Origin

Far, far away — so far that the light from there takes years to reach us — there was once a world called Krypton.

Oh, Krypton was beautiful. Can you picture it? Cities made of crystal that caught the light of a red sun and scattered it into rainbows on every surface. Towers that sang in the wind. Great libraries where the knowledge of a thousand years was kept in glowing, golden records. The people of Krypton were brilliant and warm and proud, and they loved their world with all their hearts.

One of those people was Jor-El.

Jor-El was a scientist — the best Krypton had. He spent his days in his great laboratory, reading the stars, measuring the trembling of the planet beneath his feet, following numbers that no one else was patient enough to follow. And the numbers told him something terrible: Krypton was dying. Deep inside the planet, something was breaking apart, and one day soon — sooner than anyone wanted to believe — Krypton would be gone.

Jor-El went to the Council of Elders and told them. They shook their heads. They thanked him for his concern. They did nothing.

So Jor-El went home to his wife, Lara Lor-Van, and together they looked at their infant son — their tiny, perfect, sleeping son — and made a decision that only the bravest parents could make.

They would save him.

Working day and night in secret, Jor-El built a spacecraft. Not a large one — there was not time for that. Just large enough for one small passenger, wrapped in warm blankets, sleeping through the stars. He programmed it carefully, aiming it at a small, blue-green world where a yellow sun shone — a sun that, he had calculated, would give his son extraordinary gifts. He placed inside the craft a green crystal containing everything he and Lara knew: every piece of knowledge, every word of love, every memory of Krypton.

Then the ground began to shake.

Jor-El held his son one last time. Lara kissed his forehead. They placed him in the spacecraft and closed the hatch with gentle, trembling hands.

WHOOOOSH — the craft launched into the night sky, rising past Krypton's crystal towers, past its red sun, into the dark and quiet of space. Behind it, Krypton rumbled and shook — KRAKOOM — and then the beautiful crystal world was gone, all its light folded into silence.

But the spacecraft kept going. Steady and small, it sailed through the dark for months and months until — one morning, over a wide wheat field in a state called Kansas — it fell from the sky.

BOOM — it landed in the field in a cloud of golden dust. The wheat swayed. Birds scattered. And a man named Jonathan Kent, who had been driving his truck along the country road beside that field, stopped his truck and stared.

His wife Martha was beside him. She was already running toward the spacecraft.

Inside, wrapped in the blankets from a world that no longer existed, was the most beautiful baby she had ever seen.

They named him Clark.

Clark Kent grew up in Smallville, Kansas, in a white farmhouse with a porch swing and a barn full of tools and parents who loved him completely. He was a quiet, thoughtful boy who helped with chores and read every book he could find and went to bed at a reasonable hour.

And he slowly, slowly discovered what he could do.

He could run faster than the truck. He could lift the tractor. He could see through the barn wall. One afternoon he sneezed and his breath frosted every window in the house. Jonathan and Martha sat him down at the kitchen table and spoke to him gently and clearly.

"These gifts," Jonathan said, "are a responsibility. They are not for showing off. They are not for winning. They are for serving."

Clark nodded very seriously. He never forgot those words.

Years later, Clark moved to the great city of Metropolis and became a reporter for the Daily Planet, where he wore glasses and slouched slightly and listened carefully to the stories of ordinary people — because it was their stories that mattered most to him. And when trouble came — when something too large and too dangerous arrived for any ordinary person to handle — Clark slipped away to somewhere quiet and a moment later, a red and blue streak crossed the sky.

Superman. Champion of truth. Champion of justice. The last son of Krypton, carrying his lost world's hope into every day he lived.

Because Jor-El and Lara were right. He could not save Krypton. But they had made absolutely certain their son would save everything else.