 Shortly after he is born, his planet is destroyed in a natural cataclysm, but Superman's scientist father foresaw the calamity and saves his baby son by sending him to Earth in a small spaceship.The ship, sadly, is too small to carry anyone else, so Superman's parents stay behind and die.The earliest newspaper strips name the planet "Krypton", the baby "Kal-L", and his biological parents "Jor-L" and "Lora"; their names were changed to "Jor-el", and "Lara" in a 1942 spinoff novel by George Lowther.