Who's Chris Kent and what's the deal with him right now?

Chris Kent (link to my blog tag) was introduced in the previous continuity as the biological son of General Zod and Lieutenant Ursa who was born to them in the Phantom Zone as a part of a plot to escape. The plot was successful but Chris arrived alone at first, unable to fully communicate and scared. He was adopted by Lois and Clark and given a new name – Chrisopher Kent – and a home with them as their foster-son. He was a sweet but scarred little boy whose previous life had subjected him to abuse and terrorizing at the hands of his parents as well as other Phantom Zone inmates. Which made it all the more terrifying when the other Phantom Zone inmates began to escape and take over Metropolis. 

Chris defied his abusive father, declaring he was Chris Kent – not “Lor-Zod” – and that he would do what Superman Would Do and stand up to his parents, leading to General Zod preparing to murder him for defiance when he was saved by Clark, and ultimately saved the world by selflessly pushing himself through the Phantom Zone to break the opening within it. 

“What Superman would do.”

[Action Comics (1939-2011) Annual #11]

He would later return, though as a teenager rather than the ten-year-old he entered the Phantom Zone as, due to… comic book logic and served as a teen superhero in Metropolis during the “New Krypton” arc, going by the name Nightwing while Dick Grayson was Batman in Gotham and doing so while wearing the traditional Kryptonian costume for Nightwing. 

He was even featured in Grant Morrison’s Multiversity as the Superman to Damian Wayne’s Batman in an alternate timeline where they were allowed to grow up together. (it used to take my prize for character assassination prior to the current drama because it might, in fact, be the most “get off my lawn” anti-millennial/gen-z comic that morrison has ever written which is really saying something holy shit)

[World’s Finest (2009-2010) #1]

Chris was originally modeled after Jason White from Superman Returns (2006) aesthetically, but named in honor of the most famous Superman actor Christopher Reeve who had passed away prior to Chris’ introduction to the DCU. He was a sweet, quiet child who loved Lois and Clark very much and was loved enough by them that Lois literally kicked down a door at STAR Lab to save him, and Clark literally broke him out of a military facility. 

He was erased with the majority of the pre-Flashpoint DCU until Rebirth where some ill advised choices have led to Chris returning as… 

Well none of the things I mentioned above. We haven’t seen all that much of him as a child yet, though what we have is not at all similar to his previous incarnation and he seems to have a strangely normal relationship with his biological parents that doesn’t really show the signs of trauma or abuse from before. 

[Action Comics (2016-present) #984]

He’s far more of a “evil version” of Jon Kent, the current biological child of Lois and Clark, and a part of the family’s foils in the Zod family more than anything else. 

This has been topped off by the current storyline which features an alternate timeline where we see an adult Chris Kent who is literally just… unhinged General Zod who hates Superman more than anything and has dedicated his life to killing Clark. 

Child and adult version both have an incredibly stupid haircut that he… never grows out of apparently. Anyway. 

Anyway, I am a HUGE fan of Chris Kent and he’s very important and special to me which makes the current changes very disheartening to say the least. I’m trying to see if there are plans to do… literally anything else, but if there’s one thing that the Superman Mythos has taught me over the decades it’s that there is probably no property this side of Wonder Woman that DC is less likely to concern itself over the coherent continuity of. 

Why is Superboy Prime best Evil Superman?

I don’t know that I’d call him the best Evil Superman period. That’d be the Plutonian:

But he’s absolutely DC’s best attempt at the same. It helps that the majority of Evil Supermen actually kind of suck.

Zod’s the biggest example, and he’s bad in the exact same way Doomsday is bad, no matter how hard Terrance Stamp worked to convince everyone otherwise. He’s just a big bad dude who hits things, and Superman has to stop him, who we collectively pretend is a bigger deal than any other generic villain he fights because of his backstory. Even worse, said backstory of being a friend of Jor-El amounts to “he apparently used to be a complex three-dimensional character, so you still have to care about him now that he’s Hitler with heat vision”. 

So, of course, you can imagine my delight that the last two Superman movies have focused on him, Doomsday, and Jessie Eisenberg playing Jim Carrey playing Riddler playing Heath Ledger’s Joker playing Gene Hackman’s Luthor playing Birthright’s Luthor.

Bizarro’s great, but doesn’t exactly count as evil in my book. Super-Crook - from an old Siegel and Swan story where it turned out baby Kal-El’s ship collided with an alien craft in space that created an exact energy duplicate of him, who landed on Earth and was raised by gangsters - is fun and surprisingly poignant, but a one-off without much to say about Superman himself. Ultraman’s never lived up to his potential, a swaggering, idiotic bully who never felt like a proper equal opposite to Superman, even under Grant Morrison.

Injustice Superman I’m…actually somewhat partial towards? It doesn’t hurt that when I checked it out of the library, the Injustice comic turned out to be much better than it had any right to be courtesy of Tom Taylor (who had an excellent 3-issue Batman/Superman arc with Robson Rocha starring Actual Superman I’d highly recommend). I wrote before about how Superman’s biggest strength is that he cares, and it’s because of that that this is actually as close to semi-plausible as I’ve ever seen a “Superman turns evil” story get. It’s not a matter of him just realizing we all suck, it’s that he cares about us so much being overtaxed by the most horrific, gigantic and personal tragedy imaginable, and in his trauma and desperation that need to save as many people as possible overrides all of his other values and virtues. He’s not just evil, he’s shattered, and everyone follows him because they can’t admit to themselves Superman is gone, and those few against him aren’t in any position to force him to calm down and get his perspective back when he has the power of a god and a willingness to use that power on anyone who picks at the scar on his soul.

Of course, it’s all still predicated on Superman accidentally murdering Lois and their unborn child which results in a nuke going off in Metropolis, and that’s a wall it’s never going to be able to climb. But kudos to Taylor on making lemonade out of the lemons he was given, in a way that kept Superman’s character as much in mind as possible given the dumb-as-hell circumstances.

In a close runner-up position is Super-Doomsday, who’s absolutely wonderful, but as a concept rather than a character. He’s a cipher for a set of really interesting larger ideas about the real-life degradation of Superman as a symbol, though if anyone with the proper vision uses him again, I think there’s a solid chance he could find himself moving up to the top of the list.

And at last, we come to this joker:

He’s smug. He’s irritating. He’s ridiculous. He’s a caricature of a caricature.

He’s perfect. He is everything fun and meaningful and beautiful about Superman taken to the highest degree imaginable and gone sour, curdled into something hideous.

Everything about him comes from an extrapolation of what Superman already is. Superman’s sympathetic tragedy is that he lost his world as an infant? Prime lost his on the best day of his life. Superman wants to save the planet? Prime wants to save an entire destroyed universe. Superman represents a fantasy of freedom to the awkward and powerless? Prime is even freer, a furious, out of control dweeb now able to fulfill every twisted, petty, banal, idiotic whim that passes through his head, because no one can stop him. And Superman may live to serve an ideal, but Prime has nothing left but trying to fix what he thinks has been broken.

And as much as all of that, he’s an attack on the idea of Superman that’s most warped his character and undone him as a truly meaningful symbol in the eyes of the world: as a champion of the past.

I wrote at length on Superman as a figure of nostalgia awhile back, and Prime literalizes that in a way that also comments on DC as a whole. Superman’s allegedly the simple relic of a simple time that doesn’t apply to how things really work? Prime literally attempts to punch the world back to how it’s supposed to be. He’s a fetishization of the past to the point where he looks like a younger, more innocent version of the original superhero, and wants to destroy everything that’s ever happened to the DCU since he was a kid because none of it’s right or ‘real’. That’s why he’s Superboy PRIME, because he’s the correct one, the one that, in spite of decades of creators trying to move things forward, ACTUALLY matters no matter how he behaves, because he’s the same as how it was in the Silver Age. And as long as DC keeps following that same mindset - especially as they keep doing it via arms getting torn off - he’ll still be relevant as the horror in fandom’s mirror, and the character himself will have motivation.

And because he’s by his nature so extreme and self-aware, you can just as easily play him either for the comedy of an out-of-control brat with the power to do anything…

…or the tragedy of a boy who believed in the same dreams as us and gave up everything for them, and now lives only to destroy his heroes for not being what he wanted and needed from them.

He’s everything cruel and bitter and regressive about the superhero wearing the skin of everything that makes it wonderful, and for that reason, he’s the greatest of DC’s Evil Superm-

Oh shit. Totally forgot about this guy. Yeah, nevermind, obviously Composite Superman is the best.