For Want Of A Nail: Comic Books    • The Elseworlds comic,
Justice League: The Nail, where Jonathan and Martha Kent's truck
is incapacitated by, you guessed it, a nail (stuck in the tire).
This prevents them from going into town, which prevents them
from seeing Superman's rocketship crash land, which means they
never adopt baby Kal El (he is instead adopted by the Amish),
which means Superman doesn't become the DC universe's iconic
hero. Without the Big Blue Boyscout around to inspire confidence
and good feelings about metahumans among the general populace,
the American people (particularly those in Metropolis) become
highly suspicious of all superbeings, even to the point of
hunting them down and locking them up simply for existing. The
story even begins with the above poem.     • It turns out that
much of the reason for the anti-metahuman paranoia is fueled by
the Kryptonian Eradicator Jimmy Olsen, who in the absence of
Superman is able to operate much more slowly and subtly as far
as its attempted conquest