Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Superman of 2965

So I was finishing up last month's CBG a few days ago and ran across a reference to a backup series that ran in some of the Superman titles in the mid-60s (starting in Superman 181 in Nov. 1965), called "Superman 2965". He was Superman's descendent 1000 years from now. I always thought it was an Imaginary Story series, since there was no Superman flying around the 30th century unless he was visiting from the 20th century, but the Supermanica site says he "is not an imaginary story, parallel world, hoax or dream but an eddy in the timestream of classic Superman mythos."

I was going to write about it here to see if anyone knew what his story was in relation to the "classic" DC 30th century. Before I could do that, though, I happened to take a look at Newsarama's preview for LSH 16, and (minor spoiler) there's a guy in it who's a dead ringer for Superman/Clark Kent, down to the glasses and spit-curl on his forehead. It's too close a resemblance to Superman to be a coincidence, but the kicker is that the guy's name is Klar. There's no way that name was unintentional - especially when Superman 2965's name was Klar Ken T-5477, and double especially when the writer is uber-Superman-geek Mark Waid. Scott Mateo on the ComicBloc forums picked up on this too, and also remembered that he made an appearance a few years ago after the Superman Red/Blue thingy. They're discussing it on the Newsarama forum as well, and someone mentioned Kent Shakespeare's name as a possibility.

Homage, Superman's descendant, or just a throwaway gag? We'll see soon enough...

1 comment:

naladahc said...

I noticed that character in the preview too and Kent Shakespeare came to mind. Didn't know about the Superman story from the 60s or even the 90s red/blue one since I'm not into Supes all that much.