Reign of the Supermen #240: El

Source: Superman: Blood of My Ancestors GN (2003)
Type: PrecursorBlood of My Ancestors isn't a bad Superman comic. I'm just not sure it's a good one.

It's got a good pedigree, with Gil Kane and Steven Grant on writing, and Kane sharing the pencilling duties with John Buscema (which makes a lot of this look like Conan, which isn't a bad thing per se), with inks by Kevin Nowlan. The frame of the story is in fact pretty good: As Superman fights a gigantic alien creature that consumes genetic memories stored in your cells, he gets to experience the life of his first ancestor, a Kryptonian hero known as El. Superman finds renewed strength in the memories and defeats the monster, putting it in stasis inside a small egg and feeding it memories from time to time (the memories don't disappear or anything). It's Superman being Superman, compassionate and altruistic.

Unfortunately, though they try to use El to give Superman a legacy to live up to, there's very little that's Superman-like about this ancestor from 500,000 years ago. Or there is, but only superficially. Perhaps the least excusable similarity between El and Kal-El, is that the people around them somehow share the same names. El fights against the evil city overload Uthor. His adopted parents are Naton and Mar, and he marries a woman with L.L. initials. Quite a coincidence. As the story goes, Uthor's goons jump El and kill him, though he takes a couple of them out in the process. At the funeral, the priests of Rao notice "S"-like wounds on his chest which evoke some prophecy. They immediately take the body and burn it inside a special altar and the prophecy comes true. El is reborn with great strength and power, and with the sign of Rao permanently on his chest. For this episode, the role of Rao will be played by the Red Skull.
And so, El becomes a kind of Christ figure, though he goes on the wrong path almost immediately. This is the part where he becomes like King Conan, fighting and womanizing and generally letting people treat him like a god, though he does help people too, plowing their fields and fighting really rude monsters, etc.
That's the daughter of one of Uthor's henchmen he killed, out for revenge, a revenge she takes by marrying him. She eventually plays Delilah to his Samson, putting shackles on him made from a green metal found under Rao's temple. Uthor pokes his eyes out and plans to execute him, but in his blindness he repents his sins and Rao appears to him. His wife, pregnant and actually in love with him, regrets her betrayal and attempts to rescue him, but it's Rao that returns El's strength in the end. He makes the whole city topple down, burying both him and Uthor. His wife survives and her unborn child will found the House of El which eventually gave us Jor-El and Kal-El.

Heavy-handed with the biblical analogies, Blood of My Ancestors offers a primitive Krypton steeped in fantasy rather than science (hey, DC Earth went through those motions too), and a hero that has his own arc. However, that Krypton and that member of the El family are too dissimilar to the ones we know best to really tell us something meaningful about either of them. El is no Superman, not even once he accepts Rao in his heart. Just the fact that he kills without remorse, when the present day part of the book makes a point of showing Superman's pacifist ways, makes the story alien to the Superman mythos. And when there are similarities, they read like an Elseworld, but are unjustifiable coincidences. Shame.

Bonus: Sweet Kryptonian Dinosaur Rides