DC’s Elseworlds line has always been a playground for radical reimagining, but Superman: Father of Tomorrow #1 doesn’t just reimagine the Man of Steel — it strips him back to something rawer, more human, and ultimately more heroic. Writer Kenny Porter and artist Danny Earls deliver a debut issue that is part origin story, part grief narrative, and part thunderous superhero action. Let’s walk through every page.
The Threat from the Stars
The story opens not on Earth, but in the cold void of space. A massive alien vessel — sleek, enormous, and utterly foreign — has just shot past the Moon and is barreling toward Earth’s orbit. The narration reads like a military radio transmission, clipped and urgent: the vessel has pushed past the Moon and is headed straight for Earth.
We cut immediately to the Skywatch Space Station, a militarized orbital platform bristling with weapons. Director Bendix and Major Lasalle are at the helm — two no-nonsense commanders who waste no time. They’ve already thrown every missile in their arsenal at the incoming vessel, but nothing has worked. The craft is not from this solar system, and it is not stopping.
Bendix doesn’t flinch. He orders the carbon-rod rail guns and harpoon cannons to fire — essentially trying to harpoon the thing out of the sky like a space whale. The bravado is classic military bluster, but there’s an edge of fear underneath it. He warns their ground forces to be ready, making brutally clear that whatever this is, Earth intends to make it regret arriving.
“Wherever this thing is from, we’ll make sure it regrets coming to Earth.”
— Director Bendix, Skywatch Space Station
The vessel, however, tears right through the barrage. In a spectacular double-page explosion, it collides with Skywatch itself — a massive, catastrophic impact rendered by Danny Earls in a blaze of reds, oranges, and shrapnel. The station is annihilated. Three dozen people, including Bendix and Lasalle, are killed. The vessel disappears, shielded by a radar-jamming device. Nobody on the ground knows where it landed.
Below all this chaos, at the Kent Farm in Smallville, Kansas, Jonathan and Martha Kent are outside at night, fixing their truck. They look up and see what they think is a meteor shower — streaks of burning light across a purple-dark sky. It’s startlingly beautiful, and they stand together in quiet wonder, unaware that the debris falling around them is the wreckage of a military space station — and that something very important has just landed nearby.
Two Births — One Night
Porter brilliantly cuts between two simultaneous events: the arrival of the alien vessel on the Kent farm, and the birth of a baby at Metropolis Memorial Hospital. At the hospital, a woman named Ella Lane is in labor, and her husband — Commander Sam Lane — is by her side. The moment is tender, a rare quiet beat in what’s otherwise a chaotic issue.
But even as his wife gives birth, Commander Lane gets a call: Code Black. Skywatch has been destroyed. Thirty-six dead. An alien craft has landed somewhere on Earth and they have no idea where. His country needs him immediately. The general on the phone promotes him on the spot: Stormwatch is his to command. When can he come in?
Simultaneous scenes
As Lane accepts command of Stormwatch and steps out of the delivery room, a nurse rushes after him with news: it's a baby girl. The new commander barely pauses. His daughter — Lois Lane — enters the world in the same moment her father chooses duty over family. It's a quietly devastating piece of character work, setting up Sam Lane's defining trait for the whole story.
Meanwhile, back at the Kent farm, the alien craft has crashed into their land. The vessel cracks open on impact, and a lone figure crawls out of the wreckage — a tall, dark-haired adult man in a sleek silver-grey suit, wearing a visor. He speaks in alien script, and a translation note appears: his suit’s AI is translating and adapting his language in real time.
His first words in English are devastating in their simplicity: “—and my family and planet are dead.”
This is Jor-El, the last survivor of Krypton. Not a baby shot through space in a pod — but a grown man, a scientist, the sole Kryptonian to escape his world’s destruction. He watched his planet crack apart. He watched the people he loved die. He arrived on Earth alone, carrying nothing but grief and Kryptonian technology.
A Kent Is a Brother
Years pass. The issue jumps forward to the Kent Farm — years later. Jor-El — now going by Jordan Kent — has made a life in Smallville. He helps Jonathan with the farm: fixing trucks, testing sprinkler systems, casually carrying a tractor in one hand when the engine falls off. He’s extraordinarily powerful, but he’s been holding himself back.
He and Jonathan have a warm, easy friendship. Jonathan teases him. Jordan deflects with earnestness. There’s a beautiful scene at the Smallville Farmers’ Market — a busy, sunlit tableau of small-town life — where Jordan watches children play and ordinary people laugh, and you can see on his face both comfort and longing. He belongs here, and yet he doesn’t quite belong anywhere.
The central tension of his life becomes clear in conversation with Jonathan: Jordan feels guilty. He has access to Kryptonian technology that could revolutionize medicine, agriculture, energy — he could fix Lang’s broken tractor in seconds, he could eliminate poverty on this block. But Krypton had rules: no interference with a planet’s natural development. He’s been honoring those rules, even when it costs people.
“I could share my technology… my knowledge… But Krypton had rules. We weren’t allowed to interfere with a planet’s progress. I have to honor that.”
Jonathan doesn’t moralize — he just listens, and is quietly, steadily present. This is a richer, more textured version of the “Kent as moral compass” dynamic than we usually get, because Jonathan isn’t teaching Jordan anything. He’s just being his brother.
The Night Jonathan Kent Dies
Then the story’s emotional core detonates. At dinner, Jonathan is sweating. He says it’s just indigestion. His daughter — a young woman with blonde hair — is worried. Jordan notices too. Jonathan insists he’s fine and excuses himself to do some work.
Later that night, Jordan is on the roof, staring at the sky as he often does — sleepless, haunted by memories he can’t shake. Jonathan climbs up after him. They talk about the adopted brother who’s “out there” somewhere in Jordan’s mind. Jonathan tells Jordan he’s been up every night until dawn. Not dreaming — remembering. It’s a beautiful distinction. Jordan doesn’t dream. He just carries Krypton with him, always, like weight.
Then the “bump-bump” sound effects begin. Panel after panel, the heartbeat grows more erratic, louder, more frantic. Jordan’s super-hearing picks it up first — and then his X-ray vision shows him what’s happening inside Jonathan’s chest. A heart attack. Massive. Right now.
Jordan grabs Jonathan and takes to the sky, flying at full speed toward Smallville General Hospital. Inside the ER, he tries desperately to help using Kryptonian knowledge — proposing nano-surgery robots, suspended animation, DNA repair kits. The doctors think he’s insane. Security is called. Jordan is dragged out, pleading, while Jonathan’s heart gives out.
Emotional Turning Point
This is the scene that changes everything. Jordan stood by Krypton's laws while Jonathan was dying in front of him. He could have built the technology that would have saved him — he had the knowledge — but he chose to honor dead rules from a dead world. Jonathan is gone. And Jordan is left outside a Kansas hospital in the rain, holding the weight of that choice.
Martha comforts him. She tells him it was Jonathan’s time. That nothing they could have done would have changed it. Jordan doesn’t accept that. Standing in the golden late light of evening, he watches Martha and a young girl on the porch — and he makes his decision:
“But I could’ve done something. I could’ve let Krypton’s old rules die. I could’ve shared my technology… and Jon would still be alive. And I’m changing that right now.”
The Suit. The Ship. The World.
Jordan goes to the barn. Hidden beneath covers is his Kryptonian spacecraft — intact, dormant. He commands it to activate the phantom-panel assembly and go tangible. The barn floods with light as the ship comes to life, its AI greeting him by his Kryptonian name: “Welcome back, Jor-El.”
From a locker inside, he retrieves a suit — black, silver and white, bearing the House of El crest on the chest. It’s not the familiar red-and-blue. It’s colder, more armored, with architectural lines and a long white cape. A suit built not for a boy raised on a farm, but for a grieving man who has decided to stop hiding.
Martha is with him. He asks what she thinks. Her answer is everything:
“I think it’s about damn time the world met the real you.”
Metallo and the Debut of Superman
The story shifts to Metropolis. Commander — now General — Sam Lane is holding a press event, unveiling a new Stormwatch security unit called Metallo: a massive robotic combat unit developed in partnership with the scientist Dr. John Corben. Lane is using Metallo as his answer to alien threats, selling it to the public as protection in a world “getting stranger.”
Sam Lane
Military general, head of Stormwatch. Cold, driven, paranoid about alien presence on Earth. Father of Lois.
Dr. Corben
Reluctant scientist who developed Metallo. Worried the robot isn’t ready and has never been tested around civilians.
Metallo
A towering robotic defense unit built to detect and destroy alien threats. Its AI is hair-trigger and merciless.
Lex Luthor
Appears briefly — a young man watching events unfold on TV, angry that LuthorCorp’s involvement in Metallo is being exposed.
Corben is nervous — Metallo has never been tested around a crowd. Lane overrules him and switches it on for the cameras. Everything immediately goes wrong. Metallo’s sensors detect alien DNA in the crowd — Jordan is nearby, his Kryptonian biology triggering every alarm in the robot’s system. Unable to pinpoint the source, the AI defaults to its most extreme protocol: destroy all life-forms to ensure planetary safety.
The robot opens fire on the crowded Metropolis street. People scatter in terror. Corben’s young daughter is nearly crushed. Sam Lane panics, frantically trying to find his own child in the chaos — Lois Lane, now a girl with a ribbon in her hair, is caught in the mayhem.
And then — Jordan arrives.
He sweeps down out of the sky in his black-and-white suit, cape streaming behind him. He shields Corben’s daughter first, his massive frame standing over her as Metallo’s fist comes crashing down, catching it with one hand. He speaks to her gently — telling her not to be afraid of robotics, that with the right programming, they can be fantastic allies — before hurling Metallo skyward.
The Fight. The Man in the Cape. The Promise.
The battle between Jordan and Metallo is explosive — the streets of Metropolis are shattered, buildings cracked, debris raining everywhere. Jordan is calm even as Metallo locks him in a magnetic grip and prepares atomic countermeasures. He looks at the robot and says, almost apologetically, that he won’t let the city fall.
Then, with his eyes burning red, he fires heat vision directly into Metallo’s chest. The robot explodes in a shower of sparks and screeching metal. Silence. Smoke. Rubble everywhere.
Perry White of the Daily Planet is on scene, reporting live — astonished and barely coherent, describing a “Super Man” who took on a killer android with his bare hands, flew, and shot rays from his eyes. In a luxury apartment across the city, a young Lex Luthor watches the footage in fury, ordering every trace of LuthorCorp’s connection to Metallo scrubbed immediately. His young son sits on the floor, watching the screen, wide-eyed: “Dad… I know what I want to be when I grow up.”
Back on the street, General Sam Lane confronts Jordan — or tries to. He wants to know who he is and where he came from. Jordan offers his hand and says simply: “I’m a friend, General. The sooner you realize that, the better.”
But Metallo isn’t quite finished. A final surge of damaged machinery fires one last desperate blast — and Jordan catches it mid-air, crushing the weapon in his fist. With cameras rolling and the city watching, he speaks directly into Perry White’s microphone:
“People have nothing to fear — I’m here to help. And I’m going to change things, for the better.”
The issue closes on that final image: the bearded, black-suited figure standing over rubble, arm raised, a defeated robot in his grip, the city watching from behind cameras and smoking debris. It’s a hero’s debut that feels earned — not triumphant, but determined. Not carefree, but resolute. This is a Superman who chose to be here. Who made a decision. Who carries grief and acts anyway.
