The official word on the circa 1960s Superman that I grew up with was that his hair stopped growing (as did his beard and moustache), so he didn’t have to worry about it. Interesting the way the hair length always seemed to accommodate itself to current fashion.
In one episode, Supes grew very long hair, beard, and fingernails from exposure to one piece of red kryptonite. Superman couldn’t use his own heat vision to cut them. But Supergirl and Krypto the Super dog both used their heat vision together and were able to restore him to respectability.
anyway, he has long greying hair and a beard in Kingdom Come, when he’s gone back to the simple life of running a holographic farm. And Wonder Woman’s pregnant with his child at the end, which turns out to be Magog I think.
And he’s got a terrible Billy Ray Cyrus mullet in some of the JLA books. Fashion eh?
What happened to Krypto? Did I miss the comic book where he died? I remember him being in the really old comics (e.g. Superboy), and then he disappeared in the newer comics (the older JLA with Guy Gardner, Blue Beetle, and Booster Gold).
The superpets (there were also a monkey, a cat, and a horse) never existed post Crisis.
The new Superboy owns - or owned, when I last read it - a mundane dog named Krypto (in reference to the old Krypto). He used to belong to a friend of Superman’s.
You know, I’m not sure anymore. At first, I thought he was a super-dog robot, but I’d mostly stopped reading Superman titles at the time (mostly) so I’m not certain.
Of course, we’re about to get Kara Zor-El back, so can Streaky the Supercat be far behind?
In the old, old (1950s) DC Universe, Krypto was a laboratory test dog Jor-El used in his first test of the rocket he would eventually use for young Kal-El.
Apparently this test rocket missed the “space warp” the dragged half of Krypton through it, because the dog drifted through space and didn’t reach earth until Superboy was a teenager.
Although Krypto always refered to Supie (in his thought balloons, anyway) as “master” he never lived with Clark, prefering to spend his time wandering around the universe. Why there was never a spin-off about a universe full of super-powered mixed breed dogs, I don’t know. Maybe Krypto had been spayed on Krypton.
Superman could always summon Krypto with his ultrasonic whistle, though, even when Krypto was light-years away.
I can’t remember how the supercat, monkey and horse got their powers, but I have a vague memory none of them were actually from Krypton.
In 1985-1986, DC Comics published a twelve-issue ‘maxi-series’ (like a miniseries, but bigger) called Crisis on Infinite Earths. The purpose of the world-shattering crossover, that included every major (except one, I think) and almost every minor character owned by the company was 1) to resolve certain continuity issues, and 2) to allow the writers to start fresh by removing some of the sillier events of the DC universe from continuity.
You see, they had a multiverse… with hundreds of different, parallel earths. The Justice League was the premiere superteam of Earth One, and the Justice Society was on Earth Two, and Earth Three was home to the insidious Crime Syndicate.
It’d just become a bit messy, so in Crisis they basically rebooted the multiverse as a single, coherent (Well, mostly) universe. Superman’s origin, powers, and allies changed significantly when the history was re-written.
It seems to me that the story of Krypto as an experimental test-case must be based on the Russian dog Laika that was sent into orbit, so Krypto must date from the late 1950s.
I think this is covered in the link I gave above. In any case, Streaky was an earth cat who became super-powered by playing with a piece of “Kryptonite-X” (another of the many mutant varieties of Kryptonite going around in the 50s and 60s). Comet the Super-Horse was actually a centaur that got magically changed into a full horse, but with super-powers. It always bothered me when they got the DC universe involved with magic, and a Superhorse that was a great-looking guy who became a super-horse gave me, as a boy, the heebie-jeebies. It was so obviously a girl thing.
Can’t remember the monkey’s story. In addition, there was Proty (and later Proty II), the blob-like this fram a planet of vaguely shmoo-like/tribble-like creatures who were artificially enhanced by a bunch of do-gooder scientist types so that they could morph into any shape (this let them survive a planetary catastrophe).
The super-monkey’s name was Beppo. He was yet another of Jor-El’s “test pilots”.
You really have to wonder about Jor-El… There was a story in the 60’s in which a robot landed on Earth and informed Superboy that Jor-El had built him (the robot) to test and advise the young superhero.
Thus, Jor-El apparently had time to build FOUR (dog, monkey, robot, and boy) spaceships, AND a sophisticated robot. You’d think he could have just made Kal-El’s spaceship a little bigger and GONE WITH HIM!!!
