The Long History Behind Krypto the Superdog

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a… dog? Move over, Man of Steel, because Man’s Best Friend is perhaps the real star of the new Superman movie. The film, directed by James Gunn and intended to launch a new cinematic universe based on DC Comics, has Superman (David Corenswet) facing off against Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) and his posse of metahumans, but he’s not doing it alone. Krypto, a little white pooch with a cute red cape, helps Superman out while occasionally doing naughty things that normal dogs do. Despite being a part of the Superman comic books for 70 years, this is Krypto’s first-ever appearance in a live-action movie.

Gunn, the co-head of DC Studios who will oversee all of the upcoming DC movies in addition to directing this film, has a history with superpowered animals. He’s perhaps best known for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films, which starred Bradley Cooper as a gun-toting raccoon named Rocket. Later films would introduce a bunch of other animals, including a Soviet space dog with psychic powers. That dog, Cosmo, was a CGI creation like Krypto in the new Superman film, though a real dog named Jolene stood in on the set. 

Back in October, Gunn revealed Krypto’s inclusion in the new film, posting to social media that he was inspired by his own dog, Ozu, who he’d adopted while writing the film. “He immediately came in & destroyed our home, our shoes, our furniture – he even ate my laptop. It took a long time before he would even let us touch him,” Gunn recalled in the post. “I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, how difficult would life be if Ozu had superpowers?’ – and thus Krypto came into the script & changed the shape of the story as Ozu was changing my life.” 

Krypto’s inclusion also helps set this new DC film series apart from the Zack Snyder-led movies that started with Man of Steel, which were very serious, grim, and wouldn’t have dreamed of putting something as silly as a superpowered dog in them. Although Krypto’s big screen debut was a relatively recent development, the pup has a rich but very complex and often contradictory comic book history—and the way Superman deals with all that history speaks to one of the strongest aspects of the movie as a piece of superhero comic adaptation. 

Read more: Meet David Corenswet, the New Superman

Krypto first appeared in comics in 1955, but there have been several versions

Krypto, a creation of writer Otto Binder and artists Curt Swan and Sy Barry, made his comics debut in Adventure Comics #210, which hit shelves in March 1955. In this original iteration, he was a normal Kryptonian dog that Superman’s dad Jor-El fired off into space in a prototype test rocket he would later send his infant son to Earth in. Krypto’s rocket got knocked off course, eventually landing on Earth when Clark Kent was a teenager. Krypto, who gained superstrength and the ability to fly due to Earth’s yellow sun just like his master, was initially intended to just be a one-off character who only appeared in that single issue, but he proved popular and went on to have a bunch of adventures with Superboy (and later the grown-up Superman). 

This version of Krypto was especially cartoonish, having a full internal dialog via thought bubbles rather than acting like a normal dog that could fly. He was silly, like many aspects of the Superman mythos in the Silver Age of Comic books that lasted from 1956 to 1970. Krypto endured through the Bronze Age, too, until DC’s decades of continuity got too twisted and the publisher wiped the slate clean with the event comic storyline Crisis on Infinite Earths in the mid-’80s. Krypto was no more… for a little while. 

Post-Crisis, Krypto would return in several different forms. In 1993’s Adventures of Superman #501, a new Krypto was introduced, though this was just a normal Earth dog without any superpowers that a human pal of Superman’s named Bibbo Bibbowski adopted before later giving him to Superboy. (This Superboy is a different character from Superman, whereas the original Pre-Crisis Krypto was owned by a Superboy who was just Superman in his younger days.)

Another version of Krypto appeared in the 2001 comic event Return to Krypton, where Krypto was a dog from a false version of Krypton that the supervillain Brainiac created as a trap for Superman. The Man of Steel escaped, but the dog escaped with him to the real world. This Krypto once again had superpowers, but it behaved like a normal dog rather than a more anthropomorphic one like the first Krypto. Toward the end of the decade, another comic, Superman: Secret Origin, revamped the hero’s origin story and once more had Krypto be a dog from Krypton whose rocket went off course and landed when Clark was a teenager. 

In 2011, DC rebooted its continuity again, calling it the New 52. This version of Krypto arrived on Earth not by rocket but because it had gotten stuck in the Phantom Zone, a dimension where Krypto banished its criminals, because the pooch was trying to prevent a jailbreak. As an adult, Superman was able to rescue his dog from the Phantom Zone, and the mutt gained superpowers under the yellow sun. However, The New 52 was fairly unpopular, so in 2016 DC more or less undid it with another reboot, DC Rebirth, which returned a lot of things to how they had been previously, including Krypto’s origin story. Once more, he was a Kyptonian dog whose rocket got a little waylaid.  

There have been countless other versions of Krypto with tweaked backstories in different one-off comics or stories that aren’t set in the main DC canon. He’s appeared in a bunch of animated movies and TV shows, including as one of the leads of the 2022 family movie DC League of Super-Pets, where he was voiced by Dwayne Johnson. 

The new Superman movie has no backstory for Krypto—which is great

The new Superman movie isn’t an origin story for its title character, taking place three years into his crime-fighting career. Krypto doesn’t get an origin story, either. He’s already in Superman’s care, tearing up the Fortress of Solitude when the film starts. The closest thing to an explanation of the Kryptonian dog’s backstory is the reveal that he belongs to Superman’s cousin, Supergirl, and he’s just been taking care of him. (Milly Alcock, who will star as the character in a movie due out next year, makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film to reclaim her dog after being off-world.)

This lack of an explicit backstory is very much in line with Superman‘s approach to superhero mythos, which might actually re-create the experience of reading superhero comics better than any other movie. The success of the MCU—a series of films that gradually expanded the universe’s lore step by step starting with Iron Man—might have conditioned audiences to expect origins and explanations for everything. Anybody who reads superhero comics, with their decades of history and frequently contradictory lore, will likely tell you that’s not the case. You can find explanations for just about everything, but it’s typically better to just accept things. Superman has a dog named Krypto, and this is true for most versions of the character regardless of the medium. Sometimes he pops up in stories, other times he doesn’t. He’s just part of the fiction, waiting to be played with.

With Krypto, Superman is just including an iconic (if a little niche) part of the hero’s mythos and trusting that audiences will go along with it. While this has the potential to make a newbie viewer feel lost and unmoored, it’s a refreshing change of pace. This little white dog is speaking to how vast the possibilities of superhero storytelling can be when you’re focused on telling a fun romp rather than getting lost in the weeds of explaining the origins of every hero, villain, and, yes, pet.