Superman: DC Reveals the Man of Steel’s Most Disturbing Possible Death

The Man of Steel dies in Batman/Superman #16 in a very terrifying way during his most vulnerable state…and he never even sees it coming.

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Superman, DC’s most popular character and arguably the most famous superhero in the world, has died in Batman/Superman #16. Penned by writer Gene Luen Yang with art by Ivan Reis, the issue is actually two stories told simultaneously, each from Batman’s and Superman’s perspective. It is Batman who finds Superman’s body…and he is tragically killed in his most vulnerable state.

When Superman was first created in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, he was able to bend steel with his bare hands, leap tall buildings in a single bound, and punch through solid concrete. Now, 83 years later, the character can lift islands out of the water, fly faster than the speed of sound, and in one memorable instance, quite literally punch a hole through reality itself. Readers are so familiar with Superman’s drastic increase in strength that is it hard to remember that there was a time when Superman had no powers at all…and it is in this moment where he meets his end.

In Batman’s storyline, Batman and Robin break into Arkham Asylum in search of an escaped criminal. Sneaking into the Warden’s office, they find a treasure trove of strange artifacts…and Robin’s attention is drawn to a small silver rocket pod with the Superman shield emblazoned on the side. Robin peers through the rocket’s cracked viewing port and sees a small skeleton of a child nestled inside the pod. Later in the Batcave, the duo analyze the pod via the Batcomputer. According to Robin, “Judging by the damage, the rocket ship’s hull was punctured by a crystalline meteoroid at some point during its journey, and the lone infant passenger died.” Robin’s conclusion points to the worst of all possible scenarios for baby Kal-El: his small ship was hit by a fragment of Kryptonite as it escaped the planet. By the time the rocket landed on Earth, Superman was already dead.

These small images in an otherwise self-contained Elseworlds story leave a large impact, and perhaps show just how easily Kal-El could have perished along his journey to Earth. Imagining a child being exposed to heavy radiation alone in the depths of space is disturbing enough, but tragedy begets tragedy; this world continued on without a Superman. Writing the rocket’s change in trajectory as the point of divergence in an Elseworlds story is a popular tactic among writers, and has led to more than a few memorable stories over the decades of Superman media. In Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar, Kal-El lands in the Soviet Union, and is raised to become a model USSR citizen who fights for “Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact!” His signature S-shield on his chest is appropriately changed to a red hammer and sickle. All for the want of a nail, the entire world changes: the United States has all but collapsed and Soviet citizens live in prosperity at the cost of many civil liberties.

As another similar example, in the timeline accidentally created by Barry Allen in the Flashpoint series, Superman’s rocket crashes in Metropolis, and the government takes possession of the infant instead of Jonathan and Martha Kent. Raised in a sterile laboratory environment, Kal-El is subjected to experimentation in the hopes that the alien boy could be used as a weapon. Thin, pale, sullen and rarely speaking, the Flashpoint version of Kal-El is as much of a departure from the original as was the Superman raised by the USSR.

With the considerable amount of alternate-universe stories told about Superman in recent years that end in tragedy, it is a minor miracle that Superman landed where and when he did in the prime DC universe at all. Superman’s rocket is a deliberately transparent allegory of Moses in a basket, floating down the Nile river to escape certain death (he was created by two Jewish writers, after all). Batman/Superman #16 shows how easily an errant rock could quite literally change the world for the worse…and how the kindness of the Kents, upon finding Kal-El in his proverbial basket, can change it for the better. As the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz famously stated, “This is the best of all possible worlds.”

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/batman-superman-16-dc-comics-rocket-baby-dead/