How ‘Superman Reborn’ Informs “The Oz Effect”

“Superman Reborn,” the first big inter-title Superman crossover of the Rebirth era, came to hardcover this week — seemingly timed perfectly to tie in with “The Oz Effect,” a story in Action Comics that picks up some of the threads established in “Reborn.”

Six months ago tomorrow, ComicBook.com took the long view of Superman Reborn in a review that ultimately declared that the story had done what it set out to do, strengthened the hero’s mythology, and made Superman a more compelling character coming out of it than he was going in.

Arguably the biggest success story of DC’s Rebirth publishing event, Superman has gone from directionless and divisive to having two of the best mainstream superhero stories on the shelves right now. All the while, though, there has been a major plot point dangling just out of reach, waiting to be resolved.

That plot point was the identity of Mr. Oz, a mysterious, cloaked figure who had been doing squirrelly, secretive things on the periphery of Superman’s life since the Geoff Johns/John Romita, Jr. run on Superman in 2015.

Mr. Oz was a major player in “Superman Reborn,” so with the hardcover collection arriving in bookstores this week, and the audience hanging in the limbo between Oz’s identity reveal and his “secret origin,” which will help to explain how Jor-El of Krypton became one of Superman’s most unlikely arch-villains, it seemed worthwhile to examine how “Reborn” might inform the events of “The Oz Effect.”

If you need a primer, you can re-read “Superman Reborn,” now available in hardcover at your local comic shop or on Amazon.

Mr. Mxyzptlk and Superman Reborn

In “Superman Reborn,” Mr. Mxyzptlk kidnaps Superman’s son, Jon, in what appears at face value to be a much higher-stakes and darker version of the “games” Mxyzptlk has played with Superman over the years.

Mxyzptlk, if you don’t know, is an imp from the Fifth Dimension. He has godlike powers, knows that Superman exists inside of a comic book, and can’t really be defeated by conventional means. He sets up little puzzles and contests for Superman to best him at, and by winning the game, Superman can send Mxy back home for a time, but the imp will always return.

And that’s the issue: Superman’s life was in a state of total upheaval when Mxy failed to return…because he (Mxy) had been kidnapped and was being tortured by Mr. Oz in an extra-dimensional prison where he was also holding (at a minimum) Tim Drake.

Eventually the audience would learn that Mxyzptlk, after being kidnapped and while being tortured, always believed in Superman. He genuinely thought Superman would come find him — and when he didn’t, it broke Mxy’s heart in a surprising way:

He asked the hero, basically, that why he was the only one who didn’t “matter.” Superman saves everyone — even truly despicable people — and so why hadn’t he come to Mxy’s aid?

The very real suffering Mxy demonstrated, and the way he was broken by his experience with Mr. Oz, was very much a pilot program for what the villain is doing in “The Oz Effect.”

 

Superman Reborn

At the time, the biggest discussion of “Superman Reborn” revolved around the continuity snarl created by the ending, of course. The very short version is that the pre-Flashpoint Superman and Lois Lane were somehow “merged” with their New 52 counterparts, and the resultant characters have all of the memories of both versions. Those around them will also remember years of Lois and Clark being married and raising Jonathan. Continuity wonks will likely complain that it’s another tweak to the character’s history, making the timeline more complicated than it needs to be — but we disagree.

We argued at the time that the writers, backed into a corner, did exactly what they needed to do — and what was best for the Superman mythology — to get out of it.

Superman’s appeal from 1987 until 2000 rested in no small part on the fact that they took cues from latter-day books like The New Teen Titans, The New Gods, and the best of the Marvel Age, and presented a lead character who had an evolution and a growth path. The “Triangle Era” was Superman at its most addictive — coming out weekly, with tightly-woven continuity and a strong supporting cast, the books weren’t everyone’s cup of tea but they brought in a committed fan base, and in many cases, that era converted comics non-believers into lifelong fans.

The New 52 blew up much of that mythology and alienated a lot of people who had been reading Superman for what at the time of The New 52’s genesis would have been 25 years since the last full-on reboot. Many of the stories told with those characters, though, were on the face of them not bad stories, and fans who read The New 52 era and enjoyed it — or even long-term fans who merely endured it — in many cases felt a bit cheated by the return of the “Lois & Clark” Superman, even as older fans rejoiced.

What was missed in that discussion, by and large, was any serious examination of why Mr. Oz was doing what he was doing. He was a constant presence lingering over the story, but not a major player in it, and his goals were never made particularly clear.

 

DC’s movies and Superman’s ethos

In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the hero finds himself facing off against Lex Luthor inside the creepy birthing matrix thing in the belly of the downed Kryptonian Scout Ship. Lex pontificates about having created Doomsday as the perfect weapon to kill Superman, but when Doomsday comes out of the chrysalis, the firs thing he does is swing at his “father,” Lex. Superman, without missing a beat, speeds into action faster than the eye can move and saves Lex’s life. It’s this act that begins his fatal battle with Doomsday.

I have always thought this scene spoke to a misconception about Zack Snyder’s Superman. The idea that the Man of Steel Superman doesn’t care about saving lives is the kind of thing you hear repeated on the internet a lot, but it’s pretty self-evidently nonsense when you try to actually hold it up to scrutiny. Superman saves people. It’s what he does.

And, whether it’s the victims of a hate crime or even someone who is currently acting to try and kill Superman himself, Superman does not judge who gets to live or not. In 90% of action movies, even films that have a sense of lightness to them, Lex Luthor dies in that scene. Most action heroes do not swoop in to save the villain in during the climactic battle. Superman does — because he’s Superman. That’s who he is.

This philosophy is kind of covert in Snyder’s admittedly dark and cynical films, but it is there. It is made OVERT in Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, in which a villain tells Diana “they — they, in this case, being humanity — don’t deserve you.”

Diana replies with, “It’s not about deserve,” a callback to something Steve Trevor had told her earlier.

It may not be a word-for-word callback to the beginning of the film, but it’s pretty clear that Diana has always felt the compulsion to help people and do the right thing. When she is leaving Themyscira to bring Steve back to man’s world, she is told that once she makes the decision to leave, she can never return. Her response — “Who would I be if I stayed?” — is note-perfect, and it asks the same question that a young Clark Kent asked his father in Man of Steel, albeit somewhat more clumsily.

Jonathan “Pa” Kent wants to protect Clark, because that’s what parents do: they protect their child at all cost, and if it comes down to your child or the world, the world can go hang. But the Kents raised Clark in such a way that he is fundamentally unable to accept taking primacy over others. Jonathan Kent may want to sacrifice others so that his son might live, but Clark would willingly sacrifice himself to save others. 

 

Fathers and Sons

Something that played a key role in “Superman Reborn,” and has been revisited often in the Superman titles since, was the idea that Superman would do anything to protect his son, Jon.

Mr. Oz is actually Jor-El, Superman’s biological father, who has somehow survived the destruction of Krypton. He wants his son to see how petty and selfish and vulgar and violent these humans are. He wants Superman to see that THEY DON’T DESERVE YOU (see what we did there?).

Saving a group of immigrants from a hate crime — and preventing a “One Percenter’s” house from being torched, and delivering vaccines to a clinic in an impoverished nation, and working to mitigate the damage from an oil spill — these are all things that Superman faces in the issue — and as part one of a larger story, this issue forms the base upon which the rest of the story is built.

It’s about Superman — saving people. This is his ethic. This is what he does and who he is. And the story’s conflict is about Mr. Oz challenging that ethic. Mr. Oz says “These people don’t deserve you.”

And why does Mr. Oz do that? Because Mr. Oz is Jor-El, and Jor-El believes that he sent his son to the WRONG PLANET. He wants to protect his son, because that’s what a father does. In an earlier story, Mr. Oz intercepted and “trapped” Doomsday, and in this issue he steals a chunk of Kryptonite and secrets that away in the same chamber where he has the monster incapacitated. These are the only two things known to have the capacity to kill his son, and he is removing them from the board.

Fundamentally, then, this is a story that asks the question: if Jor-El can break Mr. Mxyzptlk’s faith in Superman, can he also break Superman’s faith in humanity? Can he make Superman believe that it really IS about deserve? Can he overwrite the messages of Clark’s adopted family and force Kal-El to accept primacy over others, and to allow himself to be “protected” and taken away from humanity?

We know the answer, of course. Geoff Johns, the chief creative officer at DC, briefly wrote Action Comics, and during one of his most popular stories, he told a story set in the future with aliens, but which was obviously a coded story about white supremacy and fear of The Other.

In the far future, someone has rewritten Superman’s history so that he was fully human, a champion of Earth, and a human supremacist. When he steps in to save a group of aliens being targeted by law enforcement, the police challenge him. “Superman is for HUMAN rights,” they say, and Superman’s answer speaks volumes:

“I’m for everyone.”

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