#doomsday clock

New History of the DC Universe #4 (2025)

I didn't believe it but then Pozhar and Killer Frost came out to talk about it and i'm having my doubts.

This is gonna be a long one. This fucking "theory" has been sitting on my back for close to 6 years now so buckle your seatbelts and just to make sure you read to the end I stuck some REALLY juicy drama down there.

I think the so called "Superman Theory" is one part repackaging unsurprising information everybody knew, one part conspiracy theories ACTING upon said publically available information in the worst possible way and one part both previous answers being amplified by bad faith political actors for the sake of their own ends. In short, I think its bunk.

The "Superman Theory" in its broadest form is a conspiracy theory positing that the overbalance of active metahumans in the United States was created by the United States government and military in and attempt to cover super soldier research, creating a new weapon in geopolitical strategy that the United States could keep a larger control of by pretending it was a natural phenomenon.

Let me debunk this part by part:

(A partial map of "claimed" superhero teams in the immediate aftermath of the theory's political ripples. Most of these teams never actually operated and many of their members are thought to be entirely fictional. In fact many of the LEADERS of said teams do not work directly for their governments and have disavowed these "teams" outright)

1. No one was ever under any impression the government WASNT trying to manufacture superhumans.

We've all seen it, outfits like the DEO or Argus or Task Force X working on myriad ways to trying to create superhuman operatives that would be loyal to a government chain of command. Some of the "revelations" exposed by the "Superman Theory" are farcical in their idea that this is somehow not old news. Saying that Captain Atom was the creature of a military experiment isn't a shocking twist because it WAS a shocking twist more than a decade ago when it was actually uncovered.

The idea that many other superhumans such as Metamorpho or Gotham's Man-Bat were pushed into existence by clandestine military funding isn't pulling the blanket off of anything because that is how the military industrial complex in the United States has ALWAYS worked. The government pays for scientists to test stuff, and then they test stuff! The fact that these tests were not morally or ethically sound is a big shakeup if you happen to have never heard of the US Military or Government before.

2. The idea that any government can manufacture controlled metagene responses isn't just insane, its dangerous

There's a lot of bad science out there about "the metagene" as if its a specific thing only certain people have. That's not how it works at all.

EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING ALIVE HAS A "METAGENE".

Because what we call a "metagene" is really a poorly understood system of genes and DNA clusters that activate when a human being is placed under impossible stress. If there is some kind of terrible happenstance. And your body can adapt to that particular happenstance in order to keep you alive, then congratulations you're a metahuman. It's not a single light switch that goes on and off its a shorthand term for the human body's amazing and poorly understood ability to adapt to life threatening injury via the manifestation of superhuman traits.

No one knows what stimuli will activate a specific person's metagene, no one CAN know how that metagene will manifest once activated and putting in place systems to "test" or "activate" a metagene is going to end up with 9 parts corpses to 1 part terrified people running on fight or flight adrenaline except now they can shoot lava from their hands.

3. The international superhero community is not "unbalanced" in America's favor

All I really have to do here is gesture broadly at the existence of the Global Guardians, the Great Ten or the Rocket Reds. The rest of the world is not lacking for superheroes. Every large nation has a team and every small nation has a member on a large multinational team. The idea that American superheroes are especially numerous, powerful or prominent has more to do with the way that American superheroes monopolize media attention than it does anything to do with raw data.

As for the numbers of actual METAHUMANS that each nation has, rather than active superheroes. That is an impossible comparison to make. No one has even the broadest guess as to the number of active metahumans in the world in general, let alone in each nation. And that's just metahumans.

4. Metahuman and superhero are not synonyms.

Superman is not a metahuman. Wonder Woman is not a metahuman. Green Lantern is not a metahuman. BATMAN IS NOT A METAHUMAN.

The idea that a larger metahuman population would equate to a larger population of active superheroes just doesn't amount to anything when you look at who superheroes are and how they work. Superheroes draw their ranks from every kind of extranormal being imaginable from aliens to wizards and regular people in spandex animal costumes. Most metahumans are people living with a mutation, more akin to a rare disability than a superhero. Superheroes exist for a laundry list of very individual moral and societal factors that have little to nothing to do with the mere existence of their abilities.

5. Superheroes can't be an arms race because superheroes aren't soldiers.

America is not going to send the Justice League into downtown Beijing to level the place because the Justice League doesn't work for the American government. Any successful superhero organization has found that the only way for it to successfully conduct its work is to be independent of political oversight. The first age of heroes in the United States ended in a single court case when the Justice Society declared outright that it had no interest in following the political whims of Washington.

That's why so many of these new "national teams" announced in the aftermath of the Superman Theory (and the brawl it lead to on the White House lawn because we're at the point where some people are listening to Black fucking Atom for diplomatic cues) ended up being so much smoke and vapor.

So many of these teams were announced on live TV with heavy fanfare only to amount to nothing.

The Seraph is not leading a team of black ops superhumans for the Mossad because The Seraph already works for the Global Guardians and has been kinda busy for the last 600 days acting as one of the core mediators for a political clusterfuck of epic proportions in the Gaza Strip. Russia's "People's Heroes" consisted of large swaths of Russian heroes being impersonated by stunt doubles because most of Russia's superhero population is in open revolt against the Putin administration and has been since the 2nd Chechen war. China's "Great Twenty" proposal has run into the brick wall that is the DEEP factional animosity between China's traditional hero team the Great Ten and its more recent Justice League China. China's Super-Man and the Great Ten's August General in Iron can't even be in the same room and the two groups' communications have been in a deep freeze for nearly a year.

The UK's "Knights Inc" proposal caused a flare up in post-Brexit tensions when they attempted to include Irish national hero Jack O'Lantern in the team's roster without his permission leading to a truly history defining rant by the Irish hero on the emerald isle's iconic Late Late Show backed up by his Global Guardians teammate Godiva.

Conclusion

The Superman Theory isn't just an idiotic conspiracy theory playing off ignorance at the superhuman community's global scope it is also a dangerous political crowbar being used by bad faith actors in an attempt to stoke nationalist divisions in said superhero communities. It is fanning flames of distrust that could actually get people killed if teams from a certain region are the closest at hand to respond to violence or disaster in a neighboring nation. There was a tense period where Vietnam nearly denied the Great Ten entry into the country's airspace where hundreds of thousands were at risk of catastrophic typhoon flooding.

Superheroes are not national assets and there are dozens, hundreds, THOUSANDS or reasons as to why. But the insidious part is that until now the superhero community has sidestepped national division in favor of a close knit circle of trust that has allowed them to respond to as many disasters as possible with the maximum effective force.

None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you....