivor, and builds him into a cyborg (who soon kills his creator), first with a heart of uranium, and then, after learning much much more, a heart of a far more terrible stone: kryptonite. Now, what will Luthor do with this creation?
After all the changes of 1986 – Crisis, Moore’s experimental Whatever Happened to the man of Tomorrow, and of course Byrne’s retelling of Superman’s origin story in Superman the Man of Steel – the numbering for the Superman series was reset (hence sometimes identified as “Superman v2”), beginning with the story Heart of Stone in #1.
