Krypton Gets a Digital Mini Comic Ahead of Season 2

Cameron Cuffe, Colin Salmon, and other members of the Krypton cast are immortalized on the comic book page, as Krypton today revealed a mini-comic that tells stories set between the show's first season, and its second, which premieres on June 12. While comic book tie-ins and adaptations used to be de rigeur for the small handful of TV shows and movies that came out before 2000 or so, the new age of comic book movies and TV have had relatively few tie-ins -- and when they do come, they are often digital. In fact, Krypton executive producer David Goyer was one of the credited writers on a Man of Steel tie-in comic that was only available digitally.

The first page of the comic plays out in a series of tweets, seen below, along with a short video that offers fans a Twilight Zone-style spooky musical cue for the mini-comic, titled Tales of the Phantom Zone. Written by Batman and the Outsiders scribe Bryan Edward Hill and featuring art by Jason Badower and colors by Annett Kwok. It takes place inside the Phantom Zone, where Seg-El finds himself stranded with Brainiac (the two were transported there in the season one finale), looking out at a universe where Doomsday, Lobo, and General Zod are existential threats to life on Krypton and beyond.

"I've been reading comics since I was a kid," Cuffe, who plays Seg-El in the series, tweeted. "Never did I imagine I'd one day see my face in one. I'm the luckiest guy in the world."

A link to SYFY's website at the end of the thread (also here) gives fans a chance to read the full three pages of the comic, plus check out a peek behind the curtains of the process, with pencils, inks, and colors separated out in three sets of three pages. Since the pencils and inks are by the same artist, the pencils are very loose layouts, giving more of an insight into the differences between development stages of the art.

What if Superman never existed? Set two generations before the destruction of Superman's home planet, KRYPTON follows Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe), the legendary Man of Steel's grandfather, as a young man who fights to save his home planet from destruction. Season 2 brings us back to a changed Kandor, locked in a battle over its freedom and its future. General Dru-Zod (Colin Salmon) is now in control. He's on a ruthless mission to rebuild Krypton according to his ideals and to secure its future by conquering the universe. Faced with a bleak outlook, our hero, Seg-El, attempts to unite a dispersed group of resisters in an effort to defeat Zod and restore hope to their beloved planet. Their chance at redemption is threatened however, by their opposing tactics, shifting alliances and conflicting moral boundaries – forcing each of them to individually determine how far they're willing to go in pursuit of a better tomorrow.

While the finale left a lot of big questions up in the air, and most fans assume that ultimately the
"good guys" will win and the timeline will be restored, Krypton being disconnected from any particular shared universe means that, like Gotham before it, they could make some pretty serious tweaks to the mythology along the way and get away with it because, as showrunner Cameron Welsh has said in the past, the show takes place in its own world within DC's multiverse.

Within that portion of the universe? An Earth overwhelmed by Kryptonian forces, in which Adam Strange returned home to find it ruled by Zod -- and captured within Brainiac's bottled cities. Krypton returns to SYFY on June 12.