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Part of my comic book reread project. Continued from Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey.

Four stars, just like the Batman Zero Hour story, but the the good sections were switched. In Superman, the lead-up issues are pretty okay, but the #0 books are the ones I enjoyed more. More on that in a moment.

Time and reality has gone haywire, and parallel dimensions and time streams are bleeding into each other. The Batmen from all of these timelines have gone to Metropolis to talk to Supes about it, but all of them end up in our Superman's where and when.



It was fun seeing all these incarnations and their attendant idiosyncrasies. I would like to have seen Adam West with a can of Entropy Fissure Repellent, or something, but you can't have everything. After all the bats go back to their own dimensions, Jor-El and Lara (yes, Superman's dead biological parents) show up in Smallville to take Superman home to a Krypton that never blew-up, but they disappear mid-conversation. When Superman gets back to Metropolis, he discovers Alpha Centurion is now the city's hero, is dating Lois Lane, and Superman never actually existed at all. Everything has a Roman Empire slant to it which is kind of cool, but then he's shunted back to his real world. Later he returns to Smallville to check on his parents again only to find he's in the time his spaceship arrived when he was a baby, but instead of being found by the Kents, he was discovered by a man who took the ship, but left baby Kal-El in the crater where he died. That was how the Kents found him, and now we're in another world without a Superman. They go after the creep who left a child to die, and then the stuff from the main Zero Hour: Crisis in Time happens, and we're back to reality, ope, there goes gravity, ope, there goes rabbit, he choked, he's so mad, but he won't give up that easy, nope, he won't have it, he... Sorry. I often in those lyrics when I utter the phrase that fires it off.

Anyway, Superman is now back to... the real world... though there have been a few changes. Metropolis was a bunch of rubble after Lex Luthor destroyed it, and it would've taken years to rebuild it. Enter Deus ex Machina, stage right, and with time being restored, so is Metropolis. Nobody is able to explain why, but I don't reckon it's important. However, there's a strange inconsistency here. If the time reset with minor changes was able to put Metropolis back to rights, couldn't it have done the same to Superman's hair? When he came back to life, he came back with a mullet, and I'm sorry, but that's just wrong. If Metropolis being destroyed is wrong, then so is the mullet.



I don't care! It's wrong, I tell ya! I would've been fine with Metropolis staying in ruins if the Zero Hour reset had given Supes a haircut, but que sera, sera. Unfortunately, I believe we still have a couple years left before he chops his mop, and we can all sing hallelujah.

With the #0 issues, we get introduced to Conduit (Kenny Braverman) whom I've always liked as a villain.



He was born the day Superman landed on Earth. They were friends who grew up together, but the poor kid was always a dollar short and a day late when pitted against Clark. He would've been Smallville High's star athlete and student, but Clark was just a bit better at everything. This all happened before Clark got his superpowers, but Kenny doesn't believe that when he finds out Clark and Supes are one and the same... However, that's at the next checkpoint. Anyway, Kenny is fueled by deep-seated resentment, hatred, and jealousy, and I always love that kind of motivation in a villain. It makes them a bit insane and thus more interesting.

Conduit's attacks on Clark are always foiled by Superman who just happens to show up when the shit is going down. Of course, you and I know why, but Kenny is initially baffled though he chalks it up to the good luck Clark has seemed to have since he was born. Conduit became the way he is because he was exposed to Kryptonite radiation the day he was born when Clark's spaceship crashed nearby. It slowly ate at him, and he was often sick, but eventually it made him more powerful. As a result, he's an equal for Superman because of the radiation he carries, though most other DC superheroes could probably handle him. Supes puts Conduit away, but Superman's old memorial statue/tomb was damaged during the fight, and Superman's body is discovered in it... but that's for next time.

And now a word from our sponsors. Here's an ad for some shitty shows you could see Saturday morning on NBC in the fall of 1994:



Thank God I had sense enough not to watch any of them on the reg after checking them out... And for the sake of full disclosure even though it might be akin to heresy for one of my generation to admit it... We can all probably agree that Saved by the Bell: The New Class was complete crap, but I was never impressed with the original series either. I certainly watched plenty of them, but it was never anything I had to see because, well, it sucked. And if that makes you think less of me, I guess there's nothing I can do about that.

Next checkpoint: The Death of Clark Kent.