What Does This Man Have To Do With the New Clark Kent in Action Comics?

09/14/2016 10:00 am EDT

There has been a bit of industrial intrigue built into the plot of Dan Jurgens's Action Comics run since it launched three months ago -- but that kicks into overdrive today, and one particular character may provide a key clue as to just what's going on.

To recap: the first issue of Action Comics saw Superman and Lex Luthor (in his "Super-Lex" armor, as Jonathan Kent likes to call it) converged at Geneticron, a laboratory that does some kind of genetic research and where a hostage crisis was underway. Luthor put a stop to the hostage situation quickly, but it turned out to have been a distraction to allow masked men to steal...something...from a secretive vault on the building's top floor.

As it turned out, that something was Doomsday, the monster who once killed Superman, so the Geneticron angle was largely forgotten as Superman, Luthor, an dothers were forced to deal with the more pressing issue of Doomsday rampaging through Metropolis.

Along the way, a new Clark Kent arrived, making vague accusations that Superman had forced him into hiding at some point in the past and insisting that he is not now, and has never been, Superman. This, of course, came as a surprise to Superman -- although he couldn't definitively deny that his predecessor might have had interactions with Kent.

In this week's Action Comics #963, it's revealed that Clark Kent was investigating Geneticron when Superman approached him and told him his life was in danger. Per Kent's story, Superman agreed to stand in for him, since the two physically resembled each other, and it was not long after this agreement was struck that Lois Lane outed Superman as Clark Kent (in last year's Action Comics #41).

A trip to Geneticron introduced Clark -- and the readers -- to the company's CEO, whom Clark calls "Mr. Bandu," and that set off some alarm bells in our heads.

Savitar Bandu was the name of a minor supporting character in the Superman titles in the '90s. He had a total of ten appearances, as far as we can tell, and while it seemed he was being set up for big things, they never really paid off.

Created by longtime Superman inker Brett Breeding, Bandu was a vigilante called Shadowdragon, who at first appeared to be a Deathstroke-style super-soldier but later turned out to be something more: a master martial artist who wore a tech suit with microweave circuitry that enhanced his strength, speed, and agility while also providing him some cool tech toys to play with, offering him invisibility among other things.

What's interesting -- especially in the context of the new Clark Kent showing up at the same time as this new "Mr. Bandu" -- is that Shadowdragon's biggest role was in a storyline called The Death of Clark Kent, which centered on the idea of Superman's identity being jeopardized when a supervillain got his hands on it.

Specifically, Shadowdragon -- whose father was the king of the fictional country of Bhutran, and whose royal station as prince was removed after he ran afoul of some peace negotiations his father was engaged in -- existed primarily as an information broker. He would steal intellectual property and then give it to companies in Bhutran to help the small, largely-impoverished country remain competitive in the global technology marketplace.

In The Death of Clark Kent, he stole a great deal of data on Superman from a number of sources -- enough to piece together that Superman was Clark Kent -- and provided that information to Conduit, a then-new Superman villain with a mean-on for Clark. It seems, then, very interesting that a man who may be the post-Flashpoint reinvention of Savitar Bandu's father is apparently running a company with deep ties to this new Clark Kent.

Almost like too much of a coincidence, especially coming from writer Dan Jurgens, who was on board the Superman titles 20 years ago for The Death of Clark Kent.

In Shadowdragon Annual #1, a "Year One" story that explained why he was disowned and how he got his costume, Shadowdragon's father is depicted not as evil, per se, but as callow and ultimately complicit in evil because he didn't have his son's insight or strength of will. Here, unless there's a larger power hanging over his head, it seems he's more objectively evil. Of course, he's also not royalty, but instead a corporate oligarch, at least from what we can tell in his few panels in Action Comics #963.

Don't expect this to play out right away; while it seems pretty much a sure thing that Geneticron will have something to do with the second Clark Kent, it's not likely Shadowdragon will come bounding into the storyline this minute. Still, the fact that they are apparently setting the stage for the character's return is interesting.

Despite having appeared a number of times in a short period, and despite the high profile of being tied to the Death of Clark Kent storyline, the character had so few appearances, from such a variety of different creative teams (six in all), that it seems likely his biggest value will be as a character with a cool design, an interesting backstory, and essentially a blank slate beyond that.

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