As DC Comics prepares to welcome longtime Marvel mainstay Brian Michael Bendis to its ranks as the writer of its flagship Action Comics and Superman titles, the publisher's solicitations for May 2018 include an unexpected trade paperback collection that may hint at the shape of Bendis' plans for the Man of Steel. Superman: Zero Hour collects twelve issues tying in with 1994's Zero Hour event, which saw a newly-villainous Hal Jordan try to remake all of time and space in his image.

This trade stands out because it doesn't seem to connect to any established publishing priority -- it's not collecting a current series, it's not a collection of Zero Hour itself, and DC does not seem to be offering similar collections for other heroes (though Batman's tie-ins might merit one). That would suggest there's another reason to publish this collection now, and the most likely would be a connection to Bendis' relaunch.

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So what's in these issues? In 1994, there were four ongoing Superman series, Action Comics, Adventures of Superman, Superman, and Superman: Man of Steel. There were also Steel and Superboy, featuring the ongoing adventures of popular heroes from the Reign of Supermen story arc that returned Kal-El to life.

Superman: Zero Hour collects two issues of each, with the first, a "numbered" issue, taking place during Zero Hour and featuring some alteration to the timestream, and the other, a "zero" issue, offering a new take or wrinkle on the hero's origin story. In the "numbered" issues, Superman meets Jor-El and Lara from a Krypton that never exploded; a Ma and Pa Kent who never raised him; a hero of Metropolis called Alpha Centurion, and his beautiful wife Lois Lane; and a whole bunch of Batmen.

Superboy encounters his pre-Crisis counterpart, and Steel… fights some techno-baddies, I guess.

But the #0 issues, the origin stories, may hold the more direct clues about Bendis' plans. While it does not seem there will be a hard reboot on the level of New 52 or Rebirth, DC is giving the writer room to build his own take on Superman from the ground up. The ongoing Superman series will get a new number #1, and before that Bendis will re-introduce the hero with a miniseries titled Man of Steel -- just as John Byrne did for the post-Crisis Superman in 1986. Byrne's series rewrote all of the rules, and the new mini is clearly a nod to that.

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So something is happening to Superman's origin. The four #0 issues tell one interlocking story -- as was normal for the Super-books at the time -- introducing a new villain called Conduit. Beneath the mask, Conduit is Kenny Braverman, a high school rival of Clark Kent who resented him for always coming in first. This resentment grew when Kenny discovered that his chronic childhood illnesses were the result of radiation from a rocket crashing nearby, the rocket that brought Superman to Earth -- and learned that Superman and his old buddy Clark were one and the same.

As the story shows Clark's and Kenny's shared history, readers learn a bit about Clark's social life in Smallville, as well as his travels between leaving home and arriving in Metropolis. To be fair, there isn't a ton of revelatory material here. Publishing this trade could be as simple as bringing another take on Superman's origin back into print, to shelve alongside Birthright, Byrne's Man of Steel, Rebirth, and so on, as Bendis picks and chooses elements from each.

But there are a few aspects of the collection that seem more tantalizing, especially given recent DC history.

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The Oz storyline introduced a Jor-El who survived the destruction of Krypton; should we be looking more closely at the Zero Hour timeline where Krypton survived? In the New 52, and in the Rebirth universe that subsumed it, both of Clark Kent's parents died when he was a teenager; but pre-Flashpoint they were a major part of his life well into super-adulthood. How much attention should we pay to the multiple iterations of the Kents in this collection? Is the Alpha Centurion due for a return, reality-warped into taking over the Super-family of Lois and Jon so Clark can be young and single again? (I kid. I hope.)

Or is the most straightforward answer the right one, that Conduit will play a prominent role in Bendis' early stories? Conduit was only around for a couple arcs, though Kenny Braverman has popped up as a background character a couple times over the last twenty-some years. Here's a character who, on the one hand, is an established part of Superman's origin story, but who on the other hand is a relatively blank slate for someone like Bendis to build into a compelling villain.

A revamped Conduit could lend thrilling conflict to Bendis' take on one of comics' best-known origin stories, setting it apart from other versions of this well-worn tale.

A return of Jimmy Olsen's Nine Inch Nails belly shirt, however, is to be avoided at all costs.