The Monstrefact: DC Comics' Doomsday

Superman in the early nineteen nineties. While the superhero's death didn't last too long, it was certainly a great way to launch a supervillain's career, and Doomsday has remained one of the resurrected Superman's most recognizable foes. His creation is credited to Jan Jurgens Brett Breeding, Jerry Ordway, Louise Simonson, and Roger Stern. In d C Anatomy of a Meta Human by S. D. Perry and Matthew K. Manning, with illustrations by Ming Doyle, the author's lay out Doomsday's tragic

origin story. An alien scientist named Bertron takes a humanoid child and exposes that child to the deadly prehistoric environment of the planet Krypton. The child dies but Bertron resurrects the child via advanced cloning technology and reintroduces the child

to the wild with added traits to protect them. The child dies again, and the amoral Bertrron continues the cycle over and over again, using sci fi cloning technology in the place of natural selection to eventually produce an incredibly tough super being, the ultimate metahuman combatant, now virtually undying himself incapable of amazing feats of regeneration. This is the

being that will become known as Doomsday. However, as Doomsday retains the traumatic memory of his many formative deaths, he's ultimately tormented by the rage so much that he eventually kills his mad scientist creator and continues to see the face of his hated creator in others and rages against them incessantly. It's a clever twist on evolution, melding the science of natural selection, the philosophy of Frederic Nietzsche, and

the psychological trauma. It's also interesting when we start considering the idea of resurrection from a religious and mythological standpoint. Superman in the Death of Superman's story arc quite clearly echoes the religious motif of the dying and rising god, famously seen in such figures as the ancient Egyptian Osiris

and the Christian Jesus. Doomsday is seemingly something else, though not a god who has died and come back, but a mortal who has died and come back so many times that he has become at least a demi god and a potential slayer of the divine. Though in many

ways Doomsday is not so different. After all, there is a cyclical aspect to the death and resurrection of such religious figures as of Cyrus and Jesus as well, making their deaths and resurrections also quite numerable in a sense, even in cases where there is only the singular death in the singular resurrection. These events are often remembered or celebrated alongside cyclical events like the passing of the seasons and the inundation of the Nile River, but they are

still singular resurrections celebrated cyclically in multitude. Doomsday, however, has experienced a multitude of deaths across linear time. In this you could argue that he is a modern secular linear perversion of the cyclical sacred and mythic and therefore a fitting opponent for the godlike Superman, but I would be very interested to hear what you think about the matter.

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