Quote of the day:

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.
—Agatha Christie

When I was still considering the possibility of getting a dog, I tried to come up with a name and eventually hit upon what I thought would be a good name for my dog: Krypto.

That, of course, was the name of Superman’s dog, the superdog from the planet Krypton.

I realized as well that these days anyone hearing me call my dog Krypto would most likely mishear it as “crypto”, but I figured that would be their problem.

The original Krypto made his debut in the March 1955 issue of Adventure Comics (#210). Back in those days, DC Comics was churning out stories in the Superman family at a fairly brisk pace. Action Comics and Superman Comics had stories about Superman, while Adventure Comics and Superboy Comics had stories about “The Adventures of Superman When he was a Boy”. Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen had proven so popular, that he had been given a comic book of his own, and within a few years Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane would have her own comic as well. With all these comics to fill, it’s no wonder that DC became desperate for story ideas.

And so where once baby Kal-El had been the only person to escape the exploding Krypton, when his father Jor-El packed him into an experimental rocket ship and aimed it toward the planet earth, soon we were to find that Kal-El’s (or Superman’s as he became known on earth) cousin Kara also escaped and became Supergirl. And an evil criminal had stolen an entire Kryptonian city, Kandor, miniaturized it, and placed it in a glass bottle on his spaceship, where Superman eventually found it and moved it to his Fortress of Solitude. And there was Mon-El and some criminals who were relegated to the Phantom Zone, and— 

But Krypto was the first to appear. He had been Kal-El’s pet on Krypton and Jor-El sent Krypto into space first as a test, and Krypto’s rocket got lost or something but eventually made its way to earth where dog and boy were reunited.

In the first batch of Krypto stories, the dog is more of a nuisance than anything, but eventually he evolved into a full-fledged superhero crime-fighter dog.

According to the Wikipedia article on Krypto, the initial story was supposed to be a one-off but the canine proved so popular he was back four issues later.

I’m rather doubtful about that. I’m not sure that there would have been time to create a new story and get it to press in that timeframe. Plus, the original story ends with Superboy hoping that he’ll see Krypto again, the dog having flown into outer space to roam the universe, so I suspect Krypton was always intended to be a recurring character.