Prime Time?
February 27th, 2008Throughout the current story arc, you’ve been seeing a lot of the Black Suit Superman figure. Now, for anyone who doesn’t follow comics too closely, it simply appears to be Superman in a black suit, and so for the purpose of the strip, that’s how I’m treating it. But the real truth of the character is murkier. Also, more headache-inducing.
In 1992, DC Comics killed Superman. Lots of publicity–it was even on the evening news (an event that was later mirrored in the death of Captain America–though the increased quantity and quality of the reports is indicative of how much superheroes become vogue again). Of course, this was only a setup for DC’s crossover event of 1993–Reign of the Supermen. The story is prefaced with an event depicting Jonathan Kent, Superman’s adoptive father, traveling to the afterlife in order to convince Superman’s soul to return to life. While designed to appear as a near-death hallucination, it was also made deliberately ambiguous by the coincidental appearance of four new Supermen–The Man of Tomorrow (or the Cyborg Superman), The Man of Steel (AKA John Henry Irons, a construction worker/retired arms designer who Superman once saved), The Last Son of Krypton (in actuality the Eradicator, another Kryptonian weapon, dedicated to preserving Kryptonian culture by destroying all other forms of life in the universe), and the Metropolis Kid (a teenaged clone of Superman who hated the name Superboy). The essential premise let readers assume that one of these four Supermen would turn out to be “The” Superman, and the suspense was in finding out which one it would be.
Of course, in a classic comic book plot twist, it was none of them, as the original Superman crawled out of a regeneration matrix in the Fortress of Solitude, wearing an all-black body suit with a silver S-shield emblem on the chest, no cape, and a mullet (party on). Given the occasional inaccuracy of design translations into action figure form in the past, this black-suited Superman figure could reasonably be assumed to be that Superman, possibly updated outside of canon.
But wait! There’s more. See, in the recent Infinite Crisis story arc, an alternate version of Superboy, who, along with an alternate Lex Luthor (Earth-3), Lois, and Clark (both Earth-2), had been consigned to a sort of pocket dimension after the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, then promptly forgotten, turned out to be very much still alive. He also turned out to be rather insane. He was dubbed Superboy-Prime, though, during the story arc (and perhaps in response to DC’s ongoing legal issues), he was aged and became Superman-Prime.
As an adult, the character has worn a few different outfits (including cutting the S-shield into his bare chest). Of course, the outfit relevant here is his black suit–a perfect copy of Superman’s, all in black, with a silver shield emblem, just like the earlier one. However, this one has a cape, and of course, the character lacks Superman’s awe-inspiring mullet of the ’90s. So, since the figure more closely resembles Superman-Prime, one could assume that the figure in question represents this design.
Once again, there are flaws, less apparent though they may be. First, Superman-Prime’s cape is black, not silver (or grey, as the figure’s cape is made of a soft plastic which probably does not hold metallic coloring so well). Also, that cape, from what I can tell, doesn’t have the S-shield on it, like the figure does (more on THAT later). The figure is missing the silver bands on the forearms, and the s-shield emblem is on a black background, rather than an actual raised metal-on-metal emblem found on both suits in the comics. If the figure IS based on either comic appearance, this seems lazy, since the Steel figure they made features exactly the sort of raised metal shield they’d need.
So which is it? The original, post-death Superman? The mentally unstable Superman-Prime? Or is it just Superman in a black suit? Given Mattel’s propensity for variants, even this is not out of the question (though it’s definitely tame by their standards).
Regardless, the jury’s still out. The one thing that’s certain is that Superman-Prime does not, in fact, transform into a semi-truck. Prime indeed.
