Conner Kent of Earth… DIE!

I’ve been raving about “Blackest Night” a fair bit on this site, so it’s not a surprise that I am a big fan. What’s not to like? Zombie meta humans smacking each other around.

I particularly like the bit where Hal Jordan’s New Guardians faced off against Black Lantern-ed version of heroes who have died and “cheated death” before. Seeing as how characters are moving through the revolving door of comic book death so fast these days, that is A LOT of Black Lantern powerhouses, including Superman, Wonder woman, Impulse, Green Arrow and one of my personal favorites – Superboy.

Conner Kent started out as a bit of a joke after the (*irony alert*) “Death of Superman” event.

What we initially know was that he was created by Project Cadmus to replace Superman. He was artificially aged to mid-teens and implanted with the necessary knowledge of someone his biological age (in regards to general studies, such as math, reading, etc). When Superboy arrived in Metropolis, he went by “Superman” and had no real name. While glibly asserting he was the original Superman, he quickly rebuked any insinuation he was the original Superman. In fact, he told anyone who’d listen that he was a clone of Superman.

This clone thing went on for quite a while in an age where “cloning” was a considerably dirty word, thanks to the whole Spider Man “Clone Saga”.

It was later on in his life that it was revealed that Conner Kent was a part of Project 13. Project Cadmus did a total of twelve failed experiments. They grafted what they could of Superman’s DNA onto human DNA and that process stabilized the extraterrestrial genes-thus Superboy was born, fifty percent Kryptonian and fifty percent human.

It got more interesting when the fifty percent human DNA was found to belong to one Lex Luthor.

This evolved Conner Kent into an interesting figurehead for storylines about  “Nature vs Nurture” dichotomy.

Anyway, I was quite disappointed that Conner didn’t get to lay the smackdown on anyone in the Rainbow Brigade. So here’s my latest render – Black Lantern Superboy!

Return of the Panaromic Covers

Remember the comic buying craze in the 80s/90s where fanboys buy comics in bulk to collect the ultra rare variant covers? Those were the days of gimmicks such as holographic covers, die cut covers, fold out covers, pencil sketches covers, and my favorite the “combine our 1000000000 difference covers to form a hug-eass awesome poster” covers.

Marvel has done it again with Siege… Apparently the variants of Siege combine to form this little treasure… The look on Norman Osbourne’s face is priceless!

And now that they just announced the offshoots for Siege  (namely Siege: Captain America, Siege, Spider Man, Siege: Loki, Siege: Young Avengers and Siege: Secret Warriors), they decided to follow up with the announcement of the 5 variant covers by the super talented Marko Djurdjevic. The covers for the issues will form the panorama below.. Simply awesome…

While we are on the subject of variant covers, I decided this to be one of the best I’ve seen in recent times… For Blackest Night #3

Speaking of the ongoing feud between Siege and Blackest Night, Marvel just issued this little press release to comic book retailers…

In an effort to provide assistance to comic retailers in 2010, Marvel is offering retailers an opportunity to turn unsold comics into an extremely rare Siege #3 Deadpool Variant!

Retailers – for every 50 stripped covers of the following comics sent to Marvel, you will qualify to receive one FREE Siege #3 Deadpool Variant.

Is it any wonder most of the listed titles are Blackest Night Tie ins? Apparently, retailers had to order large quantities of these Blackest Nights Tie Ins in order to get super rare limited editions of Green Lantern power rings.

And said Deadpool Variant?