The dark side of Superman

By George Pendle

Batman broods, Spiderman frets, but Superman has always seemed as impervious to Weltschmerz as he is to bullets. For Mike Kelley, however, an artist who could find the dark underbelly on a unicorn, there were chasms of gloom visible behind that invulnerable countenance.

In particular there was the city of Kandor, a minor but recurring plot point within the Superman mythology. Kandor was the capital city of Superman’s home planet Krypton, until the intergalactic archvillain, Brainiac, shrunk it down to tabletop size and stole it. When Krypton subsequently exploded, Kandor was left as the sole remnant of its culture. Superman eventually wrested the tiny city from Brainiac’s grasp, but even his super-brain could find no way of returning it to its original size. So he stashed Kandor under a bell jar in his Arctic hideaway, the Fortress of Solitude, where, in Kelley’s words, it remained as “a perpetual reminder of his inability to escape the past, and his alienated relationship to his present world.”