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This article contains spoilers for My Adventures With Superman season 3 episode 4.
The reign of the Supermen is upon us. By the end of “Guess Who’s Slammin’ to Dinner?” both Superboy and the Cyborg Superman had entered the world of My Adventures with Superman. With John Henry Irons a.k.a. Steel introduced in previous seasons, and the Cyborg Superman also borrowing elements from the Eradicator, all four characters introduced in the 1993 DC Comics crossover Reign of the Supermen are now accounted for, setting up an epic battle that will play out in the next episode.
The Cyborg Superman isn’t the only character to be reimagined in My Adventures with Superman. The Superboy we meet here looks like Conner Kent, the clone of Superman and Lex Luthor who debuted in the Reign of the Superman storyline. But as he immediately reveals to a shocked Lois and Clark, he is in fact Jon Kent, sent from a dark future by unlikely ally Lex to change the past. By bringing Jon Kent into the mix, My Adventures With Superman acknowledges the most important advancement to Superman since the 1980s: his role as a father.
The Coming of the Superboy
Reign of the Supermen stems from the infamous Death of Superman storyline from 1992. After Superman sacrificed his life to stop the rampage of the murderous Doomsday, the four new Supermen arrived to take his place, including a young snot-nosed clone who insisted that people call him “Superman.” Eventually, the clone accepted the name Superboy and enjoyed his own series for several years, and also served as a founding member of Young Justice. Eventually, he matured a bit, took the Kryptonian name Kon-El and the human name Conner and spent some time with the Kents and the new Teen Titans.
Jon Kent also comes from a Superman death, but a much more convoluted one. In 2016’s Superman #52, by Pete Tomasi with Mikel Janín and Miguel Sepulveda, Superman dies fighting an imposter with energy-based powers, a death that is final and unreversed. By the end of that story, we never see him again.
But here’s the thing, that’s the Superman introduced in the New 52 reboot from 2011, an extension of the Flashpoint storyline in which the Flash rearranged the world after an adventure through time. In 2011, DC presented the New 52 as the mainline universe, insisting that all previous stories and iterations never happened. But in the 2015 event Convergence, the New 52 Superman learns that the Superman from the previous reality, the one who has existed since the first DC reboot Crisis on Infinite Earths and remained more or less unchanged through the next reboots Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis (DC reboots kind of a lot), still lives in a pocket dimension. He’s still married to Lois Lane and, more importantly for our purposes, they have a son, Jonathan Samuel Kent.
Before his death, the New 52 Superman reached out to the previous Superman, who had since entered the mainline DC continuity and had been living a quiet life with his family outside of Metropolis. Donning the black costume he wore at the end of the Reign of the Superman storyline, the original Superman joined the New 52 Superman’s fight, and when the latter died, the former slowly made his way back into the world, and is now just the regular old Superman. But as he did, he brought Jon with him, and has become the best version of Superman in years.
Ask any writer or even some fans, and they’ll tell you the biggest challenge facing Superman is that he’s too powerful, too perfect. To write an interesting story, you have to depower him or corrupt his morals, decisions that too often undermine the very nature of the character.
The Adventures of Superdad
With the introduction of Jon, Superman faced a totally new challenge, one not even explored during the brief period when he had adopted young Kryptonian Christopher Kent in 2006 (part of a tie-in to Superman Returns, the movie in which the Man of Steel became a deadbeat dad).
First of all, the addition of a son makes Superman vulnerable in a way that he never was before. Lois Lane generally does not have powers to defend herself, but she’s also a grown woman whose fearlessness is part of her character. She is not defined by the protection offered by Superman, even if he rescues her on a regular basis. The same logic cannot be extended to Jon, even though the boy does have powers. When Superman makes decisions now, he must first consider how it will affect someone who does not have his own agency.
Second, raising Jon allows us to examine Superman’s morals from another perspective. Throughout the excellent 2017 run by Tomasi, Dan Jurgans, Patrick Gleason, and Doug Mahnke, Superman had to teach Jon not just how to fly or shoot lasers from his eyes, but also how to interact with a world that could break so easily, how to think about defending others first.
Finally, as Jon grew into his own, he redefined central Superman tropes. The Super Sons, in which Jon joined forces with the snotty pre-teen Robin Damian Wayne gave us a look at a gleeful, energetic Kryptonian on Earth, someone who loved adventure and could make a few mistakes. Even after Brian Michael Bendis‘ decision to age Jon to young adulthood took the Super Sons off the board, writers such as Tom Taylor and Grant Morrison positioned Jon as the Superman of the future, acknowledging that Superman, perfect though he may be, belongs to a certain age, and it must fall on the next generation to continue the never-ending battle for truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.
In current continuity, the young Jon Kent has returned, thanks to the older Jon Kent in disguise as a futuristic hero called Tomorrow Man, and already the storytelling possibilities are endless.
A Better Tomorrow
Of course, the Jon who arrives in My Adventures with Superman meets a Lois and Clark at the start of their careers. As demonstrated by the anxiety that Lois feels in “Guess Who’s Slammin’ to Dinner?” they haven’t even established themselves as people, and don’t need the reinvention that Jon brings with him.
But the mere presence of Jon Kent in the show reminds us that he’s an important part of Superman lore from now on, one that only makes Superman a more complicated and satisfying character.
My Adventures With Superman airs new episodes on Adult Swim and HBO Max every Saturday at midnight.
The post My Adventures With Superman’s Superboy Rewrite Introduces an Important Character appeared first on Den of Geek.
