For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the knight was lost.
For want of a knight the battle was lost.
So it was a kingdom was lost.
All for the want of a nail.

I vaguely remember a comic story when I was a child involving Superman. I'm sure most of you know the story of Superman. His home planet is about to explode and his father sends him in a rocket to Earth to save him. Arriving on Early, he is discovered by an old farm couple, the Kents, who raise him with very good morals and shape him into the man who will become Superman.

This story started with that basic Superman origin, but when baby Superman's rocket arrives on Earth, the Kents aren't there to find him because their car ran over a nail and got a flat.

The story then goes on to paint a pretty bleak world which has suffered from there being no Superman. A bunch of bad stuff happens which I no longer remember, but I do remember the ending. The big bad guy, who might have been Lex Luther, is about to kill someone but an Amish farmer suddenly steps in to save the person. An enraged Luther using some kind of power to incinerate the farmer, but the farmer survives, revealing himself as Superman. His Amish parents tell him not to join the fight, while he feels compelled to by his morals. Luther then kills his parents, prompting him to get involved and quickly end the fight. The story ends with him becoming Superman and joining the Justice League and it implies that everyone lived happily ever after.

I hadn't thought of that story in years. The other day @koto-art did a post about some Marvel cards she bought (go read it). For some reason, shortly after reading her post, this old Superman story popped in my head. The mind works in strange ways.

I might have used Google to find the story, but I probably wouldn't have bothered because I wouldn't have known exactly how to search for it. But with ChatGPT... I entered basically what I just wrote above and it gave me a very fast answer:

JLA: The Nail, a three-issue mini-series published by DC Comics in 1998.

Wow, that was easy. One area where I think AI is just awesome is in searching for things.

And what do you know, I can buy it for Kindle.

A story I probably haven't read since I was in high school, and thanks to technology I could find it again in seconds, buy it, and read it. Man... technology is great sometimes.

(By the way, after rereading the story I found that while I remembered the broad strokes of the story correctly, other things I misremembered. For example, it wasn't Luther that fought Superman at the end. That's all I'll say. If you want to know who it was, you get the book and read it yourself.)

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.