My NYCC Experience Pt. 4

While I attended many panels over the course of New York Comic Con 2013, I’ve chosen to start with the ones that will matter most to you guys. With that in mind, I’m going to fast forward to the Sunday Morning.

On the tail end of the convention, Dan DiDio, Co-Editor of DC Comics held a surprisingly intimate discussion about his tenure, the directions that DC has and will be heading, and his thoughts on the state of the brand – and on his birthday, no less!

The panel opened with a brief celebration, the assembled fans singing happy birthday to the controversial captain of the comics giant.

From there, John Cunningham, VP of Marketing for DC, took us on a retrospective of DiDio’s life and career, starting with a baby picture and taking us through his first rejection, some questionable fashion choices, his tenure over the incredible ReBoot, and to the beginning of his time at DC. That’s where things started to get interesting.

DiDio is a highly polarizing figure in comics, drawing all manner of hate from many contingencies. It is admittedly hard for many to transfer that level of outrage from a monolithic figure to the man in the cap that sat before the audience, but the panel neither cemented his status nor absolved his many unpopular decisions. What it did do was provide some fascinating context.

Superman #712 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (writer), Rick Leonardi (penciller), Jonathan Sibal (inker), Brad Anderson (colorist)

The Story: What’s the matter, boy?  What?  Connor’s stuck in a time-space crisis?  Let’s go!

The Review: As much love exists between a man and his dog, it has nothing on that between a dog and his boy.  As a clone with hyper-accelerated growth, Superboy had little in the way of a typical boy’s life—and that’s before he started playing the teen vigilante in Hawaii, often with two girls on either arm.  But owning a dog can’t fail to inject some responsibility into your life, so Krypto has had the effect of normalizing Connor a great deal.

Most writers have fun with Krypto as Superboy’s loyal companion, but few have really explored the depth of his affection for Connor.  I can think of no better man to do so than Busiek, whose work on Astro City proves him as one of the greatest humanizers of superheroes.  Here, he shows what makes Krypto inarguably the most appealing and lovable of super-pets (besides the fact that he’s a dog with a cape, of course).

Underneath all his powers, Superman is in spirit an overgrown Eagle Scout with your good ol’ Midwestern values, and by the same token, Krypto has the soul of a playful, devoted hound.  Busiek lets that soul shine in all of the super-canine’s behavior in this issue, making the story that much more touching.  Really, if you look past his flying around and using X-ray vision, this is at heart the tale of a dog looking for his lost boy.

Even so, Krypto’s powers allow greater understanding than most dogs, giving that much more weight to his simple range of emotions.  As he tracks Connor’s trail (during the events of Infinite Crisis), his enhanced senses give him rich details of what his owner got up to, ending amidst the ruins of Alexander Luthor’s world-destroying tower, which Connor destroyed at the cost of his life.  Krypto’s glass-shattering howl upon the discovery is a poignant allusion to Superman’s cry upon Supergirl’s death in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, and quite heartrending.