The “Superman Reborn” story saw the Man of Steel emerge with a new reality, a reality merging aspects of the New 52 Superman and the pre-Flashpoint Superman into one. Is this Superman a new version or a blend of both?
“In a way, the answer would be, ‘All of the above,'” Jurgens told Newsarama.com. “I think of him as a new person. There are adventures in his past we haven’t seen. Yet we selected some of the best possible aspects of his past to include, selecting from both the ‘New 52’ Superman and pre-Flashpoint Superman, to make everything work. And, yes, to make that work right, we discarded some elements as well.”
“Superman’s past was messed with for a period of time,” Jurgens explains. “During that time, he was separated in two, living two distinctly different lives as two distinctly different characters. During ‘Reborn,’ those timelines were merged and rebuilt as one. There was essentially one Superman and one Lois. As for how and why his past was altered, that’s a story that will unfold down the road.”
“This is definitive,” states Jurgens. “By the time people have read Action Comics #977 and #978, they’ll have a much better understanding of Superman and Lois’ history and how Jon fit into it. It’s “classic” at its core but still accommodates the need for our new reality.”
I’m pretty sure I’m the odd one out but I didn’t like this. Every time they do these retcons it just leaves me with more questions. Originally Lois gave birth to Jon in the Convergence world. Apparently that didn’t happen any more so what about the other Convergence events? Where does that fit in? Also Lois is far younger than she has any right to be with a son Jon’s age. Given that she had to be early to mid twenties when she first met Superman and that they didn’t get married for a few years at least. I preferred… Read more »
I agree. I think they abandoned the “Stranger in a Strange Land” angle much too soon. There was still a ton of material to mine for good stories. They should have rebooted Superman’s world after the Watchmen-Crisis, like they probably will the rest of the DCU.
Except DC’s line-wide reboots are never truly line wide because whatever is still selling at the time usually gets to basically continue unabated. The whole universe resets to square one but Dick Grayson is still Nightwing and there have been 2-5 Robins after him. When a DC line-wide reboot actually makes Dick 10 years old again I might be convinced they actually thought it all the way through.
If you don’t like this, hold on to your hat, because it’snot going to stop here. We are in the middle of a two-year long storyline, that’s not yet a year old. Superman received his treatment because he needed it, and badly, but these won’t be the last changes. Recall Oz’s words? That still has yet to come to pass.
Agreed! And as a big fan of the New 52 Superman, I think that the very thin lip-service to keeping elements of him in the timeline pretty much totally fails to satisfy me. At least before we had a sense of the Late Superman as a Great Dead Hero, a sort of ideal to strive for. Now he’s completely gone. It’s very frustrating to me.
To clarify I should add that this retcon doesn’t just erase/overwrite the last 6 years of mostly unpopular Superman it overwrites the last 6 or so months of stories that fans were mostly enjoying including myself. I just don’t like retcons because they are always half-assed. For example with New 52 Superman we were told that the Death of Superman still happened but were vague on the details. We have to keep waiting for the writers to fill in the blanks or do another retcon to “fix” things. How many retcons did Power Girl have Post-Crisis before they finally got… Read more »
Well, that made everything clearer, didn’t it? 😉
My take-away of it is that you can count Pre-Flashpoint, New 52, Convergence etc. all as continuity right up to the point where the Supermen merge and then still count everything going forward even though the past is now different. It would just be that you the reader know all that stuff happened even though the characters themselves don’t. OR you can forget all of that and go strictly by the new timeline in which those stories still happened but with slight differences. There are landmarks from various continuities that still count in Superman’s personal backstory even though for obvious… Read more »
Soooo, essentially (and as we expected), it’s the exact same thing that pre-Flashpoint Superman was and, to a lesser extend, the same thing that new52 Superman was. I’m not sure how that clears anything up, but I’m not exactly surprised either, so okay, I’ll roll with it.
Return to pre-52 Superman and leave that way.
That’s pretty much what they did. With a dash of New52 thrown in.
Eh, that’s more or less what happened. They kept just enough of the New 52 Superman (literally one explicitly stated storyline, altered in the same way that Death and Return was altered for N52 and the costume, totally divorced from its original context) that they can claim they kept elements of him. Not enough to matter.
This feels like the soft reboot after Birthright — we didn’t know what was still part of continuity and what was not — and even THAT was inconsistent. It DOES get frustrating. The way they brought back the “Bryne” Superman was brilliant — but then they had to go and combine the events with new 52. Sooooooooo confused. Clark and Lois work at the Daily planet but everyone is a counterpart to “their” people. The Perry they work for is not the Perry who attended their wedding, and so forth. SO confused.
I would consider his supporting cast merged as well. My sense is its both a reboot and a reset but in-story the characters know or are beginning to understand that something messed with time/space making them lose years to New 52 because an outside force created that timeline. A time line that continues the breakdown as characters figure it out which is causing time to right itself. Superman is significant because he and Lois essentially willed their proper timeline into being which apparently according to Mr. Oz is not something they should have been able to do. Sometimes I wonder… Read more »
Sometimes I wonder if DC could save themselves and us headaches by using Multiverse concept to just say “hey we are pointing the camera at a different Earth now but all your favorite eras are still going on in their respective worlds.” This is a much clearer way of saying what I was trying to express in my comment above. Shift the camera don’t rewrite the whole timeline. Like you said shifting the camera always leaves the option open of shifting the camera back. Apparently part of the motivation behind the Crisis on Infinite Earths was to get rid of… Read more »
That’s a pretty great idea! After all, it’s not like the fans are invested enough in a continuous story like back in the post-Crisis days. We get continuity shake-ups at least every five years now since 2001 or so! Just changing the universe would probably be a relaxing change of pace!
All I know is that 3 of my favorite characters are now dead and what seems like never existed.
Kon-El/Conner and Ma and Pa Kent.
However, I’m still happy with the books, there will always be story lines and plots that we don’t agree with 100%, but the perfect story/version we have in our head, rarely matches up with what we are given. I just hope they stay on this path, and that there will be huge payoffs with the current 2 year story line that is happening.
One has to wonder if they will culminate with Action Comics #1000?
What do you mean, “are now dead”? All three of them haven’t been around for six years. I think we have a good chance of Connor coming back though, when the time is right. In fact, I’d bet on it.
Conner was around in the N52, and the Kent’s are now dead, and have been since Clark’s Senior Prom…
Previous to that, N52 they lived until he was an adult at least I think… I could be wrong.
Conner may come back, Mr Oz may have him trapped, but he seems to have been wiped from existence at this stage.
New52 had a Kon-El, but he was never Connor Kent. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Also, New52 only showed the Kents in flashback.
Prior to New52, the Kents were around for almost the entire post-Crisis era, but Jonathan was killed off a few years before Flashpoint.
In effect, we haven’t had any of these characters for many years. As I said, I’m sure we’ll see Connor again at some point. As for the Kents, we may have to rely on going back to read old issues or waiting for out-of-continuity stories.
The “double orphan” thing was already ..well, overkill IMO.
But having both of them die on the night of his senior prom just puts it over the top. What’ll it be next time? They’ll have died on Christmas morning?
Superboy N52 was Conner, just not named Conner… And yes, I hope he will show up again.
Yeah, the Kent’s have been gone for a while, but there was the hope that at least Ma Kent would be alive after Rebirth/Reborn.
But this is the Secret Origin Superman, so all the stories that Geoff Johns wrote are cannon, so I always figured Jonathon would be dead. Shame that they are both gone.
I have to agree that I think things were going good when Lois & Superman, were the Lois & Superman from before Flashpoint and ended up in the new 52 DCU and had been in the shadows till the new 52 Superman & Lois died. I liked that Lois could go work at the Planet again, and even the Lois that had died gave her the OK to let people there think she was same Lois that had been alive in New 52 all along. And even with Mr. Mxyzptlk pretending to be Clark Kent, I think that fixed the… Read more »
Regarding the JSA, apparently they are missing, it was mentioned in the Rebirth Special. So that is what I’m hoping about Conner too. Maybe he is just missing like the JSA. We know that Tim Drake Robin is being held somewhere by Mr Oz.
I agree about the Kent’s though!
If they’re righting history or Superman’s life, fine, but if they are, bring back Ma or Pa Kent otherwise, why fix Superman’s history without them? That’s a good point and actually it’s something you can see all over with this Rebirth/Reborn deal. Lois going back to the Planet before Reborn falls under this category as well: it seems they were slowly integrating pre-Flashpoint Superman into Rebirth, until they just hit the “remake” button– again. And, as you said, it’s fine, but then what’s the point of changing absolutely nothing of value? I admit, I’m sort of tired of the Kents… Read more »
I don’t think Kon-El/Conner or Superboy will be back, read the latest Action Comics today, and showed a flashback of the Death of Superman, and the four pretenders after he dies, Steel, The Eradicator, Cyborg Superman, but no Superboy. Not sure why, but maybe with history rewritten, Superboy is no longer part of this new history, otherwise why was he not shown?
I won’t wreck the story for anyone who did read Action Comics 978 yet, but I want to know about Convergence events too, did it happen or not? I think this made things worse. Instead of the New 52 Superman & Lois dying, and letting the old Superman & Lois end up taking over for them, like they were doing, DC then messed up a good thing that was going good, by trying combine the 2 different histories and the 2 Supermen into 1. Superman,& Wonder Woman do know something is wrong, and something dose not feel quite right &… Read more »