Jochimus
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O.K., I've gone back and done some re-thinking...
When we'd first see Krypton, it would already have been in its slow, agonizing death throes - including tremendous volcanic and earthquake activity - for several months, and most of its population will already be dead from the poisoned atmospheric conditions. Basically Kryptonian civilization at its peak - aesthetically a futurized blend of ancient Rome, feudal Japan, and the Egypt of the pharoahs - would have a mystical, almost magical quality about it, in fact representative of advanced forms of super-science handed down and refined over generations (possibly influenced, as is fabled of many ancient Earth cultures, by off-world intervention, but more on that later) - extra-sensory and telekinetic abilities would become not so uncommon among adult Kryptonians; the pseudo-sorcery to go with the pseudo-swords, I guess. Unfortunately this growing meta-human evolution at some point got a little too deep into the head of poor planetary minister of defense, Jax-Ur, turned his brain into caca and made him see his people as a race of devil worshippers, hence he decided to become the galaxy's most ambitious suicide bomber and set off thermonuclear charges within the planet's magmatic innards, destablizing it and causing it to crumble. The surviving populace thus turns to the reclusive hard-science expert Jor-El for aid even though he knows he won't be able to do squat in so short a time since his people were never real big on space travel, and the situation worsens when a techno-organic Coluan insectoid named Vril Dox shows up promising to "save" the Kryptonian race by sucking up the two remaining city-states full of survivors and transplanting them on more hospitable worlds, starting with Kandor. Something about Dox rubs Jor-El and his wife the wrong way, and once they figure out the small test stardrive they built might actually be able to safely transport a Kryptonian infant along a pre-charted course, they find the first habitable planet they can in the opposite direction of where Dox went and ship the kid off.
Of course. Jonathan Kent and Martha Clark are still in their early 20s, still living in town tending to the local general store, and still not married when they decide to get out of town for a while after learning Martha won't be able to bear children. On their way past Ben Hubbard's cornfield, of course, is when they see a small spacepod soft-land in the middle of the field; they follow it, find a baby inside the half-melted pod, and quickly get it to safely just as the pod self-destructs and vaporizes half the cornfield with it to destroy any trace of its landing. Knowing that the child in all likelihood is going to end up a little different than most, they decide to finally marry and move outside of town; to cover Clark's existence and avert suspicion over Jonathan and Martha's proximity to the corn field, Jonathan claims that he and Martha saw a car with a couple of teenagers peeling out of the cornfield in a hurry and found the baby amid the fire, believing it may have been a teen pregnancy someone was really desperate to be rid of; for lack of any hard evidence, the local police let the case go cold while Jonathan offers to help out on the Hubbard farm to help cover Ben's losses from the fire. They don't quite assimilate comfortably back into Smallville society in those early years (the store struggles for the longest time as a consequence), which is just as well once they discover just how 'special' their adopted son is when he reaches puberty, but gradually Clark becomes a model student and young citizen in spite of his own shyness, which in turn allows the citizens of Smallville to be able to let go of their suspicions.
Pretty much the standards to start off with: Lana, Pete, Lois, Jimmy, Perry, and Lex the puppet-master. Lana and Pete are Clark's only other confidants in his burgeoning otherworldly abilities as a youth and become instrumental in helping him establish his Superman identity later on, Lana as a fashion designer a la S:TAS (here designing the Super-suit) and Pete as legal counsel (advising Clark on matters where even the use of his superhuman abilities would be no help). Lois is a devout rival of Clark Kent from the get-go and initially is spooked by Superman, and is determined to expose him as some sort of menace; eventually, though, she realizes that the reclusive, soft-spoken Kent may be more than what he appears, and that Superman's Boy-Scout manner may actually be the real deal -- and she begins to suspect that Clark and Superman are one and the same pretty early on, not realizing how fond she's becoming of both in spite of herself. Jimmy is a Goth teenager with bright-orange spiked hair and a nose ring who wears one of those gag 'costume' shirts - in this case a sleeveless shirt depicting a sweater-vest and bow tie - over one of those metal-band black T-shirts; always has brass knuckles and a switchblade on him, too - he's a subversive little **** in the field and has been arrested enough times, in and out of the line of duty, to have something of an inside track on Metropolis' criminal element, which is exactly why Perry KEEPS him on the payroll when any other editor would fire him a dozen times over. Perry himself is a former war correspondent who's survived multiple bullet wounds, stabbings, and gassings, and it shows in his rough voice and scarred face; he's won the Congressional Gold Medal, more Pulitzers than you have digits, and unlike Kent, he's technically blind without his own glasses. Lex is the dashing, handsome, charismatic young Mayor of Metropolis, recently named People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, and has left the day-to-day operation of his own advanced sciences firm, Lexcorp, to a committee of reliable (if not exactly trustworthy) aides that include Sydney Happersen, Dr. Gretchen Kelley, and the Corben brothers, John and Roger.
Later on I might bring in things like a version of DCAU Krypto, the one that was Bizarro's pet (with the ability to change into an Earth dog -- I can't help it, I've become a big fan of "The Thing"); as for Supergirl, I might merge the pre- and post-Crisis versions together with a dash of Ultraman (the kaiju-fighting henshin, not the evil equivalent of Superman from an alternate universe) thrown in: in keeping with my earlier mention of Kryptonian civilization possibly having been given a helping hand in its evolution by higher forces in the cosmos, the idea is that various planets have been designated to the 'care' of various celestial beings, and on Krypton, the celestial in question was named Kara, who helped lift the war-torn Kryptonian civilization to a new age, and was instrumental in helping the First El rout the efforts of the First Zod; she then had to leave to aid other ravaged worlds with intent to revisit Krypton later to see how far they'd come along. To her horror, she comes back to the dead crumble Krypton has become, but senses a surviving Kryptonian on Earth, and heads there to discover Zod has escaped the Realm of the Phantoms (and possibly was responsible for compelling Jax-Ur into setting into motion Krypton's doom to begin with), and the fallout of the battle mortally wounds a young police artist, an Asian-American Superman junkie named Linda Li. Moved by Linda's courage in the face of certain death, Kara ends up merging with her, and adopting Superman's colors as a result, Supergirl charges headlong into battle against Zod to even the odds.
Weirdly and in some cases, darkly.
Lex as I pointed out is the current Mayor of Metropolis, and he knows EVERYTHING there is to know about what goes on in and around his city...even the local gangs are only allowed to have at each other because he's found a way to benefit from it. Oh, and he figures out VERY early in the game that Superman is Clark Kent, but he considers himself above resorting to any of the conventional means of exploiting that knowledge - i.e. harming Superman's loved ones - and is fixated on finding a way to destroy Superman himself with his own hands.
Brainiac, as I pointed out, is a bipedal techno-organic insectoid, who commands a hive of drones and pilots a honeycomb-like starship. He abducts entire geographic regions full of life-forms with the express purpose of performing gruesome experiments on them, using them as stock for genetic harvesting. Basically he represents kind of a twist on the classic image of the demented little boy who likes to shine sunlight through a magnifying glass down on his ant farm.
Bizarro and Parasite remain pretty much the same as I envisioned them previously - both the products of attempts by Lexcorp to get something useful out of a sample of Superman's blood taken from his first super-powered fisticuff - though Bizarro would probably more closely resemble the "FrankenSuperman" design of James Carson for "Superman Lives". Parasite, however, would still be the gruesome maroon-colored zombie-man in the loincloth tatter that I drew him as before.
Metallo, in his original human form of John Corben, already has an artificial heart. He starts out as Co-Director of Special Projects for Lexcorp, which in addition to cracking the nut of the strange meteorite they found in the course of tracking down a spacecraft that was tracked by NORAD entering North American airspace 30 years earlier, has also been developing a new form of nanotechnology that can be injected into a human being and alter their skin in such a way as to temporarily transform it into living, nigh-invulnerable polyalloy armor. As you can probably guess, ol' Johnny manages to get the stuff accidentally pumped into him at some point, and the whole vial empties into his system, converting his entire biological makeup into living metal, inside as well as out; furthermore, the proximity of the meteorite and the weird radiation readings it gives off cause his new condition to be permanent. And to top it off, the mutagenic change has taxed his artificial heart beyond its ability to keep up, so to save his life his assistant Emmett Vale decides to fashion a shard of the mysterious meteorite into a power cell for the artificial heart -- which not only supercharges Corben's heart but also increases his own physical strength and allows him to channel the radiation throughout his whole body.
Zod is...well, he's Kryptonian-born and he's got a grudge against the House of El. The difference here is that the Zod I'd use would be Krypton's first Zod, the original patriarch from Krypton's first recorded dynastic period, who attempted to seize control of the planet but was thwarted by who was essentially the first El, and thus was cast into what was known then on Krypton as the Realm of the Phantoms. But that was thousands upon thousands of years ago, and with his escape from that 'Phantom Zone', as Superman takes to calling it, it's revealed that Zod has...CHANGED. He's much, much more than Kryptonian now and doesn't even look human, warped into a hideous, hellish Gigeresque man-creature who is invulnerable to Kryptonite and possesses powers above and beyond the 'old standards' (flight, super-speed, heat/X-ray vision, etc.). He's now basically a wraith more than anything else, and he has an intellect that represents all those millennia trapped in a dimension outside of normal time and space, observing all there is to see and hear without being seen or heard himself...although after thousands of years he grew strong enough to be seen and heard by Jax-Ur, thus enabling him to push Jax-Ur over the edge and prod him into committing his little act of genocide. And in a nod to both Kruge and Gozer (and possibly to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse), Zod doesn't go anywhere without his quartet of Terror-Doggish hellhounds - Ursa, Non, Quex-Ul and Faora - who probably did NOT start out as dogs.
Toyman's also a little different. Instead of being embodied by one man or mechanical proxy, he's able to embody MULTIPLE life-sized action-figure bodies at once for added creep factor (I think I might have got this from that mannequin episode of "The Twilight Zone", with the puppet-man form from "Justice" thrown in and a dash of Chucky). And since Schott is NEVER seen in his human form and no one has seen him alive in years, it's never made clear whether he's just remote-controlling these things or if in fact he's possessing them from beyond. And his action figure bodies come in many different forms - soldiers, gunslingers, knights of old, you name it.
Doomsday is an ever-changing pastiche of different prehistoric Kryptonian lifeforms - his genetic coding contains data for countless such beasts; every time he dies, he regenerates and often will incorporate new elements into his 'core' body from this genetic 'archive', as it were. In some cases, if his dead body sports any blood from his prey and he regenerates with it still on his person, traces of THAT genetic code will become part of the 'archive'. And, of course, true to the comics, he can never be killed the same way twice.
Some other little things:
Clark Kent has matted-down hair. Superman has a rockin' windswept 'do (with the spitcurl, 'natch).
The cape is Kryptonian, the suit is not. The cape is actually Jor-El's own, handed down through generations of Els, and is thus invulnerable on its own. The suit, however, is Earth-made, and only has any invulnerability because of the fact that Kal-El is wearing it; instead of having an "aura" of invulnerability, Superman would have what for lack of a better term I call tactile invulnerability, meaning that anything he holds in his hands will assume, to a small extent, a portion of Superman's invulnerability for as long as he's holding it. This is what would enable him to pull two people safely out of a fire or an explosion, since his cape wouldn't be big enough to cover both of them.
Likewise, the S-shield is a mix of both his Kryptonian and Earthling heritages. The El family crest is a yellow pentagonal field with a red border; as for the S, that comes later after he's already started operating publicly in Metropolis - he wears the costume and the crest, but there's no S on it initially. It's after his first battle with a supervillain, when the nickname "Superman" becomes less a derrogatory callout from the jaded populace ("Go back where you came from, Superman!") and more of a genuinely well-meaning moniker from the grateful citizenry ("Kick his @$$, Superman!!!") - and after Lois suggests that his chest emblem is lacking something - that Clark himself makes one tiny little change to the suit: remembering a school-wide contest to create a new school logo that Lana entered but did not win (the contest was rigged), Clark incorporates Lana's unused S design into the El family crest. Hence,
.
When it finally does show up, Kryptonite is Kryptonite - BUT a single Kryptonite rock does not have any 'set' color; rather, the life-cycle of Kryptonite radiation is such that it takes on a different color for each phase of the cycle; it starts out red (has unpredictable effects on Kryptonians), then goes to gold (on Earth it takes away their powers, whereas on Krypton it would have rendered them impotent), then green (fatally poisonous to them), then blue (harmless to pure-blooded Kryptonians, but fatal to any genetic facsimiles of them), then white (toxic to vegetation) and finally goes inert. This is another idea I borrowed from a classic sci-fi movie, in this case from the life-clocks in "Logan's Run".
As to whether Clark Kent or Superman is the disguise...neither of them is. They're just different aspects of the same person. He relies upon certain elements of who he is and what he believes in to be a mild-mannered reporter, just as he relies upon others to be the Man of Steel.
When we'd first see Krypton, it would already have been in its slow, agonizing death throes - including tremendous volcanic and earthquake activity - for several months, and most of its population will already be dead from the poisoned atmospheric conditions. Basically Kryptonian civilization at its peak - aesthetically a futurized blend of ancient Rome, feudal Japan, and the Egypt of the pharoahs - would have a mystical, almost magical quality about it, in fact representative of advanced forms of super-science handed down and refined over generations (possibly influenced, as is fabled of many ancient Earth cultures, by off-world intervention, but more on that later) - extra-sensory and telekinetic abilities would become not so uncommon among adult Kryptonians; the pseudo-sorcery to go with the pseudo-swords, I guess. Unfortunately this growing meta-human evolution at some point got a little too deep into the head of poor planetary minister of defense, Jax-Ur, turned his brain into caca and made him see his people as a race of devil worshippers, hence he decided to become the galaxy's most ambitious suicide bomber and set off thermonuclear charges within the planet's magmatic innards, destablizing it and causing it to crumble. The surviving populace thus turns to the reclusive hard-science expert Jor-El for aid even though he knows he won't be able to do squat in so short a time since his people were never real big on space travel, and the situation worsens when a techno-organic Coluan insectoid named Vril Dox shows up promising to "save" the Kryptonian race by sucking up the two remaining city-states full of survivors and transplanting them on more hospitable worlds, starting with Kandor. Something about Dox rubs Jor-El and his wife the wrong way, and once they figure out the small test stardrive they built might actually be able to safely transport a Kryptonian infant along a pre-charted course, they find the first habitable planet they can in the opposite direction of where Dox went and ship the kid off.
Of course. Jonathan Kent and Martha Clark are still in their early 20s, still living in town tending to the local general store, and still not married when they decide to get out of town for a while after learning Martha won't be able to bear children. On their way past Ben Hubbard's cornfield, of course, is when they see a small spacepod soft-land in the middle of the field; they follow it, find a baby inside the half-melted pod, and quickly get it to safely just as the pod self-destructs and vaporizes half the cornfield with it to destroy any trace of its landing. Knowing that the child in all likelihood is going to end up a little different than most, they decide to finally marry and move outside of town; to cover Clark's existence and avert suspicion over Jonathan and Martha's proximity to the corn field, Jonathan claims that he and Martha saw a car with a couple of teenagers peeling out of the cornfield in a hurry and found the baby amid the fire, believing it may have been a teen pregnancy someone was really desperate to be rid of; for lack of any hard evidence, the local police let the case go cold while Jonathan offers to help out on the Hubbard farm to help cover Ben's losses from the fire. They don't quite assimilate comfortably back into Smallville society in those early years (the store struggles for the longest time as a consequence), which is just as well once they discover just how 'special' their adopted son is when he reaches puberty, but gradually Clark becomes a model student and young citizen in spite of his own shyness, which in turn allows the citizens of Smallville to be able to let go of their suspicions.
Pretty much the standards to start off with: Lana, Pete, Lois, Jimmy, Perry, and Lex the puppet-master. Lana and Pete are Clark's only other confidants in his burgeoning otherworldly abilities as a youth and become instrumental in helping him establish his Superman identity later on, Lana as a fashion designer a la S:TAS (here designing the Super-suit) and Pete as legal counsel (advising Clark on matters where even the use of his superhuman abilities would be no help). Lois is a devout rival of Clark Kent from the get-go and initially is spooked by Superman, and is determined to expose him as some sort of menace; eventually, though, she realizes that the reclusive, soft-spoken Kent may be more than what he appears, and that Superman's Boy-Scout manner may actually be the real deal -- and she begins to suspect that Clark and Superman are one and the same pretty early on, not realizing how fond she's becoming of both in spite of herself. Jimmy is a Goth teenager with bright-orange spiked hair and a nose ring who wears one of those gag 'costume' shirts - in this case a sleeveless shirt depicting a sweater-vest and bow tie - over one of those metal-band black T-shirts; always has brass knuckles and a switchblade on him, too - he's a subversive little **** in the field and has been arrested enough times, in and out of the line of duty, to have something of an inside track on Metropolis' criminal element, which is exactly why Perry KEEPS him on the payroll when any other editor would fire him a dozen times over. Perry himself is a former war correspondent who's survived multiple bullet wounds, stabbings, and gassings, and it shows in his rough voice and scarred face; he's won the Congressional Gold Medal, more Pulitzers than you have digits, and unlike Kent, he's technically blind without his own glasses. Lex is the dashing, handsome, charismatic young Mayor of Metropolis, recently named People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, and has left the day-to-day operation of his own advanced sciences firm, Lexcorp, to a committee of reliable (if not exactly trustworthy) aides that include Sydney Happersen, Dr. Gretchen Kelley, and the Corben brothers, John and Roger.
Later on I might bring in things like a version of DCAU Krypto, the one that was Bizarro's pet (with the ability to change into an Earth dog -- I can't help it, I've become a big fan of "The Thing"); as for Supergirl, I might merge the pre- and post-Crisis versions together with a dash of Ultraman (the kaiju-fighting henshin, not the evil equivalent of Superman from an alternate universe) thrown in: in keeping with my earlier mention of Kryptonian civilization possibly having been given a helping hand in its evolution by higher forces in the cosmos, the idea is that various planets have been designated to the 'care' of various celestial beings, and on Krypton, the celestial in question was named Kara, who helped lift the war-torn Kryptonian civilization to a new age, and was instrumental in helping the First El rout the efforts of the First Zod; she then had to leave to aid other ravaged worlds with intent to revisit Krypton later to see how far they'd come along. To her horror, she comes back to the dead crumble Krypton has become, but senses a surviving Kryptonian on Earth, and heads there to discover Zod has escaped the Realm of the Phantoms (and possibly was responsible for compelling Jax-Ur into setting into motion Krypton's doom to begin with), and the fallout of the battle mortally wounds a young police artist, an Asian-American Superman junkie named Linda Li. Moved by Linda's courage in the face of certain death, Kara ends up merging with her, and adopting Superman's colors as a result, Supergirl charges headlong into battle against Zod to even the odds.
Weirdly and in some cases, darkly.
Lex as I pointed out is the current Mayor of Metropolis, and he knows EVERYTHING there is to know about what goes on in and around his city...even the local gangs are only allowed to have at each other because he's found a way to benefit from it. Oh, and he figures out VERY early in the game that Superman is Clark Kent, but he considers himself above resorting to any of the conventional means of exploiting that knowledge - i.e. harming Superman's loved ones - and is fixated on finding a way to destroy Superman himself with his own hands.
Brainiac, as I pointed out, is a bipedal techno-organic insectoid, who commands a hive of drones and pilots a honeycomb-like starship. He abducts entire geographic regions full of life-forms with the express purpose of performing gruesome experiments on them, using them as stock for genetic harvesting. Basically he represents kind of a twist on the classic image of the demented little boy who likes to shine sunlight through a magnifying glass down on his ant farm.
Bizarro and Parasite remain pretty much the same as I envisioned them previously - both the products of attempts by Lexcorp to get something useful out of a sample of Superman's blood taken from his first super-powered fisticuff - though Bizarro would probably more closely resemble the "FrankenSuperman" design of James Carson for "Superman Lives". Parasite, however, would still be the gruesome maroon-colored zombie-man in the loincloth tatter that I drew him as before.
Metallo, in his original human form of John Corben, already has an artificial heart. He starts out as Co-Director of Special Projects for Lexcorp, which in addition to cracking the nut of the strange meteorite they found in the course of tracking down a spacecraft that was tracked by NORAD entering North American airspace 30 years earlier, has also been developing a new form of nanotechnology that can be injected into a human being and alter their skin in such a way as to temporarily transform it into living, nigh-invulnerable polyalloy armor. As you can probably guess, ol' Johnny manages to get the stuff accidentally pumped into him at some point, and the whole vial empties into his system, converting his entire biological makeup into living metal, inside as well as out; furthermore, the proximity of the meteorite and the weird radiation readings it gives off cause his new condition to be permanent. And to top it off, the mutagenic change has taxed his artificial heart beyond its ability to keep up, so to save his life his assistant Emmett Vale decides to fashion a shard of the mysterious meteorite into a power cell for the artificial heart -- which not only supercharges Corben's heart but also increases his own physical strength and allows him to channel the radiation throughout his whole body.
Zod is...well, he's Kryptonian-born and he's got a grudge against the House of El. The difference here is that the Zod I'd use would be Krypton's first Zod, the original patriarch from Krypton's first recorded dynastic period, who attempted to seize control of the planet but was thwarted by who was essentially the first El, and thus was cast into what was known then on Krypton as the Realm of the Phantoms. But that was thousands upon thousands of years ago, and with his escape from that 'Phantom Zone', as Superman takes to calling it, it's revealed that Zod has...CHANGED. He's much, much more than Kryptonian now and doesn't even look human, warped into a hideous, hellish Gigeresque man-creature who is invulnerable to Kryptonite and possesses powers above and beyond the 'old standards' (flight, super-speed, heat/X-ray vision, etc.). He's now basically a wraith more than anything else, and he has an intellect that represents all those millennia trapped in a dimension outside of normal time and space, observing all there is to see and hear without being seen or heard himself...although after thousands of years he grew strong enough to be seen and heard by Jax-Ur, thus enabling him to push Jax-Ur over the edge and prod him into committing his little act of genocide. And in a nod to both Kruge and Gozer (and possibly to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse), Zod doesn't go anywhere without his quartet of Terror-Doggish hellhounds - Ursa, Non, Quex-Ul and Faora - who probably did NOT start out as dogs.
Toyman's also a little different. Instead of being embodied by one man or mechanical proxy, he's able to embody MULTIPLE life-sized action-figure bodies at once for added creep factor (I think I might have got this from that mannequin episode of "The Twilight Zone", with the puppet-man form from "Justice" thrown in and a dash of Chucky). And since Schott is NEVER seen in his human form and no one has seen him alive in years, it's never made clear whether he's just remote-controlling these things or if in fact he's possessing them from beyond. And his action figure bodies come in many different forms - soldiers, gunslingers, knights of old, you name it.
Doomsday is an ever-changing pastiche of different prehistoric Kryptonian lifeforms - his genetic coding contains data for countless such beasts; every time he dies, he regenerates and often will incorporate new elements into his 'core' body from this genetic 'archive', as it were. In some cases, if his dead body sports any blood from his prey and he regenerates with it still on his person, traces of THAT genetic code will become part of the 'archive'. And, of course, true to the comics, he can never be killed the same way twice.
Some other little things:
Clark Kent has matted-down hair. Superman has a rockin' windswept 'do (with the spitcurl, 'natch).
The cape is Kryptonian, the suit is not. The cape is actually Jor-El's own, handed down through generations of Els, and is thus invulnerable on its own. The suit, however, is Earth-made, and only has any invulnerability because of the fact that Kal-El is wearing it; instead of having an "aura" of invulnerability, Superman would have what for lack of a better term I call tactile invulnerability, meaning that anything he holds in his hands will assume, to a small extent, a portion of Superman's invulnerability for as long as he's holding it. This is what would enable him to pull two people safely out of a fire or an explosion, since his cape wouldn't be big enough to cover both of them.
Likewise, the S-shield is a mix of both his Kryptonian and Earthling heritages. The El family crest is a yellow pentagonal field with a red border; as for the S, that comes later after he's already started operating publicly in Metropolis - he wears the costume and the crest, but there's no S on it initially. It's after his first battle with a supervillain, when the nickname "Superman" becomes less a derrogatory callout from the jaded populace ("Go back where you came from, Superman!") and more of a genuinely well-meaning moniker from the grateful citizenry ("Kick his @$$, Superman!!!") - and after Lois suggests that his chest emblem is lacking something - that Clark himself makes one tiny little change to the suit: remembering a school-wide contest to create a new school logo that Lana entered but did not win (the contest was rigged), Clark incorporates Lana's unused S design into the El family crest. Hence,
.When it finally does show up, Kryptonite is Kryptonite - BUT a single Kryptonite rock does not have any 'set' color; rather, the life-cycle of Kryptonite radiation is such that it takes on a different color for each phase of the cycle; it starts out red (has unpredictable effects on Kryptonians), then goes to gold (on Earth it takes away their powers, whereas on Krypton it would have rendered them impotent), then green (fatally poisonous to them), then blue (harmless to pure-blooded Kryptonians, but fatal to any genetic facsimiles of them), then white (toxic to vegetation) and finally goes inert. This is another idea I borrowed from a classic sci-fi movie, in this case from the life-clocks in "Logan's Run".
As to whether Clark Kent or Superman is the disguise...neither of them is. They're just different aspects of the same person. He relies upon certain elements of who he is and what he believes in to be a mild-mannered reporter, just as he relies upon others to be the Man of Steel.
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