As Superboy-Prime steps up to turn the tide during Dark Nights: Death Metal, he asks the ultimate question about the DCU’s new status quo.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Dark Nights: Death Metal – The Secret Origin #1 by Scott Snyder, Geoff Johns, Jerry Ordway, Francis Manapul, Ryan Benjamin, Richard Friend, Paul Pelletier, Norm Rapmund, Hi-Fi, Ian Herring, Rain Beredo, Adriano Lucas and Rob Leigh, on sale now
Of all the figures the heroes and villains of the DC Universe have encountered, Superboy-Prime might have the best perspective on the true nature of the ever-changing multiverse. Growing up on Earth-Prime, this teenage iteration of Clark Kent discovered that the comic book heroes of the DC Universe he grew up reading about were real on separate worlds across the DC Multiverse. And after gaining powers of his own to become his world’s Superboy and shaking the wall of reality with his villainous turn in Infinite Crisis, Prime has resurfaced in a major way during Dark Nights: Death Metal.
And as the former villain makes something of a redemtpion in Dark Nights: Death Metal – The Secret Origin, Superboy-Prime seems to be among the first DC characters to get a glimpse of Future State and Infinite Frontier as he asks the most important question about the coming changes to the multiverse: What matters?
As the final battle between the heroes and villains of the DC Multiverse and the Darkest Knight’s armies from the Dark Multiverse is joined by everyone left in the DCU, Wonder Woman decides to give her allies a much-needed cosmic boost to turn the tide of battle. Dipping her Lasso of Truth and a deposit of Death Metal into the fires of the World Forge at the heart of the Dark Multiverse, the heroes became aware of all of their past histories across the multiverse as part of a single unified story. The development is seismic for the heroes as they gain their second wind but, for Prime, the moment is something the antihero has been aware of all along.
With Perpetua slain by the Darkest Knight, Superboy-Prime decides to take the fight to the surviving omnipotent villain himself. The frustrated antihero knows that the multiverse is in a perpetual state of rebirth; what he and the heroes are facing isn’t truly the end, just the means for another cosmic upheaval of the status quo on a multiversal scale, a lesson he learned from years of reading comic books himself. This prediction proves true after Prime sacrifices himself battling against the Darkest Knight, reborn on a restored Earth-Prime as though no time had passed at all.