Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! The, uh, "mentality" of Superboy-Prime

To put yourself in SBP's shoes (well, I'll try. this will take a while!)... Imagine being a normal boy who loves reading comics. You become a comic book character, literally. Super-friggin-boy! This is so much cooler than a wet dream, you think. Then Earth dies and you get sucked into a world of paper and ink (aka the DCU). Now that must be the most lopsided, bittersweet dream ever. You team up with the gods of modern mythology. Well, that still doesn't compensate the loss of everything before the brouhaha, of course. But the reward is sweeter. The DCU treats you with a front row seat in its theater (aka Hotel Paradise Dimension). Once the movie being played approaches the first of many climaxes, it starts to suffer from big editing gaffs. The characters you loved go whack or die. How unnatural... it's a Casablanca turned Gigli! Maybe you should've been sucked into Earth-616 instead. In a fit, you punch the friggin' screen! Holy wow, now you're the master of the 'Fourth Wall'! Well, if your life's sole purpose now is to watch a fantasy world existing behind that 'Wall', you want to 'make it right', right? Just like some crazed fanboy barraging DC with petitions, but you do it much faster. Yeah. Now you go kill'em like you're doing emo things to your childhood toys. And why are they so powerless? It's your little fanboy dream, remember? Them fictional characters wouldn't leave a mark on your holy impenetrableness. And then you kill Conner Kent as if both of you are competing RPG players. Soon later, someone whose powers are above your big sucker-punch of destiny flings you to the future. Heh... and you thought this was your personal lucid dream. Unfortunately, you are now really sick in your mind, even in Earth-Prime (aka IRL) standards. You've hacked your favourite video game into corruption and now you can't even play with it. You should be waking up anytime now, but your body keeps telling you that it isn't over, just play along now... So it's time to keep on killing, but now just doing it for the lulz. Dun-dun-dah! Watch out, Legion! It's not just Kara who thought she's dreaming you guys!

See how complicated it is? It ain't no nutshell. Geoff Johns should be winning every Harvey and Eisner just for his ingenuity in adding such sophistication to this, uh, one-dimensional character. (A bit ironic, but I hope you'll take it.) That's why I sympathize with all those DCU characters on an extreme scale (and probably any other comic writer who would've dealt with him but S!, Wolfman & Johns).

That "make it right" echoes what Rokk Krin as Time Trapper kept trying to do - and what drove him mad, over time.

SBP, fanboy turned... DC Editor from Hell? Still, Prime behaving as someone caught in a nightmare is interesting. His actions makes sense - and are fair game - from that point of view.

Nice interpretation. We've been discussing just that in the Lo3w thread but it's nice to see it all edited into a coherent post somewhere. It makes more sense than simply "fruit-bat-crazy" maniac, and ties together everything that drives the character into a narrative.
Many antagonists are portrayed as just evil for the sake of evil or evil because they need the money but that has nothing to do with Prime. In the real world everybody sees themselves as the hero of their own story and Prime needs this. Desperately. It's been difficult to accept that a Kal-El of some dimension or the other just went insane for the hell of it, this kind of storyline shows that there was an original motivation to do good. That the road to hell is paved with good intentions isn't a cliche for no reason. it's a road that many have traveled and in this particular case the traffic's backing up.

Well, the evil/possessed Kal-El cliché has been quite overused in DC's recent history. SBP really exemplifies the "villain is a hero in his own story (can also be interpreted as "a hero is a villain in his villain's story"), which I daresay was even more effective than the Alex Ross Justice miniseries.

How SBP's rampage will play out in Lo3W would be quite interesting, especially when the once-almighty Superman wants to provide redemption... which is improbable in this case. But Prime's backstory needs to be re-emphasized again, and fast. If not for his origin, he might just be the parallel version of Dan DiDio!