31 Days of Scans - Least Favorite Male Character

Now, with this one there was no shortage of choices. So many characters came to mind, I had to almost immediately dismiss Batman. Hey, I at least like him in the cartoons. Cyclops didn't win, neither did Norman Osborn. Not even the Sentry could walk away with the prize.

Scipio mentioned a month ago the idea that the big bad of Convergence, Brainiac, is a stand in for the fans. Well, the obsessive collector, trivia buff fans, anyway. While I'm not thrilled at the idea DC once again making their paying audience the villain, I'd rather be represented by Brainiac than the pitiful specimen they saddled us with in Infinite Crisis. That's right, the winner is. . .

Superboy-Prime!

Jeez, what a pain the butt. What a waste of ink. I might have been able to deal with his constant whining about how things aren't how they used to be. It isn't a pleasant mirror to look in, but that doesn't mean I haven't been guilty of the same impulse (though it's hilarious coming from Geoff Johns, who often seems intent on restoring things to some past state he liked best). It was the character's constant obliviousness to his own failings, his constant unwillingness to take responsibility for the things he did that made him insufferable. If you're going to rip someone's arm off, then just fucking do it and cop to it. Don't feed us some sob story about how he made you do it, or it's his fault.

It's not like villains don't normally blame their problems on heroes. Doom blames everything on Reed, Luthor resents Superman, but they opt for threats and cool, grandiose speeches. They swear vengeance, or promise to prove their superiority next time. Superboy-Prime played the victim in the most annoying way possible, and because they wouldn't just definitively put him on ice, he kept popping up. He was in Infinite Crisis, then he beat up Mxy in Countdown and somehow stole his powers (still not clear on how that worked), and ran around destroying different Earths. He popped up in Sinestro Corps War, and probably some other stuff. The writers seemed to be in love with him, but I was just bored. I didn't want to see him defeated, I just wanted him gone.

I think I proposed once he could punch reality and finally create that perfect world he said he wanted. Except obviously a perfect world wouldn't have him in it, so he'd end up wiping himself from existence in the process. If one good thing came out of the New 52, it's that he hasn't reappeared. Though given his presence in some of Johns' pre-reboot Green Lantern stuff, all of which supposedly still happened post-reboot, I wonder if he did exist at some point, or if his stint working for the Anti-Monitor got airbrushed out of history.

Both those panels are from Infinite Crisis, so Johns was writing, Phil Jimenez was the artist. I think the first one is from issue 6, maybe issue 5. The second one is probably issue 3. I think that was the big "Superboy-Prime versus everyone" fight.