Jonathan Kent is the son of Superman and Lois Lane, born at the Convergence of dying worlds, and raised secretly in the Prime DC Universe. When he turned ten he became the new Superboy and fought crime alongside his dad, and the public loved it. Jon was a shakeup to the Superman mythos and status quo that hadn’t happened in years, and every scene he was in carried the potential to show us something entirely new, which is very rare in the comic book world. And yet, before Jon Kent could even reach the peak of his potential as a character, he was unceremoniously and irrevocably changed. He was aged up from a preteen into a seventeen year old, and his character has never come close to recovering from that mistake, because DC has no idea what to do with him.
The Jon Kent Problem
Jon Kent started as something we’ve never seen done permanently before; the son of Superman. He was entirely new, and with his existence he brought out new sides of everyone in the Superman Family, especially Lois and Clark. He was well liked as a character and had an absolutely incredible dynamic with Damian Wayne, with Super Sons still being loved as the absolute peak of low stakes, buddy-cop, young hero adventures. And then, arbitrarily and without build up, he was aged from the kid fans were still getting to know into a very different young adult. Inherently this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as while it throws out all of the potential stories young Jon had and destroys the dynamic he had with Damian, it opens the door for lots of interesting avenues to explore this.
The problem is they didn’t explore this at all. Jon was aged up and then proceeded to do nothing with him. Sure, the immediate shock of it drew in readers and injected some drama into Superman’s story, but that’s just it, it made Jon’s dad’s story more angsty while doing nothing to advance his own. Instead of staying with his family and showing us how he builds back up his connection with them, Jon is immediately shunted off to the future to join the Legion of Super-Heroes in a bad run that went nowhere. Then when he came back it was clear that DC was attempting to fast track him into inheriting the Superman mantle as a part of the 5G relaunch, which would see most of DC’s main heroes be replaced by new characters taking up their legacies. They burned the potential for years worth of stories and all but gutted Jon’s character to force him to take up the role of Superman way, way too quickly. And then the 5G initiative fell through and became the Future State event, which did lead into Clark leaving Earth and Jon becoming the main Superman.
The problem from here is twofold. One is that Jon’s solo Superman series failed to take off, and two is that Clark returned almost immediately, just sixteen issues into Jon’s run. So now not only did Jon lose his past potential, but his promised future was snatched away too, leaving him in this nebulous gray zone. Jon’s character was set up to become the only Superman with years of rushed build up that made fans mad but at least promised something awesome at the end of the tunnel, only to smack right into a brick wall. So now Jon is Superman alongside his dad, but because Clark Kent, the greatest superhero of all time in lore with more stories under his belt than any other DC character, Jon naturally falls into Clark’s shadow, and DC has no idea how to get him out of it. It also doesn’t help that Jon’s supporting cast didn’t leave much of a positive impression, either. Dreamer is generally liked, but his main love interest Jay spent the first several years of his existence being a far more boring Lois Lane. The last thing a Lois Lane style character should be is bland, but Jay read as extremely bland for a very long time.
So now DC is in a weird place with Jon. He’s been aged up for way too long to reverse it, but they never spent time establishing who he is as a character outside of being Superman’s son, so they have nowhere to go with him. Worse yet, everything they do with Jon seems geared towards things happening to him, instead of him doing anything. He was trapped by Ultraman for years, then the Superman mantle was forced onto him before he was ready, then that responsibility was ripped away, then he was used as a murder-machine by Amanda Waller. They set him up as the “radical son of Superman” who would push in ways his dad doesn’t, but they never let him do that. They never let Jon do anything! Nicole Maines’s Secret Six run has done more for Jon and Jay as characters in its first five issues than the past five years, focusing on how the world is constantly trying to force Jon to be a monster or go farther than he believes is right, and actually gives Jay a personality all his own.
Jon Kent has so much potential as a character. He’s not just a clone of his father, but can hold just as much hope as he does, and can be a Superman for a different generation while still being Superman. Yet DC has no idea how to let him flourish as a character. They really need to figure it out, because they are wasting one of their best characters in decades, and Jon Kent deserves better.
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