I haven’t read comics in a long time, but I 've kept up on certain events through cultural osmosis. So, my first question is about Superboy Prime, or more specificaly Earth Prime. What is it? I know Earth 1 is the silver Age heroes, Earth 2 is the Golden age heroes, and Earth 3 is the earth where Luthor was the only hero. So, what was Earth Prime all about?
My other question is about Superman.
How did he lose his powers?
Thanks!
I think he lost his powers going through the red sun that Krypton was around, with a nice dose of kyptonite poisoning from the remnents of Krypton they flew through (plus being smacked in the head with nice chunk by Superman Prime.
We’re on Earth-Prime. It’s the real world.
Or at least, it was. See, it mostly appeared in stories where the Flash would travel to another dimension and hang out with his own editor and such. Some spoilsports noted that that never actually happened and thus Earth-Prime couldn’t be the real world. Instead of telling them to STFU and firing them for a terminal lack of imagination, they were allowed to spoil the concept by giving it some native superheroes, namely Ultra (or was it Ultraa? I can never remember) and later, Superboy-Prime.
Superboy-Prime, btw, was a kid found by a couple named Kent. As Superman was a work of fiction in their (our) world, they named him Clark as a joke. He later learned that he really did have Superman’s powers. Crisis happened before much was done with the character, but Kurt Busiek ran with the concept in Secret Identity, and did an amazing job with it.
To expand on the “Earth-Prime = the real, world of us real people” idea, note in Infinite Crisis # 6, that when Superboy-Prime demands that Alex Luthor find Earth-Prime for him, Alex looks, from the page, straight at the reader (through the fourth wall, you might say) and reaches forward (again, direction of the fourth wall) because we readers are the ones who live on Earth-Prime.
Of course, Alex Luthor’s tower is then destroyed, ending the implied threat to us real-worlders.
In the latest issue of Superman, it’s strongly implied (actually, pretty much stated flat out) that while that was (probably) the original cause of his power-loss he was deliberately blocking his powers’ return, because he wanted to live a normal life. For a time, at least.
Yeah but when all the Earths merged into “New Earth” last month, I still had to go to work. There wuddn’t no supervillain breakout near me.
Well, you don’t live in Metropolis, do you?
That spoilsport specifically was Gerry Conway.
Earth Prime first appeared in Flash 178 (or 9? right around there anyway). Flash was running/vibrating really fast and ended up on Earth Prime. The problem is that he couldn’t get off it. It was hard to make superpowers work to their fullest extent there. So, once Barry learned that his adventures were being published by DC, he knocked on Julius Schwartz’s door and asked for help. Schwartz helped him construct a Cosmic Treadmill which allowed him to escape Earth-Prime.
The second time (IIRC) it showed up was right before Conway took over Justice League (and had the single worst run in the book’s history, IMO*) there was a very fun two parter where Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin were co-writing JLA and one of them showed the other (I think Bates showed Maggin) that the Cosmic Treadmill story was real by sneaking into Schwartz’s office where the treadmill was supposed to be stored after Barry left.
Of course they started screwing around with it and of course they turned it on and there was some residual super-speed energy (shades of the speed force!) left in it and they disappeared. One (the plotter) ending up gaining the ability to make stuff happen and the other one, the dialogue writer got the ability to make characters say what he wanted. The “plotter” got kidnapped by baddies and it was up to the JLA, the JSA and the dialogue writer to save the day from the Injustice Society (or whoever) and the Plotter who would do things like “And…a kryptonite meteor just happens to fall right near Superman.” and then stand back as it happened. Loads of fun. And part of the fun was that the Earth-Prime appearances had been kept really low-key: a couple of people saw a guy in a Flash costume, stuff like that. But overall, that was it. There may have been one other pre-Conway Earth-Prime appearance but the writers apparently realized that the concept had to be handled carefully and rarely.
Conway appeared to hate the idea of Earth-Prime–it seemed like it was like a scab that he couldn’t stop picking at. He was all upset that “Well, Flash never REALLY visited Julie Schwartz, so we’re not Earth-Prime, we’re Earth-Real.” Once he got firm control of the JLA (after the Steve Englehart run–which may be the best JLA run in history) his second or third story was to give Earth-Prime a super-hero (Ultra(a?)) and had 5 or 6 JLA memebers get into a big three-way fight with him and his arch-villian (a giant evil space-pyramid, IIRC) to “prove” that we are on “Earth-Real”, not Earth-Prime ('cause there was nothing in the newspapers about a big super-hero fight, right?). He then nuked Earth-Prime IIRC (it was in an awful, IMO, JLA/JSA team-up in the high 190s, low 200s.) Everyone seems to have ignored it (or I’m misremembering).
Frankly, Earth-Prime was a fun conceit and I never did really understand Conway’s hatred of the concept. Apparently at one point, a bunch of DC-Staffers built a mock-up of the Cosmic Treadmill and put it in Schwartz’s office one night with a note saying something like “Sorry Julie! Needed to use it to get back home and you weren’t around. Best wishes, Barry.” and thereafter Schwartz kept it in his office for when fans showed up.
*Strangely the same could be said about his Legion run, his FF run and his Avengers run. Conway could write really good solo characters (Daredevil (he wrote, IMO the *definitive pre-Miller Daredevil) Spider-Man, Firestorm and Batman to name a few) but he just couldn’t cope with team books.
And actually, I have a question: has anyone found a web-site with all the pre-Infinite Crisis lead-up stories as well as the IC crossovers in “reading order”?
Fenris:
That was one of my favorite JLA/JSA crossovers. It starred the All-Star Squadron as well, and was in JLA 207-209 and All-Star Squadron 14-15.
It wasn’t “ignored”, it was a time-travel story (Per Degaton was the villain) in which the solution was to go back and stop the villain before he could make the time-change that kicked off the whole plot.
Specifically: Per Degaton from 1947 used Professor Zee’s time machine to go forward to 1962 (I forget how he knew of the Cuban missile Crisis, maybe there was some time-viewer attached) and steal nukes from Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis, which he was going to use to blackmail the world of 1942 into declaring him its ruler. The destruction of human life on Earth-Prime was an unintentional result, Kennedy’s refusal to believe the Russians telling him that flying men stole the missiles, triggering nuclear war. The heroes foiled Degaton by traveling in time to 1962 and stopping Degaton from stealing the missiles. this restored the normal course of history on Earth-Prime (we never heard about it because the Cuban soldiers who witnesses the super-hero battle never told, or at least no one ever believed them), and re-set the prior few days’ personal history for the JLA, JSA, All-Star Squadron (who retained no memory of the events) and Degaton himself (who remembered it in a dream, which is exactly what happened in his first appearance in All-Star Comics # 35).
That was one of my favorite storylines, and I was trying to remember it. Big summer crossover.
I remember a few more Earth-Prime storylines, but I think they’ve already been covered.
Well, that’s simple enough to explain. We’re on Earth-Prime, and the business with the giant space pyramid was on Earth-Double-Prime, a reality very much like our own until it diverged with the arival of Ultra. Of course, that divergence was ultimately triggered by the Flash’s first arrival here: It wasn’t so much that there was residual super-energy left on Earth-Prime, as that the super-energy was in a quantum superposition state. It was stable for a while, but eventually it collapsed (both ways, as per the many-worlds model) into a world (ours) where it didn’t exist at all, and a world (double-prime) where it existed at full strength, and coalesced into Ultra.
Besides, how did Conway know who did and didn’t visit Schwartz?
I was going to compile a list, but… there were too many continuity glitches.
Conway killed Gwen Stacy. Leading to thirty years of that awful redheaded idiot. Nothing more ever needs to be said about Gerry Conway, Boy Genius. He couldn’t cope, period.
MJ has a personality, which you could never say about Gwen.
I’m not all that fond of Conway’s run on Wonder Woman. Then again, the one objection I have is the pseudo-retro dynamic from the TV show being brought into the present day, & that might have been editorially instigated. Given that constraint, he did a serviceable job.
OTOH, I love the miniseries Cinder & Ashe. I think it’s just hard for a writer to be consistently good.
Speaking of Earth-Prime, I liked the Julie Schwartz birthday story where Earth-1 Julie is … oh, well, you can track it down.
OK, how do you explain this one? In Firestorm #63, Firestorm is fighting Captain Atom. Stormie is weak, 'cuz the professor (Firestorm at the time was formed by joining 2 seperate people, Ronnie Raymond and professor Martin Stein) is dying from a brain tumor, and retreats from the Captain by flying into the DC comics offices (Firestorm could alter his molecular density and fly through walls). I’m sure that the artist had lots of fun drawing his friends from work into the comic, but in one panel we see Firestorm and Captain Atom fly full speed down a hall, scaring the hell out of two people who are working on the Firestorm comic (Presumably the writer and artist at the time, I forget who they were). These people drop the stack of pages for the comic they are holding, and as the pages fall, if you look closely enoght you can see that they are the very pages we’re currently reading (about FS and CA flying thru DC Comics)! What kind of an infinite loop is that? And what Earth?
Ahh. Wiki reveals that the writer was John Ostrander and the artist Joe Brozowski.
DC Comics and its staff has analogues in Earth-1/Post-Crisis Earth and presumably New Earth. Just like there’s a Superman on both Earth-1 and Earth-2, there’s a Julius Schwartz on both Earth-Prime and Earth-1.
What they actually publish is unclear. Sometimes they publish fictional heroes, sometimes they publish fictionalized accounts of real heroes, and sometimes, bizarrely, they seem to publish the exact same comics we read.
Bah, nothing a few super-punches to the old reality wall wouldn’t fix!