They probably will leave Robin out of it, since the original SUPERMAN annual really doesn’t leave all that much for Batman to do besides speculate on the plant and verify Superman’s out of it. By leaving out Robin, it allows Batman to overcome the Black Mercy (perhaps with Wonder Woman’s help) and be the one climb after the battling alien titans to ultimately get the drop on Mongul using it.
Pity. I always felt this annual showed Jason Todd at his best…
Well, the dog wasn’t named or anything, it was just a (I thought unhealthy-looking, i.e. aged) white dog who appears in one frame.
Here goes a fast attempt at annotation:
Page 1, frame 1: Jax-Ur poster at extreme left. Jax-Ur was a scientist who destroyed Krypton’s smaller moon (as well as some 500 colonists) with a prototype pseudo-nuclear warhead of some kind, and was thus sentenced to eternity in the Phantom Zone (i.e. Krypton’s other-dimensional prison system). These posters will appear frequently through the story, as well as protestors who want the PZ system abolished.
Frame 3: Kandor Crater reference.
Frame 4: Nightwing and Flamebird reference. These were a Batman and Robin-like pair of crimefighters in the bottled city of Kandor, originally with the “secret identities” of Superman and Jimmy Olsen (Superman had no powers when in Kandor) and later the roles were filled by two Kandorians. In this fantasy, they are a pair of characters on a popular children’s entertainment series. Also, reference to the “Scarlet Jungle”, an untamed region on Krypton noted for red vegetation and wild beasts.
Frame 5: The white dog appears, as well as (we would later learn) Allura and Kara Zor-El (i.e. Supergirl), Kal-El’s aunt and cousin.
Frame 6: Kara gives Kal a headband. Men in Kryptonian society typically wore headbands as marks of citizenship (i.e. after passing some level of education and/or social development) though in this fantasy, it seems to have fallen out of fashion. The Metal-Eater is a Kryptonian animal resembling a small hippo (though in another story, it was portrayed as a giant mole) and (as should be obvious) can consume metal. Note also that Kal-El evidently wears a Clark Kent-ish pair of eyeglasses
Page 6, Frame 4; Reference to Zor-El, Jor-El’s twin brother, deceased in this fantasy (as a side note, Zor-El’s death and especially the death of Kal’s mother Lara strike me as unusual elements in a “heart’s desire” fantasy).
Page 7, frame 6: reference to “Rao”, the Kryptonian sun-god. Note also on this page that Jor-El’s clothing is the typical green suit with sunburst emblem, which is how he is almost always been portrayed (see page 33, frame 5).
Page 8, frame 2: Reference to Erkol, an island that historically has been populated with thieves (one story featuring a time-tossed Superman and Batman showed the island as actually having incoprorated theft and other criminal activities as social norms, with honesty punishable by exile). Also, reference to “racial trouble with the Vathlo Island immigrants”. Vathlo is an Kryptonian island populated by people with black skin. In one historical Krypton story, one of Kal-El’s ancestors led a Columbus-like sea expedition and “discovers” Vathlo.
Frame 4: Reference to Science Council, the seniormost ruling body on Krypton. I have to admit not knowing what the “eating sickness” reference means.
Frame 5: “Twenty years ago”. Kryptonian years are about 1.5 times as long as Earth years, so a 20 year-old Kal-El is the rough equivalent of a 29(-ish) Clark Kent/Superman. Reference also to Jor-El’s prediction that Krypton was doomed. In this fantasy he has been proven wrong and had to face the consequences.
Frame 6: Phantom Zone reference. The technology to put people in the PZ was developed by Jor-El himself, and it was this discovery that originally got him on the Science Council, but is now making the house of El politically unpopular.
Page 14, frame 6: Another reference to Jax-Ur and anti-PZ protests. Note that the word “AMNESTY” is readable (albeit in a stylized font). Putting Kryptonian text in recognizable English is a bit of artistic license on the part of Moore & Gibbons.
Page 16, frame 1: Nightwing and Flamebird toys, including “Metalgiant”, a villian I assume. In the next frame, the nurse “converts [Metalgiant] into a trundle gun”. No Krypton reference here, but rather a nod to the then-popular Transformer toys.
Frames 5 and 6: References to “Atomic Town”. I’m not familiar with it.
Page 17, frame 3: Reference to “Little Vathlo”, presumably where many or most of the Vathlo immigrants have settled. As far as I know, this is an invention by Moore and Gibbons. Krypton stories typically showed everyone as Caucasian, with the original Vathlo story written only to make some point about tolerance or whatnot, and never mentioned again.
Page 21, frame 4: “Gold volcano” reference. Gold was commonplace on Krypton and was never been used as currency.
I’m sure there’s more, but that should hold you.
The same “readable Kryptonese” font is used towards the end of the story, when Kal and his son visit the Kandor crater… the big honkin’ hole in the ground where Kandor used to be. Check the warning sign on the highway as they approach.
Well, considering that I’m pretty sure that there IS no Jason Todd in the animated universe (they skipped right from Dick to Tim), that’s not a huge loss, all things considered. 
Yeah, they skipped Jason. Which, istself, isn’t really a huge loss.
Ok, I’m going to post the BIG SURPRISE, so don’t read the spoiler if you don’t want to know whats coming:
At first, Superman is in the middle of his perfect fantasy: Krypton never exploded and he lived a happy life there. But the problem is that Supermans’s super-intelligent brain keeps thinking of the problems that would arise if it were real- he’s too intelligent not to see the negative consequences of the scenerio. By the time he imagines Kara crtically injured by rioters, the fantasy has become so non-wish fullfillment that the plant’s hold on his psyche has become tenuous enough that Batman and Robin can get it off him.
Heh, I like your description better than mine. I’d totally forgotten what some of the events were that worked in the negativity. Thanks!
(Though the idea of one of Superman’s “powers” being super-intelligence has always rankled with me for some reason.)
Re The Sword Of Rao
IIRC They weren’t criminals, but the Kryptonian equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan. They marc in red hoods and white robes, while holding a symbolic sword by the blade close to the tip, the quillons (crosspieces) and hilt of the sword look rather like a cross.
Regarding the Kandor crater, it occured to me after posting (and sometime over dinner) that I hadn’t done justice to Kandor’s history.
In short, Earth was visited by an intergalactic scientist/villian named “Brainiac” who started harvesting major cities by “beaming them up” and shrinking them to fit into moonshine-sized bottles. Unable to get past Brainiac’s forcefield, Superman decides instead to wait in Metropolis, which he expects Brainiac to take. Once inside B’s ship (albeit now an eighth-of-an-inch tall), Supes rescues the Earth cities and discovers that B has a Kryptonian city, Kandor, harvested shortly before the planet’s demise. At the end, Supes takes the bottled city of Kandor to his Fortress of Solitude and works intermittently over the next several years on a way to reverse Braniac’s shrink ray (and occasionally visiting the city with Jimmy Olsen to fight crime as "nightwing and Flamebird). In the fantasy, the residents of Krypton are apparantly aware of how Kandor was stolen (i.e. “shrunk up”) though they don’t know why or by whom.
Superman eventually found a way to restore Kandor to full size, and did so on a planet that conveniently spends most of its time in another dimension. Some time later, he created an exact replica of the bottled city, and soon found a large population of teeny-tiny alien squatters had moved in (the roach motels having no vacancies, apparantly). Conveniently, these aliens were exactly the same size as the Kandorians, not being so big they kept smashing their heads on the doorways, nor so small they kept falling into the toilets. Within the comic story, Wonder Woman, not knowing Superman had made his own replica, presented him with one she’d had made on Paradise Island, prompting his super-speed hiding of his own replica. How the residents felt about being subjected to 10,000 gees is unrecorded.
Had I re-read this annual during the “Death In The Family” Batman storyline and not “Dark Knight Returns” for the umpteenth time, I probrably wouldn’t have called in TWICE to kill off Jason Todd/Robin.
The loss of Jason Todd as a character may not be a big deal, (You heartless jaded fanboy cynics. Boo!) but the loss of a Robin character’s POV in this adaptation definitely would be a loss. We’ll miss Batman/Robin interaction, (“Us get cold? With her dressed like that?” “Think clean thoughts, chum.”) his awe at the Fortress and meeting Superman (“Oh, yeah. He’s Superman. I forgot.”), his utter dismissal by Mongul as a possible threat, (“Oh and please tell the little yellow creature to stop shuffling. It distracts me.”) his dismay when trying to helping Superman, “How do I get up there? There’s no stairs anywhere in this place!” and of course, as Knowed Out reminded us, his triumph: “Excuse me. I think this is yours. Almost intelligent, huh?”
When watsonwil posted “Burn!” earlier, I thought he was doing a Michael Kelso, not Superman’s famous pissed off utterance. I guess I’ve been watching too much “That '70’s Show.”
Bryan. YOU DA MAN, SUNN!!! Thanks for an informative and entertaining annotation. This is the most enjoyable comics related thread I’ve started in a long time. Can’t wait for ths show to come out this fall on Justice League Unlimited. One quick question to anyone: will the new episodes be a 22 minute or 44 minute show?
And the Ku Klux Klan ain’t criminal? (Summoning Black Male Outrage) Man, you best take that kinda talk to the Pit 'fore I pimp-slap you down there. “You will not disrupt the sacred tranquillity of our gathering…”
(I would put a smiley icon here to reassure you I’m kidding, but that’d just wreck the Black Male Outrage.)
I pulled out my (WARNING: plug) spanking new copy of “The DC Stories of Alan Moore” for ‘For The Man Who Has Everything’ reprint and the Sword of Rao parts, and re-read the names 'Reverence Lor-Rem" and “Major Dax-Ar,” who visited Jor-El. Now call me P. Diddy ('cuz the boy’s crazy), but haven’t I heard Dax-Ar before as a Phantom Zone criminal? Lor-Rem sounds faintly familiar, too.
The KKK analogy isn’t quite accurate. I don’t see a racist or supremacist element to the Sword of Rao (Jor-El even laments the “racial trouble” with the Vathlo immigrants as a sign of Krypton’s decline). I see them more as the kind of arch-conservatives who busted hippie heads during the Vietnam War; possibly a rougher version of the Knghts of Columbus (though Jor-El’s speech suggests he wants to re-establish a technological rather than a religious society). Certainly the Phantom Zone protestors aren’t a bunch of choirboys, since a few of them did assault Kara.
Overall, Gibbon’s Krypton is looking kinda cyberpunky.
I just kinda hope the cartoon leaves in the bit where WW levels a ray-gun and Mongol at tells him to “Go to Hell!”
As a further footnote, page 40, frame 2 shows a number of aliens paying homage to Mongol. I can recognize a few: Brainiac (robotic character touching Mongol’s left hand), Adam Strange (third in line, wearing twin rocket pack), possibly an Oan Guardian (fourth in line, bald headed man), Hyathis (fifth in line, woman with pointed hair, Empress of Thanagar). The others are vaguely familiar. In the next panel is “a resurrected Warworld”. Warworld was essentally a mega-sized Death Star (larger than a white dwarf star, i.e. a volume at least as large as Earth) that was destroyed through the teamwork of Superman and Supergirl. Interestingly, Mongul’s fantasy starts from the moment the Black Mercy gloms onto him (his fantasy starts when he “swats the thing aside” and promptly kills Robin and Superman), while Superman’s and Batman’s fantasies are retroactive, showing their lives having taken completely different directions.
Me too. I also hope they manage to capture the look on Mongul’s face as he glances down on the glowing spot on his chest.
Actaully, some of my favorite lines were in the narration.
“Eyes spit suns, muscles move like continental plates underneath hide of jaundicated leather. Each an irresistable force, he finds himself thrwarted, each an immovable object, he finds himself moved.”
This comic was my first introduction to Alan Moore.
I can clear up the few you haven’t identified, Mr. Eckers. Firstly, in the first panel on page 40 Mongul walks through a boneyard of dead Thanagarians, including Sheyra (Hawkgirl) and Katar (Hawkman) Hol; in that second panel you mentioned, 2nd in line behind Brainiac is Bolphunga the Unrelenting, from a nifty 6-page Green Lantern short called “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” also penned by Moore and drawn by Gibbons, and a funny cameo to those who spot it; behind the Thanagarian Empress is, (I think), is a non-bearded Warlord of Okaara; then a cowed Jonn Jonzz, the Martian Manhunter; the even smaller figures in the background are The Construct; a Weaponeer of Qward; and a suspiciously long haired, bearded human male that I’ve always assumed was Gibbons’ take on Alan Moore. 'Cuz you know you’re a True Kilogalactic Badass if you can meet your Maker and he bows down to YOU.
Funny how I can spot all those character references and miss Krypto on page one.
I liked Mongol… when he was called Thanos. Even better as Space Pope!
Too bad Starlin didn’t work for Harvey, Charlton, and Atlas.
When I typed it, I thought of Kelso in a Superman costume saying it! 
This is great news! I loved this comic as a kid but I lost it ages ago. It was easily one of my favorite comics. Can’t wait to see it. I loved when Superman comes out of the trance and yells Monguuuul!!! Mongul turns towards the yell and sees a red/blue blur flying at him and just has an “oh shit” look on his face. Anyway, that’s how I remember it.
Heck, you’ve got to do it justice. Mongul is about to smash WW’s face in when…
NARRATION: He hears a voice like armageddon shouting his name, and he starts to turn… He knows he has perhaps less than half a second in which to defend himself… He starts to reach for his armor’s weapons systems, letting the unconscious woman crumple to the floor… but the rock of the far wall seems to ripple outwards in a sudden cascade of power… and a four-hundred-mile-an-hour wind slams into him like a steam hammer as big as the world… and he knows that he is far too late.
Jeff Lodoen
Mongul is not Thanos. Darkseid is Thanos. Darkseid and Thanos both worship death and search for a weapon that will inflict casualties on a galactic scale Mongul does not worship death or see murder as an end in itself. He wants to rule an empire and be worshipped.