#24- That's Really Super, Superman-Prime!

When legal issues and publishing issues collide, it's a perfect storm of poorly executed comics!

So our black-clad Superperson is revealed to be the Annoying Little Twit Formerly Known as Superboy! But of course, we can't call him Superboy, because DC might not own the rights to the character.

To make things even better, he's showing up here in a new outfit and VISIBLY OLDER than he appears in the still on-going Sinestro Corps War, which won't finish up until December.

Now I ask you, what the hell is that all about? Why is DC so committed to sabotaging the Sinestro Corps storyline? Dan Didio is over at Newsarama asserting that pulling Kyle and Prime into Countdown before they've finished out their stories in the Lantern book is what's best for all involved. The argument seems to be that coordinating multiple storylines is hard. You don't say!

It also seems that the epilogue to the Sinestro Corps War will be published before its conclusion. How could anyone be confused?

No Rogues, no Jimmy and still no sign of Harley and Holly this issue. Maybe they got eaten by those guard dogs a couple weeks back.

Everyone's favorite copyright infringement finds himself on the apparently quite pleasant Earth-15, a planet where the sidekicks have become the heroes. And Zod has become Superman, which doesn't jive with the rest of things, but I guess it doesn't much matter, since Prime toasts Mr. and Mrs. Zod in the first couple pages.

Possessed by Desaad, Firestorm still can't figure out a way to effectively use his pretty mind-bending powers. You give a guy who's supposed to be some sort of torture genius the ability to turn anything into anything else and all he can think to do is fire poorly-aimed laser beams at Karate Kid, whose superpower is...karate? But the Atomic Knights come to the rescue, defeating Firesaad with a shiny ball of goo! One more panel would have been enough to explain what the ball of goo was all about, but instead, a significantly less fiery Desaad boomtubes back to Apokolips into the middle of a Darkseid-Mary Marvel rumble. Mary might be entirely insane, but she's still devoted to free will! Granted, sometimes free will means magically not-quite-killing-but-for-all-extents-and-purposes-killing a whole lot of people, but some New Gods just go too far. Mary toughs out some Omega Beams, zaps Darkseid with her poorly-defined powers, poses for yet another upskirt shot and escapes into, well, she escapes.

"Elsewhere", Donna and Kyle have a heart-to-heart on an earth that apparently doesn't even rate a name. Looks like if you're a Green Lantern, "stick together" is sometimes a euphemism for "make out". Hope springs eternal, Mr. Rayner.

Back to Earth-15, we get a very brief glimpse of the JLA made up of Garth, Connor and Cyborg. Oh, and Martian Manhunter, but that guy's like the J in JLA. And then they get exploded.

Even the combined power of the Bat-plane and the Invisible Jet are not enough to slow this little legal loophole! In a move that can only be described as "a slight over-reaction", Prime decides that if the people of Earth-15 can't learn to love his psychotic self, he'd simply plow through the earth's core and explode that, too. I'm no geologist, but I'm pretty sure that's not how the earth is set up. Yes, this is the one thing I'm taking issue with: I don't believe that flying through the earth would cause it to blow up, and I challenge any of you to fly through the center of the earth and prove me wrong.

So what book is this anyway? Couldn't we resolve one threat before adding another? I wasn't all that interested in Lil' Supes in Infinite Crisis or Sinestro Corps and I'm not that interested in him here. I'd be much keener on Cyborg Supes or the AntiMonitor showing up here. Hey, maybe 52 AntiMonitors! You know, someone who doesn't come off as a complete blundering idiot. Even blundering your way through the center of a planet is still blundering.