#even if you didn't feel the weight of being the last trustee of millennia of culture

[cantsayidont]

December 1986. In the wake of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, John Byrne plainly expresses the ugly nativist foundations of Superman's new post-Crisis origin. Contemplating the history and culture of Krypton, which he's just received as a massive telepathic info-dump from a hologram of Jor-El, Superman unequivocally rejects as "ultimately meaningless" every single aspect of his Kryptonian heritage, from language to art to religion. Moreover, he expressly denies that he himself is an immigrant. This is not simply semantic; in Byrne's version, the starship that carries Kal-El to Earth is a "birthing matrix" — an in vitro womb in which Kryptonian embryos are grown — so he's not technically born until he lands on Earth and is decanted by his human parents on American soil:

This is actually Byrne's kindest take on the post-Crisis Krypton in this period: His horrifying 1988 WORLD OF KRYPTON miniseries, drawn by Mike Mignola, presents Jor-El's world as a fallen, postapocalyptic society, ruined, both environmentally and morally, by the degeneracy (a word I use advisedly) of Krypton's last Golden Age. Only Jor-El is presented as having any moral worth, and only because of his interest in the traditions and history of Krypton before the fall, which his father and peers (including Lara) consider distasteful. This questioning of modern Kryptonian culture ultimately gives Jor-El the wherewithal to save his (unborn) son from Krypton, both from its actual destruction and from its soulless corruption of natural human values. Yikes!

It's also worth recalling the status quo that MAN OF STEEL erased. Since 1958, Superman had been part of a diaspora of Kryptonian survivors: Besides himself and Krypto (with whom Byrne later dispensed very harshly), there were the millions of inhabitants of the Bottle City of Kandor, stolen by Brainiac before the destruction of Krypton and later enlarged on the distant planet Rokyn; Supergirl, born on Argo City after Krypton's destruction; the prisoners in the Phantom Zone; the Kryptonian bully Dev-Em and his parents (who later traveled to the 30th Century); and Supergirl's Kryptonian parents (who survived the destruction of Argo City and later settled in Kandor). In his Fortress of Solitude, Superman kept a private journal in Kryptonese. His intimates often referred to him as "Kal," not Clark. He observed, to at least some degree, certain Kryptonian customs, and in moments of stress, he would invoke the name of the Kryptonian god ("Great Rao!"). He was, like many members of real-world diasporas, a man of two worlds — neither wholly of Krypton nor entirely of Earth, but part of both, and an interstellar hero.

The Byrne/Wolfman reboot erased almost every facet of that, and very deliberately. Part of this, of course, was a desire to shake things up for commercial reasons, while part was DC's editorial conviction (mistaken, I think) that allowing any Kryptonian survivors other than Superman himself weakened and undermined Superman as a character. However, as the pages above make clear, it was also a desire to slam the door on the idea of Superman as an immigrant — and, by extension, on the Jewish coding that had been a central feature of the Superman comics mythos for nearly 30 years.