DC has revealed the shocking truth about one Superman character’s powers – thereby retconning a curious piece of the Superman lore that goes back to the 1990s.
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Superboy’s Powers Explained – Tactile Telekinesis
Back in the 1990s “Death of Superman” story arc, four new versions of “Superman” appeared on the scene. Of those four, the one who was the biggest embodiment of the era was no doubt Superboy – aka Connor Kent (now known as “Kon-El”). With his leather jacket and John Lennon-style Ray-Ban sunglasses, Superboy was clearly not cut from the exact same cloth as Superman – a fact driven home when the young hero discovered that he didn’t actually have “superpowers” like Superman.
Connor would eventually learn that Project Cadmus couldn’t actually clone Superman, so they made him a mix of Superman and Lex Luthor and fitted him with a power that could simulate all of Superman’s abilities: Tactile Telekinesis. With his TT field, Connor lifts weights and hits as hard as Superman; and moves himself through flight or at enhanced speeds – while doing things Clark Kent/Kal-El never could, like protecting himself with a force field or firing force blasts that are stronger than heat vision.
(SPOILERS) In Superman #8 “The Chained Part Three” we finally learn the true origin of Superman’s new superpowered nemesis, The Chained. As it turns out, “The Chained” is actually Samuel Stryker, the son of Sebastian Stryker, the man who built Metropolis’s infamous Stryker Island Penitentiary. As a young boy, Stryker let Sammy was revealed to possess the metahuman power of Tactile Telekinesis. Not only was Sammy quick to master extending his TK aura field beyond the need to touch things physically – he also began to stumble into theories of using the power to “expand the field out further and further and manipulate reality” itself.
It was that evolution of his powers that eventually caused Sammy to become too dangerous; he eventually murdered his father, causing Lex Luthor to lock him away, for the good of all.
However, even though Samuel Stryker disappeared from the world, his powers certainly didn’t: Luthor took a small fraction of the Tactile Telekinesis power, which was then mixed in with Connor’s clone matrix. However, as The Chained makes very clear, Connor’s Tactile Telekinesis is nowhere near the level fo what Sammy Stryker could do with his power – which is the only reason we need to be terrified about what could do to Metropolis and the Superman Family, before this fight is over.
Superman #8 is now on sale at DC Comics.
