In last week’s issue of writer Brian Michael Bendis’s Superman relaunch The Man of Steel, newly-introduced villain Rogol Zaar shocked and horrified Superman and Supergirl by breaking into the Fortress of Solitude when they were not around and destroying the Bottle City of Kandor, effectively wiping out almost all of the remaining Kryptonians.
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This week’s issue of the minseries will begin to deal with fallout from the event, but it got us thinking about some of our favorite Kandor stories over the years.
We have selected from the wacky science-fantasy of the pre-Crisis, the more baffling alien mosaic of the post-Crisis, and even live action.
Check our favorites out below, and let us know what we missed — either in the comments below, or via Twitter @RussBurlingame!
It All Begins Here!
The first appearance of Kandor — at least in its bottled form — was in Action Comics #242, cover dated for July 1958.
…So, y’know — happy sixtieth birthday, Kandor! You dead.
Anyway, the first appearance of Kandor is also notable for being the first appearance of Brainaic, who in most versions of the mythology (believe it or not, NOT all of them — we’ll get to that) was the one responsible for the city’s bottling.
In “The Super-Duel in Space,” Superman first learns that he is not alone in the universe — that a whole city of Kryptonians has survived, in miniaturized form as the prisoners of a space tyrant.
One assumes that at the time, without the context implicit in hearing Kandor’s name for modern comics readers, this was a bonkers idea — and for years, they would continue going back to it and making it more (gleefully) bonkers all the time.
Nightwing and Flamebird
Nightwing and Flamebird are a pair of Kryptonian gods who have inspired a number of superhero teams — and at one point, Superman and Jimmy Olsen used to shrink down, head into Kandor, and serve as heroes within the city’s glass walls.
In the first such story, a Kandorian scientist, Than-Ol, convinces the people of the bottle city of Kandor that Superman knows how to enlarge Kandor but has refused, and the Man of Steel is declared an enemy of Kandor.
Superman and Jimmy Olsen shrink themselves, enter Kandor, and first assume the secret identities of Nightwing and Flamebird to help them in their quest to prove Superman’s innocence, and to show the Kandorians that Than-Ol’s enlarging process will not only make them normal-sized, but will also disintegrate them.
“Let My People Grow”
In what is one of the most fun titles on the list, “Let My People Grow” was a 1979 story in which the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman finally managed to enlarge Kandor.
In the story, the Man of Steel absorbs the energies of a supernova into a power canister, and returns with it to Earth. He and Supergirl intend to use it to power an enlarging ray with which to restore Kandor to its normal size. To test it, Superman arranges to have himself shrunken by Brainiac and then enlarged. He accomplishes this by using a supersonic “beacon” device that only Brainiac can hear to lure the computer-villain into a space battle. Superman maneuvers his foe into using the shrink-ray on him, but, when Brainiac tries to do the same to Supergirl, she counterattacks with the enlarging ray, which reverses Brainiac’s weapon and causes him and his craft to shrink beyond detection.
Later, in the Fortress, Supergirl restores Superman to normal height with the enlarging ray. Superman and Supergirl fly the bottle city of Kandor to a planet beneath a red sun which they have chosen, using a spacecraft to make the trip. There they finally succeed in enlarging Kandor to normal size, shattering the bottle and restoring the Kryptonians within to normalcy. The Kandorians thank their two benefactors and Supergirl has an emotional reunion with her parents, Zor-El and Allura. However, she tells them she has chosen to live on Earth. Shortly afterward, the city itself crumbles into dust, since the enlarger ray only works permanently on living matter. Superman is grief-stricken, but Van-Zee tells him it is for the best; the Kandorians were without initiative, being cared for by Superman for years, and now they have a chance to build a new city through their own efforts, and even conquer a world.
Superman asks to be allowed to stay and help them build. Van-Zee, regretting what he must do, knocks Superman unconscious, loads him in the spacecraft, and has Supergirl fly them both into space. Seconds later, since the world the Kandorians have chosen is a phase-world, it slips into another dimension with the shifting of the Cosmic Axis.
It’s Electric!
When Superman briefly had electric powers and a completely different look, one of the things he had to do was to visit, along with The Atom, a version of Kandor that existed in the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity.
At this point, Superman was still the only remaining full-blooded Kryptonian, so they gave Kandor an alternative origin: bottled by a space wizard called Tolos, the city featured various beings from throughout the universe thrown together in a city that looked suspiciously Kryptonian.
The 1986 to 1999 publishing era in Superman’s titles was a fascinating one, and the challenges presented by John Byrne’s sweeping changes to Krypton following the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths often resulted in creative workarounds so that familiar ideas like Kandor, Supergirl, Superboy, and the like could be reintroduced in a way that was intellectually consistent with the then-current editorial edicts.
Both the reworked Kandor and the wizard Tolos (who stood in for Brainiac, as Brainiac had been depicted very differently in the post-Crisis years) were examples of such workarounds. It also gave the books an opportunity to use Superman’s classic costume, as one of Kandor’s aliens came to Earth and wore it for a time while Superman was still in the electric blue get-up.
New Krypton
This story is one of the most popular of the post-2000 era, with elements of it adapted into Supergirl and Krypton already and more planned in the next season of Supergirl at least.
After Superman rescued it from Brainiac, Kandor was expanded to its proper size near the Fortress of Solitude in the North Pole, populated by 100,000 Kryptonians.
Although distracted by the recent death of Jonathan Kent, Superman attempts to aid the Kryptonians in their assimilation with the rest of the Earth, something very few Kryptonians seem interested in, including the city’s leaders, Zor-El and Alura, Supergirl’s parents.
After the first televised meeting between the President of the United States and a delegation from Kandor is interrupted by a rampaging Doomsday, Zor-El and Alura form a task force determined to preemptively end any future threat to Kandor by capturing Superman’s worst villains and trapping them in the Phantom Zone. However, when several human police officers refuse to hand over the Parasite, they are killed by the task force, enraging Superman.
At the same time, Lex Luthor, who has been recruited by General Sam Lane to halt the Kryptonian “invasion,” gains control of Brainiac and unleashes his robot army from within the depths of the alien’s spaceship, currently being held in Kandor. During the fight, Metallo and Reactron, who are working for Luthor and General Lane, are brought into Kandor as Trojan horses containing kryptonite. Reactron manages to kill Supergirl’s father, Zor-El.
Alura’s anger causes her to denounce humanity. Members of the Justice League and Justice Society arrive in Kandor, led by the Guardian demanding the city turn over those who murdered the police officers, and a large-scale battle erupts, with Superman in the middle. It only ends when Kryptonian scientists manage to use Brainiac’s technology to lift Kandor off the Earth and grow an entirely new planet underneath it, called “New Krypton,” on the other side of the solar system, directly opposite the Earth, and therefore hidden by the sun.
Alura tells Superman that he is not welcome on New Krypton, although Supergirl takes up residence there with her mother. In the end, Alura frees General Zod from the Phantom Zone to help her lead their people.
The Last Days of Krypton
In The Last Days of Krypton novel by Kevin J. Anderson, Kandor is depicted as the capital city of the planet of Krypton, home of the Council and the Temple of Rao.
The city was besieged by the Brain Interactive Construct, later renamed Brainiac by Commissioner Zod. Brainiac had admired the beauty and architecture of Kandor and wanted to preserve the city from destruction, should disaster strike Krypton as it did on his home planet of Colu. Commissioner Zod permitted Brainiac’s taking of Kandor, stating that Brainiac could have the city, as the rest of Krypton belonged to him.
Brainiac’s ship fired three lasers that pummeled the surrounding crust around Kandor and literally upheaved the city from Krypton’s surface, apparently anihilating it to outside observers. A force field was then erected around the city which contracted, shrinking the city and its inhabitants and leaving only a smoking crater. Brainiac departed without causing further destruction or seizing other Kryptonian cities. It is implied that Zod is the only Kryptonian aware of the fact that Kandor has not been destroyed, but shrunken and abducted by Brainiac.
Dark Knight III: The Master Race
This is not exactly a great Superman story, but it is a well-regarded story that ties Krypton into one of the most beloved Elseworlds universes ever created, and it is recent enough to be easily found in bookshops and comic stores.
In Dark Knight III: The Master Race, Ray Palmer (remember him from just a few stories ago?) restores 1,000 of the inhabitants of Kandor to full-size, but they immediately begin to terrorize the Earth. Batman sets out to assemble his former allies against the invaders.
Of course, in the world of The Dark Knight Returns, Kryptonians are always seen as a threat, and the aging and paranoid Batman has to take them down — this time with an assist from various other metahumans and even Superman himself.
‘Krypton’ Season One
Ten episodes of Krypton on SYFY has done as much or more to bring a life and vitality to Superman’s planet as any story ever told — and it all takes place in Kandor.
Granted, the city is not yet bottled at this point — in fact, the whole concept of the season was Superman’s grandfather teaming up with Adam Strange to prevent its being collected by Brainiac, but all of the elements of a great Kandor story are there (even a badass Brainiac), and ultimately it asks a really interesting question: what if you could save your own world, knowing full well that a couple of lifetimes from now the cost would be the existence of the universe as a whole?
Superman: The Bottle City of Kandor
Neither a single story nor really a fair one for us to put here, this is kind of a catch-all for anybody who reads some of these tales and comes away wishing they could have more.
A kind of “greatest hits album” of Kandor stories written before the Crisis on Infinit Earths, this trade paperback — still available inexpensively even though it is currently out of print — includes a handful of the stories on this list, and a bunch more that give color and flavor to the world of Kandor.
