The comic book letter column normally just allows readers to submit comments to the editor, but in Superman’s case these fan letters managed to change Kryptonian lore forever. In the 1970s, an editor at DC Comics received so many letters from obsessive fans, asking specific questions about Superman-related continuity, that he decided to literally make history.
Edward Nelson Bridwell was considered “DC’s self-appointed continuity cop” because he loved trivial details and hated contradictions. Bridwell handled the letter columns for several Superman-related titles and every letter from fans passed directly through his hands. These fan letters frequently included suggestions for a Kryptonian alphabet and questions about Golden Age Superman comics contradicting the established Earth-Two continuity. Bridwell investigated older comics looking for adequate explanations but all he discovered was editorial oversight. He found this insufficient information to be completely unacceptable... so he started to get creative.
In an attempt to dismiss frequent requests for a Kryptonian-English dictionary, Bridwell responded in the letter column, “That would be difficult, since the Kryptonian alphabet has 118 letters, and most of the words are longer than supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!” Bridwell was compelled to substantiate this claim, so he combed through older Superman stories looking for random squiggles drawn by artists throughout the 1950s and 1960s to represent the language of Superman’s destroyed home planet of Krypton. Bridwell selected 118 Kryptonian symbols and assigned arbitrary values to each symbol representing letters, punctuation marks, and numbers in order to create the first official Kryptonese syllabary. This Kryptonese language was used by DC Comics in every Superman-related comic until John Byrne’s reboot of the Superman origin story in 1986 introduced a new geometrically shaped Kryptonian alphabet.
By clearing up questions about Earth-Two, Bridwell had an impact on shaping the DC Multiverse. Earth-Two was created in 1961 by DC Comics to explain the differences between the original Golden Age and the new Silver Age versions of characters. However, devout Superman fans noticed a number of Golden Age stories that overlapped important details from both the Earth-Two and Earth-One versions of the character. Bridwell explained that these inconsistencies were due to an alternate hypertime reality, Earth-Two-A, which created distortions in Superman’s Golden Age backstory including: Kryptonite appearing as green or red without causing different effects, Superman gaining the ability to reshape his muscles to disguise his face, Superman having super strength, invulnerability, and a costume as a baby, and more. The concept of Earth-Two-A was officially canonized by DC Comics in 1986 with the publication of The Official Crisis on Infinite Earths Index.
The Superman comic book letter columns created an opportunity for fans to reshape their beloved character. The connection forged between readers and comic book characters is clearly a powerful force. Edward Nelson Bridwell worked tirelessly to foster the opposite of a toxic fandom, a community that pushes creators to deepen their understanding of the source material and enrich the lives of their characters. Long before the age of internet trolls, anonymous comments, and social media campaigns, a dedicated community of true DC Comics fans changed Kryptonian lore forever by simply sharing their admiration of Superman.
Source: "The Kryptonian Alphabet: A Real-World Historical Tale" by Al Turniansky, from The Kryptonian Companion