Superboy Prime is Trapped in a Box (textually and also metatextually)
Superboy-Prime deserved to hate be able to hate Superman, for taking him away from home, turning him into something he’s not. He deserves to hate Green Lanterns, for trapping him in a featureless box because he wasn’t safe. Not because he was evil, but because he was dangerous. Going to prison only made him worse and worse and worse. It’s fucked, sticking him in a green box with nothing there. The Lanterns, at least, have rings that keep their body in perfect condition, but Superboy doesn’t have anything except his clothes and the S he carved into his chest. Not that the cells for the other Green Lantern Prisoners are better, but they’re not the Corps of Hope. They’re the Corps of Will, and that makes them cops, not saints. Cops who kill, by the time Superboy busts out. Speedsters ran him under the light of a red sun, so he fears them. He’s a petulant child in Infinite Crisis, but how could he be anything else? After that much isolation, after everything?
He’s not safe, but that’s not his fault. He didn’t train for it, never got his powers before Superman showed It’s Superman’s fault he’s Superboy. Superman-1, the one who got remade, who took him out of his perfectly fine life and made him like him. Made Superboy-Prime like his idol. And Superboy Prime tries. If Alex Luthor Jr. had been content in the unspecified paradise dimension he took two Clark Kents and a Lois Lane too, they could have stayed there happily.
But it’s not a paradise dimension. It’s a world that responds based on your will, a world made only of simulacrum and Alex wasn’t old enough, didn’t have will enough to keep himself entertained. Superboy Prime watched the happy memories of his life a hundred times over, but Alex didn’t have happy memories. Not enough.
Superboy Prime would have gone insane, only looking at the echos of his past, but it would have been a more manageable sort of insane than the kind Alex needed from him. Alex looked at his very short life and learned all the wrong lessons. To make one world with all the best of the others, that he was the only hero in a universe full of villains. He tormented Superboy with the evils of the world, drove him insane. Turned him against Conner Kent.
Clark Kent-2 and Lois Lane-2, were, all by themselves, not sufficient parents for those two boys. Probably no one would be, but Superboy Prime resented Power Girl. That’s who Lois was writing too, and CK was so angry at Power Girl for existing, existing and being real and having a family and he never believed she would support them. He goes out to fight Connor Kent.
And CK has only had one way to make things better. Punch stuff until the universe breaks better. He gets mad at Alex, and then horrified, but Alex doesn’t stop him. Alex needs him to break the world for him, and none of the rest of it matters. CK wants Alex to be happy at his side, but the dimension that Alex took them all to was empty.
Alex tells CK that he saw Hell, and that Hell was a way back to their world. And CK doesn’t really want to go back, but how could this place every be enough for someone who hadn’t really lived at all?
So Alex tells CK to hack apart the wall between dimensions, and everything is all the better when it changes the world. Really changes it. And CK learns that the answer to his problems is punching them until they go away.
Not a great start to his interactions with Connor Kent. I mean, he’s actually pretty polite. Stutters, and unsure of himself, but he’s just shy. Well, until he decides to punch Connor Kent’s face in. Connor Kent calls in the Teen Titans, and Clark kills some of them. He says it’s this world, and it’s true. His world wouldn’t have let him kill these people. But it’s also that he’s not in purgatory anymore. Here he can hurt people, people which don’t appreciate him blowing up at them.
He doesn’t know what to do with that. He doesn’t know how to be Superboy, let alone Superman. He can’t handle his powers, and neither can the people around him. That’s why they die, you know.
The Flashes run him under the light of a red sun, but it doesn’t kill him. He decides to destroy it all, and start over. No one seems to have learned a good thing from Crisis on Infinite Earths. But Superboy-Prime is powerful, too powerful, and no one reaches out a hand here. So they trap him in a Green-Lanter-Box in a red sun. Solitary confinement.
The lanterns have rings that keep them fed+watered. Alive. Kent doesn’t have that. Kent only has the clothes on his back and the S he carved into his own chest. It would have been kinder to kill him. It’s Superman’s fault he’s still alive. Superman’s fault he left his world, that he didn’t die with Laurie and his parents. Itd’ve been kinder that way. I bet he wished he was dead, in that box. There’s not much to do in a place like that but plan and wish.
It’s not his fault his universe is gone. It’s not his fault he’s the only one who wanted to bring his universe back. What he did to get it back was absolutely his fault, but he shouldn’t have had the chance. He wouldn’t have known he was Kryptonian, except for Superman-1. He tried to fly before, and he failed.
He gets crueler and crueler, until Legion of 3 Worlds. He gets angry there, about being nothing more than a footnote. Angry at Superman. And he should be, but not like he was. He’s angry at Superman-for being remembered, and him being forgotten. And hell, at least it isn’t Superboy. But the Lanterns? The speedsters? He’s not even mad for the right reasons. Not mad at what was done to him. He killed the closest thing to the Superman that took him from his home, I guess, but he’s so much more image-obsessed in Legion, rather then any of his many, justified grievances. The people he’s angry at don’t deserve to die, of course. He killed people, could have killed so many more, but if he’s going to paint the multiverse with blood, couldn’t it’ve at least been people he had a pre-existing interest in?
And in Blackest Night, he can’t leave his house with his parents that hate and fear him. He hurt Laurie, maybe killed her. He, his world narrows down to the scope of the comics, and he tells us that it’s all the authors fault. And that he loves Laurie.
He doesn’t deserve Laurie. Not for loving her. Not after she ran away from him. Not after whatever he did to her that made his parents so afraid.
And if he was just a puppet of the narrative when he did it, what of it? He’s not real, even when he says he’s not real. That makes him more aware, not real. He can’t be taken off the strings he’s on, except, perhaps, to be attached to new ones, in our minds. He’d be the freest in a dream. Dreams move us all around the same-controlled by the subconscious, rather than the conscious mind. And the next thing he shows up in, he’s just Connor Kent’s monster. He gets stuck to the Source Wall-another Multiversal prison. A worse one-because he broke the barriers between the universe. He shouldn’t have to become a part of them. He tried to protect the best world he could find, tried to reforge the world. Alex pruned worlds like a garden, and he gets made into the wall that separates them? No. The world’s shouldn’t be separated, at least not with a mound of bodies.
In the Dark Multiverse, he kills himself to kill 52 planets worth of people. Evil planets, but-
He’s a hero for that. He gets Krypto, or a version of him. He gets to try again.
And when he shows up again, he’s in a pocket dimension. Quipping.
I don’t hate him quipping. I don’t hate the meta stuff. But I need them to explore what happened to him. He won’t punch his way back to Earth-Prime, so tell us about him. Make him face the Guardians of the Universe. Let him tell Jason Todd about the death vote. Please. Quipping’s not enough. If you want to make him meta, you better get to the very heart of it. I can’t promise it’ll go well, but I can promise you it’ll be worth remembering.
