“DC relaunched, then rebirthed. I’m just getting to this now in a reading project let’s go ahead and call
DC: AFTERBIRTH!
Superman. What we have here is apparently an alternate Earth Superman that we got to know during Flashpoint. Sooooo our relaunch involves a character who is a clone of our Superman that came about from a 2011 comics event.
Two things:
1. DC, c’mon, dudes. Relaunch the shit or don’t. I don’t get why they keep doing this, relaunching but not really. It’s super annoying. If I’m looking for a jump-on point with Superman, it’s not this.
2. Let’s face it, it’s totally irrational, but nobody likes when a character is replaced with an exact clone. No matter how exact. We just plain don’t like it. I think because it implies that if we were cloned, nobody would know the difference, and that fucks with a person’s sense of self. I’d like to think if I were cloned right now, my girlfriend wouldn’t figure it out at first, but then she would, and she would hold the clone hostage, bust me out of mega-prison where I have to wear magnet boots, and the clone would grow a beard and go off and live his own life, ultimately shaming me by being a much better version of me.
I mean, people don’t like when you replace Peter Parker with AN EXACT CLONE OF PETER PARKER. This happens here and there in other media too. There was a Futurama where Bender was replaced with an exact Bender clone, and the writers got a nice pile o’ hate mail. Or, we have cat cloning. That shit’s real. $25,000, but still, very real. And I think most of us view the idea with a level of suspicion. Because…it’s just not the same.
Anyway, I don’t know why this happens as often as it does in comics, but replacing a character with an exact clone? Never works. Just let’s not do that. Let’s do…anything else but that.
There’s some mileage in this book of Superman as a dad. That’s probably the best stuff, although it gets a little adorable for my liking when Batman comes on the scene and superdads unite. It’s cute, but cute wasn’t really what I was looking for. When I want cute, I know exactly where to look: Me, in the mirror. That’s all the cute I can handle. “