Every comic book fan worth their salt understands the significance of the year 1992 in the history of their medium. What else could the year of Superman’s death be called? Jerry Siegel’s renowned creation had spent half a century as a light of hope for individuals not only in the DC Universe but also in our own lives.
Yes, the most recognizable superhero of all time had been “killed” numerous times, but never for an extended period of time. When your narrative is themed “The Death of Superman,” it is difficult to overlook what the issue’s final outcome will be. Superman Vol. 2 #75 was a commercial success for DC, selling 6 million copies worldwide.
We are reminded that things could have been a lot worse than Superman dying and being resurrected a few weeks later by investigating the hope-sized gap that the Man of Steel’s absence creates on planet Earth.
But what if he does not get up when he is supposed to? What if Superman’s body did not recover quickly enough for whatever reason? What if his loved ones, overcome by loss and wrath, decided to convert his mission of hope into a bloody crusade? This is Death of Superman – Explored from Tales from the Dark Multiverse.
Where do your worst nightmares go to? They live in the Dark Multiverse
Think about this for a moment, if you would: imagine your worst fears and nightmares, living on beyond the moments that you experience them. Imagine them having shape, form, and living, breathing sentience. Imagine a world that is created purely out of the negativity that resides within you. Only you don’t have to, because it already exists; thriving, rushing towards its inevitable collapse in the dark. When Perpetua created the Multiverse, she gave birth to 3 sons who would help oversee her massive creation.
Out of these 3, Mar Novu The Monitor and Morpheus The Anti-Monitor were locked in a conflict borne as much out of jealousy as it was polarity for millions of years. Some of the strongest cosmic forces in the DC Universe were involved in cleaning up the crisis events kick-started by their sibling rivalry; and as all this chaos was engulfing the worlds above, the third son of Perpetua silently labored away at his planetary forge.
Alpeus The World Forger was assigned the task of creating stable worlds from the essence of the Dark Multiverse, which itself was comprised of the hopes & fears of all sentient life. And for countless eons, he did as he was bid, allowing worthy worlds to ascend the veil in between while feeding the unstable ones to his pet dragon Barbatos. But living in a nightmare reality isn’t for the feeble of heart, mind or soul; and Barbatos’ was corrupted due to his long years of servitude.
So he killed his master and let his Forge run cold, restricting the number of Universes in the world above to 52; while millions spawned in the darkness, born from the simmering paranoia that had gripped all of creation. Worlds in the Dark Multiverse do not live for long, mainly because they’re not meant to; but they survive long enough to realize their doomed fates.
Barbatos once told Bruce Wayne that entire galaxies exist in his domain thanks to the former’s paranoid nature, but this isn’t one of those “and then Batman went rogue” stories we’ve been doing for a while on our channel. This is a story that is much darker than that. It’s a story about how love lost can twist even the purest of souls; and how the Man of Steel’s death truly represents the loss of all hope.
The Son of Krypton Dies Again: Tempus Fuginaut’s Hopeless Quest
Tales from the Dark Multiverse: The Death of Superman opens, as most of these tie-ins do, with the cosmic guardian Tempus Fuginaut, still looking for worthy souls who can help him in the coming Crisis. He ruminates over the fact that all that is right in the Multiverse comes with its internal Light. He has observed it his entire life; seen its purifying glow, felt its euphoric warmth.
As a member of the Fuginaut race, it is Tempus’ duty to patrol & repair any breaches in the barriers between Multiverses; but he finds his job rather difficult these days. Barbatos has launched his invasion into Prime Earth, and the boundaries between realities are starting to merge. As he searches through the Dark Multiverse for any semblance of hope & heroism remaining in it, he comes upon a world very similar to Earth-One; though not similar enough to be called its counterpart or opposite.
We say this because, in this world, the pre-historic Kryptonian behemoth christened Doomsday attacks the Last Son of Krypton as well. And much like on Earth One, Kal-El dies at the hands of the genetic abomination. But as Tempus reminds us; this isn’t his story. It’s a story that truly explores the premise that is The Death of Superman from the eyes of the one person who loved him more than anyone else; Lois Lane.
For decades, Lois had spent her life in love with the man she knew was a beacon of Hope & Kindness for the world. On Earth One, she grieved, but she carried on the fight against evil in Clark’s name anyway, and before long he came back to life. But in this world, his death broke her and turned her into something decidedly more sinister.
Loss, Grief, Pain & Revenge: The Constant Thoughts of Lois Lane
In more ways than one, Superman was the glue that held the world together; and no one saw that more than Lois. Clark’s relentless pursuit of justice and his endless faith in humanity kept planet Earth in line and even managed to turn Batman’s cold heart warm with friendship. Lois Lane saw the effect he and his message had on people, but they themselves never seemed to notice it.
And now that he was gone, she started noticing things about them. Like how the Justice League claimed to be his family yet were never around to help him during his worst battles; including this one. How they failed him in his most desperate hour of need, and yet they were the ones front-and-center at his funeral; while Lois watched from a distant crowd, and Jonathon & Martha attended the ceremony through their television screens.
She predicted it all; the empty speeches from the mouths of degenerates like Lex Luthor that would praise her love as a symbol of hope, the great show of morality that mankind would put on for a couple of weeks, and the swift return to depravity and wanton destruction that would follow soon after. And to no one’s surprise, everything Lois Lane thought would happen, did happen.
The world didn’t just return to business as usual, it descended into chaos. Violence became the order of the day, and all she could do was visit Clark’s parents as much as she could, and try to live up to his legacy as well as she could. But it was all pointless in the end. Jonathon Kent died a few days after Superman passed away out of sheer grief, and Lois found herself in a near-catatonic state, constantly pondering & grieving over the loss of her love.
She paid her respects to him at his home on Earth and then went to pay her respects to him at a place that represented his real home: The Fortress of Solitude. Whether it was fate, grief, expectation, or pure rage that compelled her to go there, she could not tell; but as she laid down the cape that embodied everything the Man of Steel stood for, Lois Lane’s life would change forever.
The Corruption of a Pure Soul: Lois Lane becomes The Eradicator
Lois sat in the Fortress of Solitude dejected, broken, and nursing a fresh wound in the form of the realization that Kal-El was the Last Son of Krypton. But as she bitterly thought to herself how humans did not deserve his message, she’d encounter a spirit that would fundamentally alter her life. You see, thousands of years ago, a Kryptonian named Kem-L altered the exploratory containment devices sent by an alien race into a lethal weapon, designed to protect his people and “keep Krypton strong”.
After eons of lying dormant, the Last Protector of Krypton bursts into the Fortress of Solitude to preserve the lineage of the House of El. You see, part of The Eradicator’s mission statement is to ensure Superman’s continued survival; so when Kal-El dies at the hands of Doomsday, it rushes over to his grave and sticks him in the birthing matrix at the Fortress. But for some reason, it doesn’t work; Superman’s cells don’t recharge, and Eradicator declares that he is truly dead to an already-broken Lois Lane.
As she goes to respond to him, however, a reaction occurs that seals both their fates. Eradicator was put in place to act as sort of a re-spawn option for Superman, should he ever die. But given that he wasn’t timely enough to do it, the Kryptonian Life Matrix was burning through him, searing him alive. In his dying moments, all Eradicator could think of was defending Krypton’s existence; and to his shock, Lois Lane volunteered to help him carry it forward.
She volunteered herself for the procedure, begging Eradicator to merge with her instead, so his legacy wouldn’t die with him. Though apprehensive at first, Eradicator asks Lois why she intends to go through with something she knows can kill her.
She tells him that she loved him and that she wanted to do this not to carry on his mission, but to end it. Content with her logic, Eradicator imbues the former lover of Kal-El with all the powers that his glowing Kryptonian form had kept within it and transforms Lois Lane into The Eradicator. But something must have gone horribly wrong because all she can think about is not upholding Superman’s ideals; but destroying them inside-out.
The Dark Angel of the Multiverse: Lois Lane’s Tragic Rampage
After gaining all the powers of the man she thought was her personal god, she realized just how…stupid he’d been. Clark would have chased down bank robbers down alleyways and taken orders from a general during wartime. Lois Lane simply took down the bankers and ended the wars themselves. She was a journalist at the core of her being, but her pursuit of the truth usually ended up in disappointment because try as she might, she couldn’t bring about the kind of change that would force humanity to move past its barbarity.
But now, with the powers of an alien race at her disposal, Lois didn’t have to go through hoops to get the truth to the people; she could simply get to the source, and eliminate it root and stem. And as she was cleansing the world like a flaming sword cutting through thin paper, she couldn’t help but wonder; why did Clark allow all this to keep happening? He could’ve easily done whatever she was doing right now, so why didn’t he? Was he naïve? Foolish? Stubborn? Or did he think humanity was beyond the effort of saving itself?
Whatever it was, for the 1st time in her life, Lois Lane didn’t want to know. She cuts a bloody path through all of his enemies, starting with Lex Luthor, but she doesn’t stop there; she kills off individual supervillains like The Joker, Black Adam, Ra’s al Ghul, and when she’s done with them, she annihilates groups like Intergang, LexCorp & Project Cadmus. This forces Batman to confront her about the evil nature of her actions, but she shuts him up by calling him a pathetic coward. Lois toys with Bruce, telling him Clark always pitied him before incinerating him with her heat vision.
After purifying all of these stains off Kal-El’s legacy, she goes after those who are trying to replace him. Not Steel & Superboy, because they weren’t necessarily trying to become Superman. The last name of Lois Lane’s List of Eradication was Hank Henshaw; aka Cyborg Superman. She engages him in battle alongside Steel & Superboy, but Henshaw makes short work of them and then goes after Ms. Lane herself.
They fight for what seems like an eternity, and thousands die as a result of their titanic clash. The people cry out for help, and suddenly, Superman arrives! As it turns out, the birthing matrix’s effects weren’t nullified, they were simply delayed. Clark turns to Lois and tells her he’s here to help her, but this breaks her because she doesn’t want him to see her this way.
As Henshaw pointed out earlier, Lois has blood on her hands, and Clark notices that. But before he can react, Henshaw unleashes a lethal dose of Kryptonite that kills him and mortally poisons Kal-El. Lois tries to frantically plead with him to stay alive, but all he can give her is his fear of her. Clark Kent dies in the arms of his former lover, killed by the one person who he thought personified everything that was good with the world.
And the reality of having been the reason for his death shatters Lois Lane. She pledges to create a world that would be as just as he had hoped it would be and rises from the battlefield as The Eradicator once again; the Dark Angel of the Dark Multiverse.
What Makes The Eradicator Lois Lane So Powerful?
What makes Eradicator Lois Lane so powerful? Well, to put it simply, she is basically Superman hopped up on roid rage. Lois Lane is a regular human being with a rather keen sense of honesty & justice, given that she is a journalist by profession. But she doesn’t possess any inherent superpowers of her own; until she merges with the Eradicator. And given that the entity had essentially become a clone of Superman by the time he was introduced into the “The Death of Superman” storyline, it has all the same powers that Kal-El has; meaning Lois does, too.
Heat vision, icy breath, X-Ray sight, enhanced hearing, superhuman strength, flight, a monstrously durable body; everything that made Clark Kent Superman was essentially now a part of Lois’ inner being. But don’t let that fool you into thinking she’s a knock-off of Supes; she just might be an improvement on him and a rather twisted one at that.
For starters, when Eradicator merges with Lois, it doesn’t give her a standard Superman costume as it had done in the original comic book with Kal-El’s dead body; instead, it gives her a pitch-black costume with a bloody S symbol, indicative of the dark path she was about to give in to. It also gave her red energy aura and black accents just to drive home how corrupt Lois’ soul had become.
Add to that the fact that she started justifying her crimes as the “right thing” and even went as far as killing Clark when he “got in her way”, and you get someone who will not stop until the whole truth is out, no matter what it takes. And in Lois’ mind, what it takes is blood, ash, and brimstone falling from the skies; unlike Kal-El, she isn’t “restraining herself”, and that automatically makes her more powerful than him, and much more lethal than he could ever have become.
Evil Lois Lane is a reminder that nothing remains good forever
Say what you will about Zack Snyder’s Justice League movies, if there is one thing he got right, it was the pure emotional ethos of Superman’s existence. Yes, while things like a trigger-happy Batman made many fans cry wolf, none of them had the same reaction to the Knightmare sequences peppered through Snyder’s cinematic offerings because it gave them a taste of a world that “wasn’t the norm”; Superman was a tyrant, Batman allied with The Joker & Darkseid had enslaved the entire population of Earth with the Anti-Life Equation. Everything was upside-down here, except for one thing; Lois Lane.
The fact that her death set Clark down this path is what horrified Bruce Wayne, and would’ve left fans deeply scarred had Justice League 2 & 3 actually been made. But the point here is that throughout all of his depictions, Lois Lane has attacked as Kal-El’s anchor to humanity itself.
Tales from the Dark Multiverse: The Death of Superman gives us a glimpse of what might happen should the spirit of hope ever get corrupted, and the consequences are something even Tempus Fuginaut cannot contain. Evil Lois Lane is possibly the most tragic character in DC history because she serves as a grim reminder of the fact that nothing remains good forever.