 March 1938 - while a child reads a comic book about the largest newspaper in the city of Metropolis, in a distant galaxy an advanced race of humans reside on the planet Krypton. Three traitors who have attempted to overthrow Krypton s ruling council are sentenced by the planet s greatest scientist, Jor-El, to an enclosed extra-dimensional prison drifting through space. However, Jor-El s more pressing concern lies in the orbital shift of Krypton, which is sending it into the fatal gravitational pull of its crimson central star, a fact blithely ignored by the ruling council. Effectively placed under house arrest by the council, Jor-El and his wife Lara consent to sending their infant son, Kal-El, to a primitive planet six galaxies distant, known as Earth, where a yellow sun will fuse with his irradiated molecular density to make him strong, fast, and virtually invulnerable. The tiny starship bearing Kal-El escapes Krypton s gravity just before the planet is sucked into its red sun and both bodies are obliterated. Years later the starship reaches Earth and crashlands on a vast wheatfield near Smallville, Kansas, before local farmers Martha and Jonathan Kent. Deciding to adopt the child within the strange craft, the Kents name him Clark and he loves them as his true parents. Many years pass and he is now a high schooler shunned by many of his peers. But following a tragic incident, he learns the truth about his genesis, and a personal exodus to the very summit of the North Pole leads to the creation of a vast crystaline fortress within which Kal-El learns the full truth of his existence from the spirit of his true father, Jor-El. He now becomes a fully matured man, clad in a red and blue costume bearing the S-shaped crest of the House Of El, with the mission of protecting his newly adopted home planet in the memory of his true homeworld, and in such capacity he disguises himself as a meek newswriter in which guise he can learn of threats to his adopted homeworld - one of which occurs in an act of trachery by an arrogant criminal mastermind living in a vast headquarters 200 feet beneath the surface of Metropolis, an act of treachery that sends nuclear missiles flying off course and detonates a gigantic earthquake that threatens to destroy California.