All throughout December, we will be examining comic book stories and ideas that were not only abandoned, but also had the stories/plots specifically "overturned" by a later writer (as if they were a legal precedent). Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of The Abandoned An' Forsaked. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.

Today we look at where Superboy's DNA came from...

Enjoy!

Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett created the 1990s Superboy, who was a partial clone of Superman, for the "Reign of the Supermen" storyline that led to the return of Superman. In the 1995 Superboy Annual, they finally revealed who was the human basis for Superboy's DNA. It turns out it was the villainous Director of Cadmus, Paul Westfield!!







Westfield was a fairly notable Superman supporting character at the time, but over the years he was more or less relegated to limbo, particularly when Kesel left the book for good.

Roughly a decade later, though, Teen Titans #1 came out and we discovered that Superboy was actually half a clone of Superman and half a clone of a human. And the REAL human part of Superboy's DNA was...



This might have been dropped with the new 52 reboot, but even if it was, I don't count reboots as "abandoning and forsaking" previous plots, since that's the whole point of a reboot.

I did a Comic Book Legends Revealed about the interesting history of how long Geoff Johns (writer of Teen Titans #1) had been hoping to have Lex Luthor be the human part of Superboy's DNA. You can read it here.