Superboy: Futures End #1 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Frank J. Barbiere
Art By: Ben Caldwell
Cover Price:  $3.99
Release Date: September 10, 2014

Sibling Rivalry

Alright it's week 2 of the Futures End event and I still don't have anything to say during this portion, where I usually do the recap from last issue.  I guess since last month's issue was technically Superboy's finale, we could talk about how we got here, but that was really confusing and I don't want to try and explain all that again.  All you need to know is that Jon Lane Kent died a hero killing himself from an earlier point in time and he was mostly erased from time, with the exception that Kon was fine and that you could find him on interweb stories.  So Kon is back and since the Teen Titans have supposedly died in this timeline, let's see what's been keeping our Boy of Steel busy Five Years From Now.

Explain It!:

Our future story begins with Superboy and his friends; Guardian, Rose Wilson and Roxie taking on a robot monster.  Yeah just right in with a robot monster fight.  It's a good thing they didn't explain anything to get us into the story, because that would just make too much sense.  We later find out that this robot was created by Superboy's cyborg brother and we're led to believe that his friends and him have been taking out his clones for awhile now.  Yup no idea about an army of clones and their systematic destruction by our hero.

Well speak of the devil, because three Superboys somehow teleport into Manhattan and talk about how they've returned and now that they are back from where ever they might have been, they plan on killing Kon.  I really don't get what's going on here because we're supposed to believe that Kon is taking out his clones so they don't hurt anyone, but these guys come off more like parallel Earth Superboys who have been going around killing their parallel selves to absorb their power.  That's right Superboy has now become Highlander and apparently there can be only one.  To help prove my point Kon is alerted to these "clones" arrival by one of his team's machines telling him that a dimensional breach was detected.  Again are they parallel Superboys or clones and if they are clones, what the hell were they doing in another dimension?  

OH NO.........CLONES?

Superboy races off to confront his "brothers" and tells Roxie not to tell the rest of the team because he wants to deal with this on his own.  Now we get back to these characters being clones because the reason they want Kon is because they think he has the cure to the virus that's killing them, but the problem with this is that they never had a virus before.  It was their own biology that was killing them, not some virus from some outbreak monkey.  So I'm seriously confused with what DC was going with for this Futures End story.  One bit of info that doesn't suck is that apparently Kon is still affected by his biology in the future and it's been hindering his powers and will still eventually kill him, but he wants to make sure he's the last Superboy standing.  

Even though the artwork is muddied and confusing I was eventually able to figure out that Superboy took out his cyborg version and then his scar face version absorbs the downed Superboy's power to become stronger.  You know clone quickening and all that.  Now it's only two on one, but the odds are evened out when the rest of his team show up like you knew they would and to get the upper hand again, the scar faced Superboy just straight up murders the masked Superboy and absorbs him.  You see how stupid I sound trying to explain this?  If we were given names, or background on why they appear this way I might be able to not sound like a moron talking about it, but no you get Cyborg, Scar face and Masked.  Now for some nonsense.  Even though we just witnessed this Superboy absorb another and he stayed the same, now that he absorbed the other he looks like he just shot up some Titan from Arkham Asylum.  If that reference is lost on you, then let's just say he hulks out.  I don't get it.  

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

In the end the team work together to distract the monster Superboy so that Kon can jump through his chest and kill the last clone.  Jumped through his chest............  Now I know that we just got done a story line with a murderous Superboy for the last few months and this is a dark sort of future, but Kon just got done talking about wanting to  live up to Superman in the beginning of this issue.  I know he's an evil hulking clone, but murder?  Kon kills people?  So that's it, our heroes win and celebrate the end to their clone killing days.  Superboy I had such high hopes for you in the future and you just let me down.

GROSS SUPERBOY, JUST GROSS

Bits and Pieces:

This was just an awful issue.  I was really hoping for a good way to say goodbye to Superboy here.......... and it was just awful.  The story contradicted the Superboy series and left you wondering what the hell is really going on.  While I liked the cartoony style this was going with when I began the issue, it became muddied and confusing and made me do a couple double takes to make sure I knew what I was looking at.  Superboy Five Years From Now is not the hero I wanted him to be and now I actually wish that this title was omitted from the Futures End event.

2.5/10