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Imagine that you're a writer attached to the SUPERMAN wing of DC Comics. The boss has come down with orders for you: write a story in which you redeem the character of Superboy-Prime. You're being a lot of leeway to develop this story as you see fit, but the end result must be that Superboy-Prime is redeemed for all the crimes he has committed since INFINITE CRISIS and is once more a hero. How would you do this story?
[color=red]Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)[/color]
Easy, superboy Prime comes and beats up dr manhattan. Busts into our world kicks DC management's ass and make them treat titans with respect. The end.
Rapidly gaining and losing his powers based on whether or not he was exposed to a yellow sun caused Superboy-Prime to be chemically unstable. Alexander Luthor Jr may have exacerbated this by giving Prime drugs under the guise of helping him, but Lex's real goal was to make Prime easier to use as a weapon. His experiences with Bart in that alternate dimension during Infinite Crisis and being imprisoned by the Green Lantern Corps only made him more unstable due to there efforts to keep him out of direct sunlight,
Upon his return to our DCU this time Prime attempts to destroy the DCU by following the example of the Anti-Monitor. Prime charges up and using his Pre-Crisis level super-speed begins to travel back to the Dawn of Time. But he discovers that once he enters the timestream he loses contact with yellow sunlight and instead winds up skipping like a stone back through history. For just a nano-seconnd he appears in the skies of Kansas roughly 40 years ago, alongside a rocket leaving Krypton as it explodes in the 1950's , over the skies of Cleveland in the early 1930's. alongside a different rocket landing on in rural America around 1915, over Indian Creek Colorado in 1894, over Salem Massachusetts in 1691, over Hastings England in 1066, over the Middle East roughly 2000 years ago, over Egypt roughly 3000 years ago, and coming back fully in space passing two rotating clouds and colliding with a star roughly 5 billion years ago.
Resting in our infant Sun, Prime slowly heals. First his body slowly changes, somehow seeming to both grow older and younger simultaneously. His face begins to unclench as tension leaves it. A hint of a smile, one lacking the malice he has shown recently forms. Images flash through his mind of various battles he has fought. Tears fall slowly down his cheek. He sees ghosts of the dead he has killed as the tears come more rapidly. He sees Patha's face as his fist connects and he wakes with a deafening shout of "NNNNOOOOO!!!!!!!".
Being infected by the Dark Multiverse would be the easiest option, as would being corrupted by Alexander Luthor's anti-matter powers. Either or those would work...or a combination of both.
In terms of story, I would do it with Superboy-Prime being freed from the Source Wall during the events of Metal, which finds him suffering from a split personality that vacillates wildly between the kind-hearted kid from the original Crisis on Infinite Earths to the fanboy rage-aholic from Infinite Crisis. This is all happening while Superboy-Prime is being zapped through various alternate realities of the Dark Multiverse, where he meets the T-shirt & jeans New 52 Superman. Thanks to his help, Superboy-Prime is separated into two, his original good self and his evil self from the Dark Multiverse, Ultraboy-Prime.
They come face to face with the mastermind behind Superboy-Prime's infection by his Dark Multiverse counterpart, Alexander Luthor, who was resurrected by the time shenanigans of Dr. Manhattan. During the climactic battle between Superman & Superboy-Prime with Luthor & Ultraboy-Prime, it is revealed that the New 52 Superman is the reincarnation of the late Superman of Earth-2, who died at the hands of the infected Superboy-Prime. With the villains defeated and imprisoned within the Phantom Zone, the two Men of Steel set off to search for the Lois Lane of Earth-2, who was also resurrected somewhere in the infinite worlds of the Multiverse.
Redeeming Superboy-Prime was one of the disappointing things about Legion of Three Worlds. Superman says that they can redeem Superboy-Prime and so that sets up an expectation that they will--because Superman is always true to his word. Yet by the end, they actually don't redeem him, so Superman has failed. I've always wondered if Geoff Johns had it in mind to follow through on that mission but, because the mini-series went through so many revisions and changes in the subsequent issues, he just dropped that part of the story.
Doctor Manhattan summons Superboy Prime to help deal with Superman and the other heroes. along the say he comes to the realization that Jon was responsible for his life going to hell and turns on him helping to save the day. Afterwards he is sent to the new and improved Sanctuary to get the help he needs to recover from his trauma with a lead-lined room to help keep him under control.
Superboy-Prime punches Jon Kent so hard it retcons him back to being a kid and his teen years feel like a hazy dream. Then, he goes out to punch away the continuity errors of the multiverse, becoming somewhat of a Monitor.
It turns out the Superboy Prime we know was never the real Superboy Prime. Maybe he was a clone, some kind of Bizzaro duplicate gone wrong, who knows, but he was never the real guy even though he thought he was. The real one comes in, kicks the imposter's butt along with some other villains. The end.
[QUOTE=Jim Kelly;4527705]Redeeming Superboy-Prime was one of the disappointing things about Legion of Three Worlds. Superman says that they can redeem Superboy-Prime and so that sets up an expectation that they will--because Superman is always true to his word. Yet by the end, they actually don't redeem him, so Superman has failed. I've always wondered if Geoff Johns had it in mind to follow through on that mission but, because the mini-series went through so many revisions and changes in the subsequent issues, he just dropped that part of the story.[/QUOTE]
It was directly followed up on in Blackest Night and that ends with Prime's redemption, which J.T. Krul undid without reason (literally without reason, the opening of the issue of Titans where he comes back has him going "Dang it, some mysterious cosmic force for reasons unknown dragged me back to the DCU, I'm so mad about this I'm evil again!") in the last three months before the New 52.
If you have to do it (which I'd rather not because it kills the joke, but): open on Superman defending Earth, everyone's thrilled that he's come to life to defend the real world, it seems like this is a Secret Identity deal. Turns out (at the end of the issue if it's an ongoing thing, at the end of Act One if it's a one-shot) it's Prime who's actively going to therapy and haunted by what he's done, having tried to better himself but terrified he'll slip up, especially given the first time his then-burgeoning desire to be the good guy again was put to the test in that Krul arc he immediately reverted to type. Can a monster truly become not just a good man, but Superman?