DC: New Future Superman Details Revealed

As the Dark Nights: Death Metal storyline comes to a close next week, DC has introduced a slew of new characters to their larger multiverse for the final battle in today’s one shot that fittingly was named Dark Nights: Death Metal the Last 52: War of the Multiverses #1. With the comic now available for purchase, writer Magdalene Visaggio took to Twitter to offer some more context for some of the characters that appear but whose back story wasn’t exactly present. Visaggio penned the story “First & Last Men” (featuring art by Paul Pelletier)
which positions many of the Superman and Super-adjacent characters fighting against some brand new evil-leaning Supermen characters who hail from the far future of the DCU.

“So! There’s some background on these guys that was supposed to make it into one of the other Death Metal books, and I’m not sure that it did,” Visaggio tweeted in a thread. “So let me fill you in on Saint (blue) Shepherd (trenchcoat) Savior (armor), and the Last Sun. Saint, Shepherd, and Savior are the Superiors of the Ancient House of El in from the year 14,000, a future in which Superman has lost control of his legacy and the meaning of his name. Where the S no longer means hope, but brute strength and domination. They’re all descendants of Superman through Conner or Jon (respectively, Shepherd and Savior both offer strong visual ties to either). And Magma man? That’s the Last Sun — Clark Kent himself.”

“The Last Sun is what I called ‘the Captive Superman,’ a Superman who has had his will stripped away by his descendants so they can wield him like a weapon: he’s a living atom bomb, so charged with solar energy his body itself has changed. I wanted to offer a worst case scenario for Superman: one where his greatest power — his goodness — is taken away and where there is *nothing* he can do to save himself or those he loves. Clark is still in there, but locked away while Saint calls the shots. The Ancient House of El doesn’t govern the earth, but they sure as hell rule it. They jealously guard their Kryptonian blood, ensuring pure and powerful lines of descent that have created thousands of years of petty aristocrats with godlike power.”

She concluded, “Of the three Superiors, Saint is princeps, representing the Kryptonian ideal, hence the visual connection to the Eradicator. Cruel, cold, distant. Shepherd, designed like a 90s antihero, is wild and lawless and arbitrary. Savior is all about raw, unfiltered power, hence the armor which enhances his abilities….All of this is canon now.”

Visaggio later tweeted an addendum to her breakdown of the new characters, saying if she never wrote Superman again that this one story was enough to make her proud as writer.

Dark Nights: Death Metal the Last 52: War of the Multiverses #1 is on sale now with Dark Nights: Death Metal #7 arriving in shops on January 5, 2021.