Why “The Last Days of Ma and Pa Kent” Meant So Much to Me
Yes, the storytelling is simple, maybe even crude compared to the near-cinematic work of an Eisner or a Kubert. Reading it, as is the case with so many DC and Marvel Silver Age stories, is more like flipping through a series of snapshots. Like a snapshot, each panel is a moment frozen in time that captures the significance of that one moment clearly, but the panels jump ahead quickly in time and space.
I can see why this style might be difficult for a post-Silver Age fan to get used to, but especially in the Weisinger titles and Schiff’s Batman books, this was the default setting. And considering the age of most comics readers then, probably a good choice. Remember that I had mentioned a few entries back that as a new comics reader myself back in 1963, titles like Green Lantern and the Flash were a bit too much for me. Infantino and Kane’s styles were truly cinematic, and I think I needed the comics “primer” that the Superman titles gave me in order to be ready for more sophisticated storytelling.
That somewhat static style was quite unlike much modern storytelling, which is not only more dynamic, but also tends to elongate individual moments like a slow-motion sequence in a film (perhaps stemming from the notorious “we-make-more-money-from-this-if-we can-collect-it-in-a-trade” approach). If there were one modification I could make to stories from the Silver Age, it would be to make stories about twice as long as they were. In other words, the fabled “book-length novels” could and should almost always have been two issues long and the eight-page stories 16. Then the writers could have done better by the characters and the stories.
Jim Shooter, Mort Weisinger’s child prodigy seemed to realize this when he took over
Adventure, which had often often featured two-issue “arcs,” but never as book-length stories, because
Adventure always had a back-up story in every issue. I do think that this is one reason that Shooter’s Fatal Five and Mordru stories are so memorable. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the Legion took over the full 23 pages of
Adventure in the summer of 1966, when Shooter arrived as the Legion’s regular writer.
(The corollary to my wish for the Silver Age is that I wish many newer and modern arcs would be about half as long as they are.)
“House style” it may have been, but that static style of “The Last Days of Ma and Pa Kent” well befits a story that Clark is recalling; his memory flashes from one iconic, painful image to another as he recounts a story that brings him to tears. As he and the reader jump from key moment to key moment, the story itself is simply given more emphasis as a result. Because we know Superman so well, we are more intrigued by how this previously untold event affected him, and seeing him cry is particularly moving. Writer Leo Dorfman certainly knows how restrictive the house style could be, but instead of fighting it, he is able to use its stress on economy and fast pacing to his advantage.
Yet, what may seem crude by more modern standards in Dorfman’s story actually does maintain a cinematic quality; “The Last Days of Ma and Pa Kent” is similar to the B-features of the thirties and forties, those little gems that had neither the time nor the budget to linger on subtleties of plot or character. Dialogue often did the heavy lifting of exposition in those movies, as it did in so many comics, and the pace of them, like that of so many of Mort Weisinger’s stories, was almost always dizzying. The details of time and place are sacrificed in the service of telling a compelling story. We don’t need to see Superboy on his way to various locations; we just need to see him once he’s there.
The bare-bones style made watching those kinds of movies and reading those kinds of stories challenging … but in a good way. Boiled down to their essence, these stories crackled. No wasted scenes, no unnecessary dialogue. And if you had to use your imagination to fill in a few gaps, well, who cared? It made them that much more interesting.
As Shakespeare does in many a play, as Homer does in the
Odyssey, Dorfman plays with time to achieve a particular effect on the reader, compressing what must have been at least a few days’ worth of events into what seems hours to create the feel of a headlong rush to tragedy.
We all know how time can stretch out or speed up, depending on the circumstance: the day before your birthday, the night before Christmas, Friday afternoon in school all seem to creep; the awaited day itself hurtles by before you know it.
In
Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare even commented on this phenomenon when Juliet wishes the day before her wedding to Romeo would race by:
“So tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.”
(Sometimes the Hulk-teacher in me overwhelms my puny Banner side. Sorry.)
The reader never stops to think about how long Ma and Pa are in bed, how long it takes Superboy to fly hither and yon for remedies, or how much time elapses between Luthor’s release and his attempt to save his beloved parents. Dorfman just uses captions like “Later” and “Presently” and “Then” to move us along.
A closer look at the story shows that the Kents apparently die sometime in the evening of the day they are stricken, which was the day after they returned from the past. In that last day of their lives, doctors visit, Superboy builds a protective dome around the house, he goes to “the library” as Clark to do research, flies to Brazil, squeezes the sap from an orchid tree into a cup he molds from lava, tries the remedy on his folks to no avail, allows Luthor to try his cure-all on the Kents “that evening,” broods a bit till he remembers the Phantom Zone ray buried beneath the ocean, retrieves it and tries it on his parents unsuccessfully.
That’s a tall order for one day even for a Superboy. But you never noticed it when you were reading it as a kid. The young man’s desperation and his repeated failures to save his parents’ lives are the focus.
Maybe Leo Dorfman wasn’t consciously applying these storytelling techniques; he was, after all, writing a bit of ephemera for an equally ephemeral audience. It doesn’t matter. Whether by instinct or experience, and perhaps because of both, Dorfman knew how to tell a story.
One intriguing point about “The Deaths of Ma and Pa Kent” is that as many times as I’ve read it, I am still surprised that at the end, Clark is relieved of the burden of being the cause of his parents’ deaths when he conveniently matches the two portions of Morgan’s diary. That ending always seems tacked on and ineffective, because the impression that has always remained with me after reading this story is the fact that in the long run, Superboy still caused his parents’ deaths by taking them into the past to begin with.
He was careless not to have considered the potentially harmful effects of time travel on his parents, perhaps because he was invulnerable. That may sound like a harsh judgment, but had he been more circumspect, the Kents might never have contracted the plague. When they first see the pirates marooning their shipmate, Superboy brusquely reminds his parents that time can’t be changed -- “No, Dad! We can’t do anything to change history!” Later on, though, he messes around with the time stream himself, playing tricks on the pirates to “give Mother and Dad a thrill…”
Every kid reading this knew that acting like a big shot always comes back to haunt you, even if you’re Superboy. And Superboy had a habit of doing stupid things like this; like every other kid, he often had trouble with impulse control and delaying his gratification. Thus the raft of stories in which he abandoned Krypto, “tested” friends like Pete Ross, and almost always caused Ma and Pa agita because he chose not to let them in on his many schemes and plans, because… well, because. Superboy often just acted like a super-jerk.
These kinds of stories made Superboy annoyingly human, however, and that was a good thing for the reader. Things would often work out for the best at the end, but in most stories like that, Superboy could be a little dink.
Rarely did
Clark behave this way, though; Superboy was the Mr. Hyde half of Superboy’s personality. Not always, not in every issue, but just often enough to remind us that he was a kid.
And that he was still a kid comes through loud and clear in this story. His showing off, his lack of foresight and his inability to think clearly ring true. If this had happened to his parents when he had been well along in his Superman career, he would have solved the problem in anyone of a dozen ways.
But as Superboy, no. Maybe there’s no limit to what a Superman can do, but that’s not the case for a Superboy.
If this story were retold today, of course the Kents (who always reminded me of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson on “Dennis the Menace”) would have been put in a hospital, of course Lana Lang wouldn’t have been their only nurse, of course the doctors would have done more, and of course Superboy would have shred the fabric of time and space to save Ma and Pa. But not in 1963, when someone – probably Mort – decided it was time to kill the Kents, and made sure that it was not just a sad story, but a tragic one. It answered the perhaps unasked question: If Superman is so powerful, how could he have let his parents die?
Well, for the DC readers, the answer was that Superman may be super, but he’s also a man, and therefore, even he can feel guilt and shame and sadness. Even he can be plagued by bad dreams and sleepless nights.
And this is no Hollywood death scene. There’s no final farewell form Clark, no chance to tell them how much they meant to him. They’re in comas so quickly that there’s no time for any of that. Clark doesn’t even get to speak to his mother before she dies, and Pa’s final words are so bland and clichéd that they sound real. They are hardly the kind of melodramatic valediction we associate with comics…
The Flash gave a speech longer than a Bill Clinton stem-winder when he melted away in the Crisis.
Captain Stacy saved his biggest secret for his dying breaths in Peter Parker’s arms.
Abin Sur gave Hal Jordan a long history and science lesson, beginning with the sonorous announcement, “I am Abin Sur… I am not of Earth – but of a far distant planet – and I am… dying.”
But Pa Kent? Nothing that compares to those.
“Son, you did your best for us,” he says, making what any child might regard as a half-hearted attempt to absolve him of guilt. “Now listen to my last words. You must always use your super-powers to do good… uphold law and order! Good luck, my son… and goodbye!”
It’s bland, really, and stoic, but then, what else would you expect from a Midwestern shopkeeper slipping in and out of a coma? Pa Kent cut to the heart of the matter as best he could.
Dull it may be, but it is also true and real, and what more can we ask of fiction but that it be true and real?
Mort was good at reminding readers of just how alone Superman was, and this story re-emphasized that theme. Godlike he was, but he was still a stranger in a strange land, the alien among us, and a little boy lost. All his power, all his adventures, and all the fun he had could never make up for all he had lost at a young age.
The ending may have been the only one Dorfman could have written in 1963. Rarely did stories about kids end sadly or badly, and certainly not Comics Code-Approved stories. Maybe it was thought that losing his foster parents was more than enough for this young man on the brink of adulthood to bear without also loading on the guilt he would have borne for the rest of his life. But it was still an ineffective ending.
And the proof of its ineffectiveness is that what has stayed with me after so many readings of “The Last Days of Ma and Pa Kent” is Superboy’s utter helplessness the one time he could have helped those he loved most in the whole world. He caused their fatal illness and he could do nothing to save them.
Forget the torn pages of Morgan’s diary. Superboy feels the guilt and will continue to feel it as Superman, as most of us do when those we love die.
And seeing that human weakness of the godlike Superman, the weakness that made him like me, even though he could juggle worlds, is what made this story so touching to an eight-year-old boy, and why it has remained so touching throughout his life.
Next: Comics Become My Refuge
At my height as a reader, the books were just making the transition from .75 to $1.00, so I had little trouble getting all the titles I was interested in even before I started working at 16. I don't think I ever exceeded ten titles in a month, though. 
At my height as a reader, the books were just making the transition from .75 to $1.00, so I had little trouble getting all the titles I was interested in even before I started working at 16. I don't think I ever exceeded ten titles in a month, though. 
