Kryptonite - Original Versions

Original Versions

A forerunner of the kryptonite concept was the unpublished 1940 story "The K-Metal from Krypton", by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. The K-metal in the story was a piece of Krypton which robbed Superman of his strength while giving humans superhuman powers, a plot point which decades later made its way into the TV series Smallville. Jerry Siegel also stated that the naming of the planet Krypton was taken from the element Krypton due to the common denominators of high density and viscosity between the two.

"Kryptonite" was introduced in June 1943 on the Superman radio series, in the story arc "The Meteor from Krypton". It was used as both a plot device and as a means to allow Superman's actor, Bud Collyer, to take occasional time off. The substance played a part in at least one major plot-line during the course of the program.

It was not until 1949 that comic book writers incorporated kryptonite into their stories, as both a convenient danger and weakness for Superman and to add an interesting element to his stories. Pioneering female editor Dorothy Woolfolk claims she brought Kryptonite to the comics. She told the Florida newspaper Today in August 1993 that she had found Superman's invulnerability dull, and that DC's flagship hero might be more interesting with an Achilles' heel such as adverse reactions to a fragment of his home planet.

Kryptonite, in its first comic appearance (Superman vol. 1, #61, in 1949), was quite rare. It came to earth inside a single meteorite from the exploded planet Krypton. Superman captured the two small pieces of kryptonite, one from a fake swami (pretending to "hex" Superman with it) and another he purchased from a jewelry store, and threw them into Metropolis' river. Over time, kryptonite was depicted as being so abundant that many ordinary criminals kept a supply as a precaution against Superman's interference. In several accounts, it was explained that the explosion of the planet Krypton had opened a "dimensional warp" (similar to a wormhole in modern theoretical physics) which allowed the vehicle carrying the young Kal-El to reach Earth in a relatively brief time, and a large amount of planetary debris had also passed through this "warp" and emerged near Earth at virtually the same time, accounting for the seemingly improbable abundance of kryptonite material and its availability to Superman's enemies. Science fiction writer Larry Niven has tongue-in-cheek theorized that, based on such abundance, Krypton was actually a Dyson sphere with a surface hundreds of times that of a mere planet.

Kryptonite is most commonly depicted as green in coloring, with a few exceptions; it was red in its first appearance in Superman #61 (November 1949). When Superman followed the time trail of a piece of red rock that weakened him, he was able to trace his origin back to Krypton for the first time. Other colors of kryptonite, having different effects, began to show up frequently beginning in late 1950s comics, reaching a peak in appearances in 1960s Superman series. (See below for further detail on Kryptonite variations)

In an effort to reduce the use of kryptonite in Superman storylines, all known kryptonite on Earth was transmuted into "k-iron" in a 1971 storyline titled "The Sandman Saga", though kryptonite could still be synthetically manufactured by a variety of known and unknown means, and additional material left over from the destruction of Krypton would continue to fall from space.