The Super-Twins: Osul-Ra and Otho-Ra

[raidensix]

ACTION COMICS #1054
Written by PHILLIP KENNEDY JOHNSON, DAN JURGENS, and DORADO QUICK
Art by RAFA SANDOVAL, DAN JURGENS, and YASMIN FLORES MONTANEZ
Cover by STEVE BEACH
Variant cover by RAFA SANDOVAL
Super-workout connecting variant (part 1 of 4) by DAVID TALASKI
1:25 variant cover by YASMIN FLORES MONTANEZ
1:50 foil variant cover by STEVE BEACH
Superman variant cover by IBRAHIM MOUSTAFA
$4.99 US | 48 pages | Variant $5.99 US (card stock)
ON SALE 4/25/23
The Super-Twins are lost—and alone—against the nightmarish threat of the Necrohive! How will Lois and the House of El find them?

Is Natasha supposed to be a cyborg or android now? There's no way a human body will fit in that armor.

[Prime]

Hmm so Phaelosians are like the DCAU Argosians who are functionally the same as Kryptonians?

From what I read. Yes they are the same as daxamites. They are kryptonian descendants

[ZuLuLu]

I believe hearing a PkJ interview that they going to have Clark and Lois openly say they adopted alien children rather then pass the off as humans. I think it going to tie into the whole narrative of today issue about how aliens are beginning to take refuge on earth causing a divide (hopefully done better then in CW supergirl)

I understand why PKJ is having Clark and Lois be open about adopting alien children but doesn't that make it easier for people to put together the connection between Superman and Clark. This means that he could be putting lives at risk.

[Stanlos]

Probably.



I'd blame DC's editorial as a whole. 5G feels unnecessarily complicated and hard to buy given how badly they botched the New 52.

Jon would've been perfect for the imprints. Zoom does a kid Jon story, Ink does teen Jon and Black Label does Future State Jon.

Everybody wins....

I'm hoping these two pop up in Superman and Lois. Tal-rho could adopt them.

When you consider that all of Scott Snyder League stories and its dreadful rainbow force proliferation, and the endless Metals were to act as lead-in the complexity ratchets up even higher.

If I could time travel, I would soooooooooo prevent DiDio and the other one from being hired altogether. They broke the DCU.

[CosmeticSkull]

I believe hearing a PkJ interview that they going to have Clark and Lois openly say they adopted alien children rather then pass the off as humans. I think it going to tie into the whole narrative of today issue about how aliens are beginning to take refuge on earth causing a divide (hopefully done better then in CW supergirl)

Sounds a lot like what they did with Chris Kent Pre-Flashpoint.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

I understand why PKJ is having Clark and Lois be open about adopting alien children but doesn't that make it easier for people to put together the connection between Superman and Clark. This means that he could be putting lives at risk.

That could be something Johnson set up to explore.

When you consider that all of Scott Snyder League stories and its dreadful rainbow force proliferation, and the endless Metals were to act as lead-in the complexity ratchets up even higher.

If I could time travel, I would soooooooooo prevent DiDio and the other one from being hired altogether. They broke the DCU.

I wouldn't go that far, I rather steer the ship better. In hindsight alot of Didio's moves feel self-defeating or misguided. To me marriage doesn't age you the same way raising a kid does. So benching the sidekicks makes more the sense than getting rid of Clark and Lois's marriage to me. But I'm more fond of the legacies than the originals so I rather push them forward than keeping the Silver Age mainstays young.

Same with Future's end which would work better if it was like Future's end. Setting it 5 years in the future makes it feel more pressing to deal with it.

SuperX talked about Future State Jon as the timeskip Jon and he does travel in time for Legion so it's easier to just use adult Jon to put his younger self on a new path.

[marhawkman]

That could be something Johnson set up to explore.


I wouldn't go that far, I rather steer the ship better. In hindsight alot of Didio's moves feel self-defeating or misguided. To me marriage doesn't age you the same way raising a kid does. So benching the sidekicks makes more the sense than getting rid of Clark and Lois's marriage to me. But I'm more fond of the legacies than the originals so I rather push them forward than keeping the Silver Age mainstays young.

Same with Future's end which would work better if it was like Future's end. Setting it 5 years in the future makes it feel more pressing to deal with it.

I'm totally fine with aging Superman. RW the character is old enough to be my grandpa.... and I'm not exactly a child myself. So seeing a comic book character that is so old.... IRL depicted as YOUNGEr than me on the page... just... feels weird.

Also it drastically limits what you can do with teen sidekicks(especially children of the hero). If the mentor is presumed to be late 20s or Early 30s.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

I'm totally fine with aging Superman. RW the character is old enough to be my grandpa.... and I'm not exactly a child myself. So seeing a comic book character that is so old.... IRL depicted as YOUNGEr than me on the page... just... feels weird.

Also it drastically limits what you can do with teen sidekicks(especially children of the hero). If the mentor is presumed to be late 20s or Early 30s.

I was a fan of Smallville so I don't mind it in theory. I just felt like the comic approach was misguided.

A way around that is to age up the sidekicks. Skip Robin and go to the Nightwing phase. It's easier to do with Tim's generation than Dick's as most of them had parents and lives beyond being with their mentors. It's still doable with them but it's better if it wasn't rushed or confusing.

[Digifiend]

Tim's generation - the Young Justice kids - SHOULD be aged up. Conner's debut being when it was means Jon being the age he is (even before Bendis aged him up) makes no sense. Aging them to at least early 20s would remedy that.

Is Natasha supposed to be a cyborg or android now? There's no way a human body will fit in that armor.

I believe it's nanotech. As thin as spandex, as tough as the steel she gets her codename from.

I understand why PKJ is having Clark and Lois be open about adopting alien children but doesn't that make it easier for people to put together the connection between Superman and Clark. This means that he could be putting lives at risk.

That is a bit risky yeah. Maybe what they're doing is saying that Superman entrusted them to Lois? She's always been Superman's biggest supporter (except maybe Jimmy, but he'd have done the photos for her reports about Superman's heroics), long before she married his alter ego.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

Tim's generation - the Young Justice kids - SHOULD be aged up. Conner's debut being when it was means Jon being the age he is (even before Bendis aged him up) makes no sense. Aging them to at least early 20s would remedy that.

My post was referring to the new 52.

@Marhawkman was talking about the Young Superman approach hurting the younger characters. So I was suggesting to reboot them as older characters and make them more self sufficient. I thought Tim's generation was easier to retool but I'm also biased towards them.

[SuperCrab]

Giving Lois and Clark more superkids is definitely the exact opposite direction I would have liked to have seen the line move towards. However, it's clear that they aren't writing these comic books for my niche and haven't been since the end of the New52.

I guess the hope might be that the more they keep doubling down on this without sales spikes to support it, the more likely the New52 Superman, or a Superman with an age, personality, costume, and status quo in the world similar to the New52 Superman, could make a comeback, if not as the main Superman, in a limited series, an alt-universe monthly, as part of a book about a super team (i.e. Justice League, Titans, some other thing or some new thing), or as a recurring character the way all sorts of people who generally don't have their own books show up here and there.

One thing worth noting on the new superkids is that we've seen adopted children of Lois and Clark be written out of the comics before. Granted, with comics books, even more than scifi, because superhero comics often encompass scifi and just flat out magic and a bunch of genres that cumulatively allow things to be changed in almost any way at any time, it would be easy in the sense of storytelling to write out or erase biological children in the same way (Which is something that happened to at least one iteration of The Flash), I feel like there would be more fan resistance to doing that to a biological son of Lois and Clark than wards that are basically taken in because they have no where else to go. Writing these kids off might not be much complicated than some refugee from Warworld with a biological connection turning up and them wanting to reconnect with their heritage, and feeling it was especially important as some of the last of their kind (Or something like that- I didn't read the Warworld Saga)- a sentiment their adoptive family might agree with, even though I'm sure it'd be bittersweet for them, and they'd miss the kids.

[Primal Slayer]

Their inclusion feels very 70s/80s where introducing the cute new kid to boost views was popular. Maybe they'll go upstairs one day and disappear as well lol.

But having Clark/Lois be open about them adopting aliens who then are part of Supermans team, all of whom happen to show up at the Kents fairly often....is hard to ignore (which means they'll likely ignore it)

[marhawkman]

Giving Lois and Clark more superkids is definitely the exact opposite direction I would have liked to have seen the line move towards. However, it's clear that they aren't writing these comic books for my niche and haven't been since the end of the New52.

I guess the hope might be that the more they keep doubling down on this without sales spikes to support it, the more likely the New52 Superman, or a Superman with an age, personality, costume, and status quo in the world similar to the New52 Superman, could make a comeback, if not as the main Superman, in a limited series, an alt-universe monthly, as part of a book about a super team (i.e. Justice League, Titans, some other thing or some new thing), or as a recurring character the way all sorts of people who generally don't have their own books show up here and there.

One thing worth noting on the new superkids is that we've seen adopted children of Lois and Clark be written out of the comics before. Granted, with comics books, even more than scifi, because superhero comics often encompass scifi and just flat out magic and a bunch of genres that cumulatively allow things to be changed in almost any way at any time, it would be easy in the sense of storytelling to write out or erase biological children in the same way (Which is something that happened to at least one iteration of The Flash), I feel like there would be more fan resistance to doing that to a biological son of Lois and Clark than wards that are basically taken in because they have no where else to go. Writing these kids off might not be much complicated than some refugee from Warworld with a biological connection turning up and them wanting to reconnect with their heritage, and feeling it was especially important as some of the last of their kind (Or something like that- I didn't read the Warworld Saga)- a sentiment their adoptive family might agree with, even though I'm sure it'd be bittersweet for them, and they'd miss the kids.

well it's a question of time passing. How long(in-universe) has Kal-el been Superman? How much stuff has he done? etc... It doesn't make sense for the main timeline Kal-el to be a young guy in his 20s. DCAU.... it worked because it's an alt-U where most of the stuff in the main timeline never happened at all. But main-U where Doomsday happened, and conduit happened, and..... so many other things..... It doesn't make sense for Kal-El to be in his 20s.

[SuperCrab]

well it's a question of time passing. How long(in-universe) has Kal-el been Superman? How much stuff has he done? etc... It doesn't make sense for the main timeline Kal-el to be a young guy in his 20s. DCAU.... it worked because it's an alt-U where most of the stuff in the main timeline never happened at all. But main-U where Doomsday happened, and conduit happened, and..... so many other things..... It doesn't make sense for Kal-El to be in his 20s.

My guess is that if they were to really take 85 years of Superman related comics and approach them with the attitude that all or almost of them happened to the current Superman in a linear way he remembers and the people involved remember, they would have to make him 100 years old or more. Part of the concept of them saying it all happened is I think that it allows fans to pick what happened and what didn't happen for themselves, limited only by what recent comics and major continuity altering events rule in or rule out.

If that's the case, Superman could almost just as easily be depicted as 27-33 as he could be depicted as 40-45. There are way too many events to fit into either range of years.

And of course whatever his age is supposed to be in fiction, comics implicitly operate with a sliding timeline. Superman debuted in 1938, but they rarely if ever depict him as an 85 year old character with his early cast of friends and enemies largely dead of old age. He's also too young, even as the relatively older guy (Relative to the average Superman portrayal) to have been living linearly since right after Crisis when he was already an adult. If today 's Superman were 40, he'd have been born in 1983. If he were 30, he'd have been born in 1993.

Actually, the sliding timescale is one of the reasons I don't like Superman wearing trunks. People correctly point towards circus strongmen and the like as a reason for them that would have worked for Superman when he might have been born in, say, 1908. A Superman born 30 or 40 years ago would wear a New52 style costume or something like what Rebirth Superman initially wore when he brought back the red and blue without the trunks (After operating in a black costume while New52 Superman was alive).

Anyhow, I actually think the idea of a younger Clark Kent Superman and an older Bruce Wayne Batman is interesting. Maybe Clark winds up Nightwing's friend and Batman is just a colleague. If Grayson ever became Batman, maybe we'd get a dynamic where he and Clark Superman, longtime friends of the same age, work together in a different way than Clark and Bruce do.

Of course, the New52 kept Clark and Bruce at similar ages- it's not remembered as much with Batman, but he was only on his early 30s in a lot of the New52. Batman was actually the one who the New52 timeline was the weirdest for- they made it clear that he'd gone through like 3 or Robins in 5 years or something like that instead of doing the obvious and simplifying to Grayson and Damien (Grayson past and Robin present) were the only two Robins and then finding ways to gradually reintroduce the other Robins as somehow being in Batman 's orbit in different ways past or present (Maybe one would work with him temporarily when Damien was thought to be dead, they'd be the Batmen of other cities if a Batman Inc type story were retold, or they could be lower level vigilantes who shared Intel with Batman or Nightwing and trained with one or both of them, perhaps including a storyline where they need a lot of decoy Robins to pull off some plan or other, and they all volunteer, sort of winking at the audience where it's the only time they've been Robin in that continuity but the fans know them as longer term Robins and like seeing them have an excuse to be Robin again in continuity even if just for the one mission.

[Digifiend]

They did do that with Tim. While he had been Bruce's sidekick briefly, he'd always been Red Robin, never Robin. Rebirth reverted it.