Clark Kent always knew he was different. Growing up in the quiet little town of Smallville, Kansas, where nothing unusual ever seemed to happen, he found himself the cause of unusual happenings all the time. Like the time he flipped over his father's tractor to retrieve a lost toy. Or the time he started seeing people's skeletons in the middle of class. Or after he found out his friend Lana Lang's father had been abusing her, only for the man's clothes to catch fire when Clark gave him an angry glare. These incident, and dozens more like them, left Clark confused and afraid, but comforted by his mother and father, Martha and Jonathan Kent, who showed him the old stories of Captain America and the Justice Society. The things that made him different also made him special, they told him, and he could use those special things to do some genuine good in the world. He could be all those old stories made real: a real, true, honest-to-God superhero.
In his early teens, as his incredible abilities began to manifest, Clark became more curious about where he came from, how he could do all of these impossible things. After a string of arguments that led to Clark accidentally knocking over the farm's grain silo in frustration, Jonathan and Martha finally sat him down and told him the truth. He was not merely adopted, but found in a pod that crashed down from the sky like a meteor. The Kents had happened upon the crash site and, realizing they couldn't simply leave an abandoned child to fend for himself, took him in. Hoping to find some answers about his origins, they had searched the pod, but were only able to take two things from it before the site swarmed with black helicopters and unmarked Hum-Vees: a crystalline ball which hummed with a life of its own, and a red cloak, emblazoned with a logo that looked for all the world like a stylized letter 'S.' Clark was, for lack of a better word, an alien. A strange visitor from another world. Not only was he not the same family as his adopted parents, he wasn't even the same species. The shock of this revelation was too much for Clark to take, and at age 16, he ran away from Smallville, traveling the world to find a place where he might fit in.
For the next nine years, Clark spent his life on the road, meeting new people, helping where he could, and fighting injustice and oppression where he saw it. Invariably, however, whenever he would be forced to use his abilities, the people around him would be terrified, wondering what else this unassuming country boy was hiding. He quickly began using a long line of assumed identities, discarding them and moving on whenever someone got too close to finding him. Despite making greater efforts to cover his tracks, there was one person who started seeing a pattern-- and more importantly, seeing a story. It was while working to depose a warlord in the African nation of Nairomi that Clark first met Lois Lane, who had been tracking him for over a year and was convinced enough of Clark's kind-hearted nature to approach him. While his first instinct was to withdraw, he listened long enough to take some of her words to heart: that he shouldn't have to keep running from himself, that he could own his abilities instead of hiding them, and that in time the world would come around and see him for who he was rather than what he was. Sadly, before he could begin to work with Lois on this new direction, Clark had to return home to Smallville; during Clark's years away, Jonathan had contracted cancer, and didn't have much time left.
While spending those final days on the Kent farm, Clark talked with Jonathan and Martha about his travels, about meeting Lois, and about his place in the world. Taking the old red cloak they had found in his pod, and remembering the old stories and comic books he would read with his dad, Clark fashioned a makeshift costume, little more than a cape and a blue T-shirt with the cloak's logo on it, but it was an effective enough mock-up until they could make a better one. His 'practice' costume would have to do, however, when news broke of a terrorist attack on the Science Spire in the city of Metropolis. Clark sprung into action, promising to tell the ailing Jonathan all about it when he returned. After foiling the attack, holding up several thousand tons of collapsing building long enough for civilians to flee, he flew into the air for the whole world to see and sped back to Smallville....only to find that his father had passed while he was away. Still, Martha consoled him through choked-back tears, he had gotten to see his son stand tall in front of the world, to see him save lives, and to hear what the world called him in return: the "Superman."
With a new identity and purpose, Clark moved to Metropolis permanently, where Lois Lane helped get him a job as a junior reporter at the Daily Planet and an apartment he could share with their mutual friend and Planet photographer, the excitable Jimmy Olsen. Superman was seen as a revolutionary figure not just in Metropolis, but in the world at large, as other metahumans and vigilantes began to make themselves known to the public in the wake of his debut. Many began to question if the existence of such a figure would pose a significant change or even an existential threat to society as a whole, a talking point routinely hammered home by political blowhard G. Gordon Godfrey and billionaire tech giant Lex Luthor. Despite having the eyes of the world on him, however, Clark had never felt better, and he tackled his new persona with vigor, fearlessly taking on the organized crime syndicates in Metropolis and preventing disasters, while Lois Lane acted as his partner in crime, digging up dirt that tied many thwarted disasters and rogue superhumans to corrupt elements in the government and the military.
For six months, Superman was on top of the world, easily besting the various ‘super-villains’ that rose up to challenge him, including the electrified political radical Livewire, the vampiric murderer Parasite, and the radioactive monster called the Atomic Skull. His first true challenge came, however, when he was attacked by a fleet of high-end anti-metahuman military drones, developed by Dr. John Henry Irons for the US military but hijacked by a malevolent hacker calling himself The Toyman. For weeks, Toyman tormented Superman, taking control of vital parts of Metropolis’ infrastructure, endangering millions of lives and causing wanton destruction, while Superman could only try to contain the damage. While the elusive cyber-terrorist continued to frustrate and humiliate Superman, his critics in the media had a field day with it, pressing the narrative that Superman was not someone who could be trusted when the time came.
Superman briefly broke away from his pursuit of the Toyman to meet another threat: an unknown entity called the Silver Surfer had arrived in Central City and was threatening their local hero, the speedster known as The Flash. Together, Superman and Flash were able to subdue the alien assailant, leaving him in the custody of SHIELD, but the battle left Clark severely drained of his power, but also hearing a name that resonated with him: Kal-El. Taking time to return to his home nearby in Smallville, Clark visited his mother, hoping she might have some answers from when she and his father found him. In his room, they found the metallic orb that was with Clark in his pod, which activated when he said the name ‘Kal-El,’ flashing pictures of an alien world and flooding his mind with images and memories, before flying away into the night. Elsewhere, the long-dormant pod in which Clark came to Earth stirred to life, burrowing into the Earth and disappearing from sight, but not before attracting the attention of its new owner, Lex Luthor, who had been performing experiments with the pod and its contents to create the highly advanced technology that made LexCorp a dominant power.
The next day, Clark and Lois were assigned to cover stories in Gotham City: Lois had secured an interview with Dr. Irons in the hopes that it would lead them to uncovering the Toyman’s identity, while Clark was sent to do an exposé on the vigilante known as the Batman. As Clark interviewed people who had encountered the Bat, Lois learned that Toyman was likely a disgraced programmer named Winslow Schott, who had helped develop artificial intelligence for Dr. Irons but had also been secretly torturing his creations for his own amusement. Lois and Irons were attacked when Toyman began taking control of several cars and attempted to ram them, but before Superman could help them, he was called back to Metropolis to deal with the escaped villainess Livewire. During his battle with the electrical menace, Superman was electrocuted with several million volts across the brain, temporarily affecting his mind, impairing his judgement and increasing his aggression.
When Clark returned to Gotham City to save Lois, he found her unconscious in a scene of wreckage, with the Batman looming over her. In his altered state of mind, Superman jumped to conclusions and attacked Batman, believing he had something to do with Lois’s injury. Before he could land a finishing blow, however, Lois was able to snap him out of his delusion, insisting that Batman had actually saved them. Once they reached an understanding, Superman and Batman were able to trace Toyman back to his lair, where it was revealed that Winslow Schott was long dead, and Toyman was in fact a rogue AI based on Schott’s digitized consciousness, created by a fragment of a vast and far more powerful intelligence discovered by Lex Luthor. Before the two could dismantle him, Toyman hijacked a nuclear missile from a nearby Army base and launched it towards Gotham City. With millions of lives at stake, Clark broke away from the battle to stop the missile, leaving Batman to take down the AI himself. While Superman was able to redirect the missile over the ocean, he was unable to get clear of the blast, getting caught by the shock wave of the nuclear explosion and believed dead. Incredibly, Superman survived this, and would later meet up with Batman in a nearby café to discuss the events and any potential plans for the future. In the end, the two would go their separate ways, still far from friends, but at least no longer enemies.
As Clark recuperated at Lois’s apartment (the two having confessed their feelings for each other during the crisis in Gotham and spending the night together), Lex Luthor held a press conference, unveiling his latest creation that would, according to him, render the metahuman ‘gods and monsters’ of the world irrelevant: a hyper-advanced artificial intelligence network, linked to every LexCorp device in the world, which he named Brainiac.
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