The kid stays out of the picture

Bear with me here for a few minutes, folks, because I'm gonna talk 'bout somethin' in comics that not fun. Oh no no no no, not fun at all.

...So, let me get this straight. And as I 1) am no great legal mind and 2) refuse to read Infinite Crisis, feel free to correct me...

It looks like DC Comics has lost or is losing the rights to the Superboy character, and that they go to the family of Jerome Siegel. (Mark Evanier explains it all for you, as always, much better than I can). I would definitely miss seeing Superboy comics being published, but I'm all for creators shafted by early—heck, early straight through to now—contracts being legally recognized as copyright owners of their creations. (And one could hope that in the best of both worlds, the Siegel family could license Superboy to DC so that we'd not only still get Superboy stories, but the heirs of Siegel benefit from it. Everybody wins.)

So...what happens in the recent top-selling miniseries Infinite Crisis?

[SPOILER WARNING, highlight to make visible]: Superboy of the DCU, Conner Kent, dies at the end of the most recent issue. Sad, yes, but nothing too horrible about that. He was given a hero's death, going down fighting. But worse than that [SPOILER WARNING]: Superboy-Prime (please don't ask me to explain that) becomes the villain of the piece. He rips off the arms of heroes and blasts off the heads of others. A character wearing a Superman shield...kills and maims people wantonly and violently, in lovingly-detailed art.

Oh, to heck with the spoiler warning. Take a big disbelieving gander at this:


Golly. As Phoebe Buffay once said while watching the end of Old Yeller: "What kind of sick doggy snuff film is this?" Is this what you consider taking care of a creation before handing it back to its creator, DC?

I might be a cynical little stuffed bull...but that's like giving land back to the Native Americans, but only after salting the earth so no crops will grow.

That's like returning library books you kept longer than you were allowed...but only after you've peed all over them.

That's like stealing candy from a store and then returning it...but only after you've vomited it back up.

Geez, Johnny DC. It might be coincidence and it might be happenstance, but how is it you think it's proper that the Siegel family gets back a icon that you've so recently turned into a mass murderer? Sure, we'll forget these last stories. We'll remember the 1950s and 60s Superboy and the goofy, outrageous fun they were.

But whatever happens from this point in DC Universe History, somewhere, somewhen in the Elseworlds, in another spot in Hypertime, there will forever be one Superboy who brutally abused Krypto, killed and maimed heroes and friends.

And that's DC's betrayal of Siegel I'll remember.