THE PROBLEM WITH SUPERBOY

super boy is one of my favorite superheroes no not that one close but not that one how do you even know about no this one Connor Ken the first clone of Superman that doesn't speak backwards me I'm real Superman the Half Breed who shaves his head when he finds out he's Luther's clone Comics are very weird now you'll tell me why Superman peanut butter tastes so great what started out as a typical rebellious '90s character with an intro page like don't call me super boy ended up becoming one of the mostoles and generally enjoyable characters

and DC's roster from his time spend in Hawaii meeting the Legion of Superheroes and making friends with a new God who became a stripper to his years on Young Justice a team he formed with his best friends where he met the love of his life and for a Time found belonging and comfort and who he was then he died protecting the world from another Super Boy which is funny on multiple levels to start this isn't the first time he's fought another Super Boy alternate future or clone of a clone or otherwise second this is super

boy Prime who in of himself is a reference to the original Super Boy Clark Kent you see way back in the Golden Age DC Comics produced a work of a character pitched by Superman co-creator Jerry seagull without the Creator's consent sure they got Joe Schuster to do the art for the debut but they didn't tell Jerry they were publishing it because he was at War for his people this would lead to a slew of litigation against DC Comics that would inevitably bankrupt both creators and the respective families until DC decided to settle things financially first

with a lump sum of around 90k before eventually working their way to a pension around 70 to 80k per year and this came too late by this point Shuster had gone pretty much blind and neither were in shape enough to work in the Arts anymore and then they died DC and the respective families of Schuster and seagull still fighting over the copyright of Superman to this day Super Boy a name born from copyright infringement and negligible business tactics super boy is basically what it says on the box The Adventures of Superman when he was a

boy small bill before small bille and guess what top selling title turns out making a person with incredible power young and inexperienced actually makes them more relatable than a grown ass man and throughout his various appearances from the' 40s to the 70s a Giant Cannon surrounding the origins of specific characters and relationships formed around super boy he had a best friend in the form of Pete Ross who knew his secret identity and later became president of the United States he'd meet his fellow Justice League members before they officially put on any suits fight Bizarro Mr

Mixel pck for the first time become friends with teens from the future who had a super special Club inspired by his exploits in the present all of this made the legend of Superman the archetypal superhero and not just Western pop culture but around the world all the more lofty and confusing plus with all the additional Superman family members like Supergirl C RTO streaky Comet the super horse things got way too big for Superman and while a world with a huge mythology and endless opportunities for story sounds nice on paper it's a nightmare to write when

you realize the amount of rules and preconceived ideas about these characters are set in stone so when Marv Wolfman pitched crisis on infinite Earth back in 1981 one of the things that was inevitably decided upon was throwing Clark back to zero making him younger but not too young inexperienced but still capable as a hero and most importantly he's the last of Krypton and has never been a super boy that leads to a whole slew of problems like DC still wanting a Supergirl even though they said they couldn't be Clark's cousin so they just made her

a flesh robot that Lex Luther bangs and then B Angel for some reason I digress in a tie in for crisis on infinite Earths were introduced to Super Boy prime a boy with the exact same origin as Clark but in a world where the character of Superman and its Publishers at DC Comics are actually real so Clark's parents who find him on a hiking trip decid to to cruy name their Newfound infant's son Clark because they hate him of course I know it's because of family reasons but it's just an excuse to name him that

this Clark gets mercilessly bullied growing up but has a relatively normal life that's until one Halloween at the beach when Haley's Comet rushes overhead and awakens his latent superpowers this is all happening at the exact same time as multiple worlds in the Multiverse being destroyed in quick succession so this Clark's Earth is [ __ ] in the meantime though he gets to team up with the real Superman and something kind of strange happens Superman sees himself actually having a sidekick a boy just like him able to keep up with his Antics and has the potential

to be even greater given one small but important detail he's not weak to Kryptonite or anything Superman is typically weak to Super Boy Prime at the time of Crisis had the potential to be the strongest character in the entire DC Pantheon and then his world got nuked and then the Multiverse got nuked and then everything got wrapped up into into one world but super voy Prime the Golden Age Superman and golden age lowest Lane remain without a world of their own so a genetically modified super Jesus in the form of Alexander Luthor of Earth three

keeps the three in a dimension outside of known reality a place where they can observe the known universe every dying star and newly born life as they live out the rest of their days at peace except this is the 80s there was no peace in the80s and that includes Superman who dies a few years later kind of he gets better this leads to conell to Cadmus to Connor search for Independence and inevitable acceptance of the title Super Boy despite it being flung on to him without his consent so when Superman returned alab Brandon ralth Super

Boy didn't stick by his side Like Glue Connor from the GetGo was his own person and DC editorial honored that despite attempts at integrating him into the growing post- crisis Superman family for a time this was fine sure Connor had his ex-girlfriend fridged and developed trust issues with Tim after Batman nearly killed the Justice League but that's just regular superhero comic stuff friendships repair people find new loves and the world will always be in danger ready to be saved by a hero such as him in fact in an alternate timeline Connor becomes Superman I mean

it's for an evil version of the Teen Titans but he did become Superman in the midst of all this chaos and never- ending feuding Super Boy Prime has been making judgment calls on the DC Universe At Large in short he [ __ ] hates it it's too dark too edgy heroes are no longer aspirational instead moral corruptible and just as cable as the villains they fight so alongside space Jesus Luthor this former fan of DC decides to [ __ ] with the cannon he starts Wars ruins Batman's plans destroys the Watchtower and inevitably kills multiple

DC characters in the hopes of saving this world a world that he believes shouldn't have been saved and so we reached the battle between Connor and Cal a super boy who had the potential to stand alongside the real Superman and a super boy clone from that Superman's material fight to the death the past fighting the future the embodiment of DC's fandom fighting any sort of status quo change the boy who would be king falling to the rightful air Connor dies a hero Cal is imprisoned by the Guardians of the universe and everyone thinks at least

for now things will be okay perhaps even better than before so what's so funny about this moment other than panra what in retrospect makes this fight between super boys so important other than the decades long anit textual journey of super boy Prime ending with him literally telling readers touch grass it's simple the title of Super Boy and the idea of a Superman sidekick is Superfluous the mantle of super boy means whatever the hell DC editorial wants it to mean Beyond just renewing the copyright agreement with the Schuster and seagull Estates it's an never-changing role that

doesn't have a definitive meaning let's look at the robins sure there are basically six of them at this point if you count Stephanie and the one time Duke was you know before he was the signal worst name in the bat family since Bluebird even if they're all inherently different characters the one through line is that they trained under Bruce worked alongside him evened him out and explored Bruce in a new light but developed themselves into unique memorable identities Dick Grayson has gone from the first sidekick to the leader of DC's Premier superhero team Jason Todd

went from a street kid who tried stealing from the Batman to a mass vigilante who guns down those who would hurt his neighborhood Tim Drake went from a likable independent teenage boy with dreams of being a superhero into queer tokenism daman's already on the cusp of developing his own unique code name for Robin but he's been Robin for well over a decade at this point they all worked in the role given to them by Bruce all inevitably growing out of that role or found their unique place in it and eventually the title is passed on

to whatever orphan stumbles their way into a dark alley sure you can have a Batman story without Robin but Robin has become synonymous with the character super boy not so much sure there are characters who Clark has granted the title specifically his own son but even they grow out of the super boy role he was born during an incursion of multiverses got to be raised on an alternate Earth than his own developed superpowers around the age of 12 and got to fight alongside his father as he attended public school and guess what people loved JN

I love John Peter tomasi's Superman rebirth was one of my favorite comics of the 2010s it explored Clark is not just a father trying to raise their kid right but also John discovering who he is as a person they lived in a farm town where a colony of aliens kept a low profile he got to be best friends with Damen Wayne go on all sorts of Wacky Adventures with his mother and father and he still managed to be a Charming fun-loving kid one that we wanted to see grow into the role of super boy and

eventually Superman and then they sent him to live with his mentally Disturbed Granddad don't ask had him be tortured in a volcano by an evil Superman who should have been dead by this point for several years and then sent him to live in the future for short-lived Maxi series because Brian Michael Bendis couldn't be bothered to write children John comes back he's just 18 at this point because [ __ ] it and now now you expect me to call this kid Superman you know when there's already a Superman flying around okay guess where Connor is

in the midst of all this alive again and still super boy because for some reason he can't seem to escape the title and DC refuses to give him any other code name Max vagio came up with a pitch to differentiate Connor from the rest of the Superman family by making them trans and calling them Skyrocket I think we have the LGBT rep covered but the name Works fairly well he could still keep the big S still wear his leather jacket and piercings but it would let him just be separate from Clark to some degree hell

there was a recent mini of Connor just [ __ ] off into space because he's that aimless and finds some sort of Solace protecting the greater Universe from harm instead he's permanently a third banana on the planet Earth to the big blue cheese fourth if you want to count Keenan Kong the Superman of China which I highly recommend you read the book of the most ironic thing about this is that Connor is still older than Jon despite Jon being aged up so if Jonathan Kent can be Superman alongside the other two Supermen why can't Connor

Jon is literally the liberal activist Superman he can do much more than just go to rallies it's even worse when you consider the fact that Clark has adopted two more kids ones that aren't Kryptonian but might as well be Connor isn't a sidekick anymore he's never really been one in the traditional sense he's just been called super boy because there's nothing else to call him the title of Super Boy meant something at some point but the meaning of the title changes constantly and even characters that you would consider a super boy XB like post crisis

Chris Kent aren't even called Super Boy despite fitting the bill you know the other son of Superman who was artificially aged up because Jeff John seemingly can't write children instead they're called Nightwing because of course they are I love comic I know what that is the problem with super boy is that the name Super Boy doesn't mean much Beyond a financial obligation and a pre-established fan base for a character that constantly gets [ __ ] on by their owners every Super Boy is different and not in the way you typically expect from a sidekick I

know it's stupid to say Take a Hint from Batman but in this particular instance it feels more concrete give Connor a new name give John a new name give Kanan a new name just make super boy as a title a more literal sidekick than before or just don't use it at all though that seems a tad extreme the point I want to make is Connor Kent deserves some respect and even if he can't be Superman he deserves to be more than just a super boy uh read Superman secret identity and uh read the Carl kessle

run of super boy from the 9s that's all and thank you for watching