io9: Superboy

In this exclusive preview of Teen Titans, Kid Flash takes on Superboy!

Cyriaque Lamar — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:20:00 PST

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In DC Comics' relaunched Teen Titans series by Scott Lobdell, readers have witnessed a new team of young superheroes rally together to battle against an unlikely opponent: the psionic clone Superboy. More »

10 "Crises" We Won't Miss Now That The DC Universe Rebooted Itself

Cyriaque Lamar — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:30:00 PDT

As you may have noticed, DC Comics recently radical refurbished their superhero books. Among a legion of sweeping changes comes the announcement that "the Crises" — a series of keystone stories with names like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Final Crisis — were poofed out of existence when the DC Universe began anew. More »

15 years ago, a young Geoff Johns pitched his future Teen Titans plots in DC Comics' letter column

Cyriaque Lamar — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 08:30:00 PDT

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Geoff Johns may be a bigwig over at DC Comics nowadays, but back in 1996, he was another Superboy reader staking out some real estate in the letters column. More »

DC Relaunch Snap Judgments, Week 2: The Joker In Lingerie And Alien Cats Vomiting Blood

Cyriaque Lamar — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:40:00 PDT

We're into the second week of the DC relaunch! In these offerings, the DC Universe's supporting cast won the day. More »

Trash Fights Back: The scariest monsters made of garbage!

Charlie Jane Anders — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:00:00 PST

Is there anything scarier than a garbage monster? If you even survived a trash-monster attack, you'd have to take one continuous shower for a week to feel clean afterwards. Plus some garbage monsters contain a lot of rusty metal. More »

10 scifi icons (and 10 obscure characters who have the same names)

Cyriaque Lamar — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 07:00:00 PST

You know Spider-Man, but have you heard of the British anti-hero Spiderman? Everyone's seen Terminator 2, but have you seen the Italian Terminator II? Here are 10 familiar characters (and a bunch of randoms who share their names). More »

Jeff Lemire tells us about the post-apocalyptic manimals of Sweet Tooth

Cyriaque Lamar — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 10:55:54 PST

Jeff Lemire is the creator of the acclaimed Vertigo series Sweet Tooth, which follows Gus, a nine-year-old, half-deer boy growing up in a post-apocalyptic America ravaged by a mysterious plague. We spoke to Lemire about building this zoologically screwball world. More »

Child And Alien Barbarians Tussle In This Week's Comics

Graeme McMillan — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:00:13 PST

Hulks are falling! Superheroes are killing each other for political aims brought upon by reality intruding upon naive utopian ideals! Medical comas are gateways to magical lands in peril! Truly, these could only be brand new comics we crave. More »

14 Reasons Why TV And Superheroes Don't Mix

Graeme McMillan — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:00:57 PDT

If there's one thing that this week's premieres of Heroes and Smallville collectively proved, it's that television really shouldn't try and tackle superheroes. Here's even more proof why - as well as some rare examples of when it does work. More »

Does DC's Latest Revival Hint At Legal Victory?

Graeme McMillan — Sun, 03 May 2009 10:00:04 PDT

This week's release of DC Comics' Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds included a return that may have surprised followers of a particular lawsuit over character ownership. Spoilers for lovers of teenage superheroes ahead. More »

12 Weakest Deaths In Science Fiction History

Charlie Jane Anders — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:00:00 PDT

Click to viewThe greatest science fiction heroes live on the edge, skimming the jagged maw of death every day. "Scifi hero" is a high-risk profession, so you shouldn't expect your idols to live forever. But at the very least, you can hope your hero gets a good death - a hero's death - instead of going out like a punk. So it's too bad that some of our most favorite space adventurers have been stuck with lame deaths. Here's our list of the 12 scifi hero deaths that made us feel like instead of our heroes cheating death, death cheated our heroes. With spoilers. 12) Shepherd Book. I almost mentioned Wash here, since his death in Serenity upset me tremendously - but at least Wash's death made sense in context. Wash gets to die heroically, piloting the ship through a crazy dogfight over a scary planet, then gliding a dead ship to a landing (almost) everyone can walk away from. His death is jarring and shocking, and it feels like we get to love him all over again before saying goodbye. But Shepherd Book on the other hand — he feels like a throwaway character in the movie, and his death is pretty pointless. He's just there to mouth a few words about spirituality and then get wasted. And his death, unlike Wash, is purely there for plot-hammer purposes. He's Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru — he dies so that Mal can realize that there's no way to hide from the Operative any longer, and he's too mad to keep hiding. It's the plot-device death that lets Mal turn to the camera and (pretty much) say "Now it's personal." He's Mal's girlfriend in a refrigerator. Shepherd Book deserved so, so much more than that. 11) Marcus Cole in Babylon 5. He's madly in love with Susan Ivanova, but never gets anywhere with her. Until finally, he sacrificed his life to save hers, using an alien device to transfer all his life energy to hers. Says actor Jason Carter:

"The irony of it all is that I gave my life in order that someone else might live who then left the show!" Carter laughs, referring to Claudia Christian's decision to quit as Ivanova at the of B5's fourth season. "I mean, what was the point about that then? It kind of makes my heroic act a little pointless, I thought."

Carter actually filmed two versions of the story: one where Cole died, and one where he was cryogenically frozen. And later, we found out the frosty version of Cole's fate was the real version, and creator J. Michael Straczynski wrote a story where Cole gets revived and gets to live on a barren planet with a clone of Ivanova. Aww. (Runner up: I nearly put Boone from Earth: The Final Conflict in this slot.) 10) Pantha. Actually, she can serve as a stand-in for every great comics character who's had a throwaway death in a major crossover. It never fails: some character who used to be popular or star in their own book falls from grace, until he/she turns into cannon fodder. All in the name of showing how bad-ass the latest bad-guy is, like Eclipso killing off the Will Payton version of Starman, or Max Lord shooting Blue Beetle in the head. Or Black Goliath randomly dying off in Civil War. But poor old Pantha may be the worst. One of the most loved New Titans characters in the 1990s, she'd fallen into obscurity by the time Infinite Crisis came around. So she randomly gets in the way of Superboy Prime's backhand. He spends a few panels afterwards staring at her rolling head and trying to insist he didn't really mean to do that. Way to prove you're not stupid, Superboy Prime. (Oh, and another comic-book runner up: I almost threw Superman in here, because his 1992 "death" was really cheap and weird. He and Doomsday just punch each other a whole lot, and then they're both dead. Except that they're not.) 9) Carson Beckett. Actually, there have been so many deaths on Stargate that left us unsatisfied, from Janet to Martouf to Her-ur (who shoulda been a contender!). But at least none of those other characters were killed by an exploding tumor, which apparently is the cutting edge in space terrorism. Watson has a tumor that was due to explode and kill everyone and Beckett insists on removing it instead of putting Watson in isolation. He gets it out in time, but then it blows up and kills Beckett and the bomb-disposal team. And yes, I know Beckett later comes back, but it's his clone or something. 8) The Lone Gunmen. They were cool enough to get their own short-lived spin-off series, but then they died (or possibly faked their deaths) in an episode that didn't even have Mulder and Scully in it. In the episode "Jump The Shark," the Lone Gunmen return to the show after the end of their own spin-off, only to get locked in a room with a virus bomb. 7) Trinity in the Matrix: Revolutions. Mostly, her death is weak because she gets killed and then keeps talking for another ten minutes. (Thanks to Meredith for the suggestion.) 6) Cpl. Hicks in Aliens 3. He's one of the coolest characters in Aliens, stepping up and taking charge after everything goes rotten. He stands up to the slimy Burke and listens to Ripley when she says they have to wipe out the aliens. But what does that get him in the third movie? An off-screen death at the movie's beginning, with just his name on a computer screen to confirm that he died. (Thanks again to Meredith for this one.) 5) Louanne "Kat" Katraine. She was one of my favorite characters on Battlestar Galactica, maybe because she was the only one who ever really called Starbuck on all her shit. So I was bummed when she got turned into a drug addict, and then it turned out she's an imposter who stole the name Louanne Katraine and is involved in running contraband. She may even have helped the Cylons infiltrate human society prior to the attacks. Even though I usually love Jane Espenson's writing, I really didn't like the episode "The Passage," in which Kat suddenly gets a whole new backstory as a smuggler, before being "redeemed" by sacrificing her life in a radiation field. It felt sort of cheap, as if the show was turning one of its coolest characters into a whole different person before disposing of her. 4) Judge Giant. He was one of the coolest characters in the Judge Dredd universe — until he got shot in the back during a riot in the "Block War" storyline. It was a quick, throwaway cheap death for such a cool character. Writer Alan Grant later apologized, according to Wikipedia: "When we wrote the death of Giant, I thought it was a great idea to kill him off in such a casual, natural (for a judge) way. But when the reader outcry came, I was startled and forced to see things from their point of view." 3) Cyclops in X-Men 3. This was a cheap death, except that it ended up being very expensive — it totally cost the movie my interest and suspension of disbelief. I spent about an hour after Cyclops died assuming they'd faked his death for some reason, and expecting him to pop up at a critical moment. And when I finally accepted that Cyclops had died off screen, at the hands of his true love, who had gone batshit after being hit with a plot hammer, I was so incredulous I could barely pay attention to all the waffling and wailing over whether Rogue was going to get Mutant-begone treatment or not. (Did she? I can't even remember.) 2) The Sixth Doctor. When the BBC fired Colin Baker as the star of Doctor Who, they asked him to come back so they could kill him off and regenerate him into a new actor. Not surprisingly, he said no thanks. In that instance, the classy thing would have been to introduce the new Doctor already settled in the role, and pretend the Colin Baker Doctor had died off-screen. (As a bonus, that approach would have allowed you to write out Bonnie Langford's Mel at the same time.) Instead, they put a curly blond wig onto the new Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, and had him pretend to be the old Doctor for long enough to blur his face. And poor old Colin's Doctor died, not saving the universe, but banging his head on the TARDIS console while the Rani was shooting pew-pew lasers at the time machine. 1) Captain Kirk. Actually, I pretty much want to make Captain Kirk numbers one through 10 on this list, since his death in Star Trek: Generations was the gold standard for disappointing ends. He finally agrees to leave the happy horse-barn paradise to help Captain Picard deal with Malcolm McDowell, who really shouldn't have posed much of a challenge for one Captain, let alone two. Maybe if it was Clockwork Orange Malcolm McDowell (before the treatments) or even Get Crazy Malcolm McDowell. But cranky old Malcolm McDowell? Why why why? McDowell basically beats the crap out of Kirk. It could have been worse. It could have been the original version they shot: Trek runner up: Trip in the final episode of Enterprise. Why did he have to sacrifice his life when faced with a set of standard-issue thugs? Normally, he would have defeated the low-rent space-crooks with one pinky and some technobabble, but suddenly it becomes a matter of life and death because it's the final episode. BONUS: I had to add Boba Fett from Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi, becuase as Rickotron and Bonniegrrl pointed out, he totally gets the short end of the lightsaber. He gets built up as this super-cool bounty hunter, and then he just sort of gets knocked into the mouth of the desert beastie. Yuck. And Star Wars runner-up status goes to Mace Windu and all the Jedi who get zapped by Clone Troopers in Revenge Of The Sith. More »

Teenagers From Future Now 50 Years Old

Graeme McMillan — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:30:00 PDT

April isn't just the month where formerly reputable sources try and convince you that spaghetti grows on trees - It's also the month that sees the anniversary of the creation of comics' premier team of teenage superheroes fighting crime one thousand years from now. April 2008, in fact, is the 50th anniversary of the creation of DC Comics' Legion of Super-Heroes, and we here at io9 want to take this opportunity to remind you of just five reasons why the Legion is maybe the Superman franchise's greatest gift to the world. More »

Bad Greenscreen Is Kryptonite To Superboy

Charlie Jane Anders — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:30:02 PST

I don't know what's more awesome in this clip from the late 1980s Superboy TV show: the amazing special effects, the dialogue ("I stand for truth, justice, uhh... puppies...") or the acting. It's really some combination of the three that makes this feel like a big-budget fan movie. Watching this TV prequel to the Christopher Reeves Superman movies will definitely make you appreciate Smallville more. Click through for an incredibly well acted conversation between Clark and Ma Kent. More »

Must Read: Superman: The Man Of Steel

charliejane — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:56:23 PDT

Must-read graphic novels are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. More »