Reign of the Supermen #154: Superboy-Prime

Source: 1st - Infinite Crisis #1 (2006)
Type: Alternate EarthThe ultimate fanboy, the Superboy of Earth-Prime got to live his superheroic dream for about a day before it got him trapped behind the wall of reality with one no-name and two has-beens. It was enough to make him lose his mind. And what does he do, disgruntled teenage fanboy that he is? He punches the continuity bottle to make changes that appeal to him. Which is a lot of what he does once he's out too. Here then are, in my opinion, Superboy-Prime's 5 worst punches:
5. Conflicting origins. As soon as you like a certain version of the Legion or Hawkman & Hawkgirl, they get rebooted again. Frustrating!
4. Maxwell Lord has always been a villain conspiring against heroes. I hate that he's a villain AT ALL, and specifically hate the villainy he's responsible for. It's bad enough that he turned evil, but making the entire JLI era part of an evil manipulation threatens to ruin my childhood.
3. The punch responsible for the Rolling Head of Pantha.
I don't mean the physical punch, though it IS quite awful, but it seems to me that Superboy-Prime's fanboy love of gore and shock theater would have made him punch the TONE of the DC Universe, enabling such acts to become more and more frequent (often in Geoff Johns-scripted books). People being ripped limb from limb, faces ripped off, beheadings, and more. Heck, we have a whole Corps of people who puke blood now. I blame Superboy-Prime, the purest embodiment of this aesthetic. Even Dr. Light's retconned motivation can be attributed to this tone punch. Boo!
2. Superboy-Prime himself. Eventually, his punches free him from his exile and we have to suffer both his violence and his whining from then on. Yes, folks, he will return to Reign in other guises! Jeers!
And Superboy-Prime's #1 worst punch...
1. The resurrection of Jason Todd!

Thanks folks, see ya tomorrow! (And if you have any to add or subtract, see you in the comments section as usual.)

Comments

LiamKav said…
Whatever good and bad things you can say about Superboy-Prime, I do think that his ultimate punishment is awesomely hilarious.
mkhall said…
For various reasons I stopped buying most comics a decade ago, and whenever I read about these mega-series I am further convinced I haven't missed much.

Until this I honestly thought the continuity punch was an in-joke among comics fans, not an actual thing.
If I'm not mistaken, aren't there ripples from the punches that are still used to explain something? At least we got the real Doom Patrol back.

You're right about Jason Todd. A friend told me about the issue in question (Batman or wherever) and I realized that I would not enjoy a Judd Winnick book ever again.
Austin Gorton said…
I don't have the emotional/nostalgic connection to the JLI stuff as a lot of people on the comics blogosphere, so the Maxwell Lord never bugged me as much as most people. Which isn't to say it didn't bug me, but more on principle than because a piece of my childhood was tarnished.

And the Jason Todd one is another one where the execution ruins the idea, cuz the idea of a great Batman failure being the transformation of a former Robin into a villain is, arguably, even better than the idea of a great Batman failure being the death of one of those Robins.

So in principle, I kinda like the idea of "former Robin turned evil", but the execution of it (both in terms of Todd's characterization and the Superboy punch) leaves something to be desired.
Carl Walker said…
Winick has mostly sucked for a while, but I still find it hard to believe that explanation for Jason's return was anything other than editorially determined. It just smells that way. Winick seems pretty committed to that story (they've let him have Jason again after some time with Countdown and with Morrison) and he would have had to know that Superboy-Punch would be (should be) the death of it.