The Reign of the Superboys is upon us! In the wake of DC K.O., the next major DC Universe event casts the spotlight on Conner Kent (in the pages of Supergirl), Jon Kent (in Superman Unlimited), the young Clark Kent (in Action Comics) and the infamous Superboy Prime (in Superman). To find out if the DC Universe is big enough for four Superboys, we sat down with the event’s architect, K.O. and Superman writer Joshua Williamson. Here’s what he had to tell us about letting the boys come out to play.

How did Reign of the Superboys come about?

It's funny, we plan these things so far out and we knew almost two years ago that at the end of K.O., Superman was going to go missing. We knew that part of the story. I was trying to figure what kind of story I wanted to tell, and when you have these long runs on these characters, at some point it's fun to have somebody replace your character. Like Jean-Paul Valley or Dick Grayson becoming Batman.

I was like, “Who’s the wildest person I could possibly have fill in for Superman? Prime. Prime would be something that I’ve never seen before.” Paul Kaminsky, the Metropolis Group Editor at DC, came to my house and we were mapping everything out. I was like, “I know who's going to replace Superman. It's going to be Prime.” Paul was like, “Well, if you're going to do that, you have to reintroduce him. You’ve got to bring him back in.”

Once we started talking about it, then it became this conversation. There isn't just one Superman book. There are multiple Superman books—there's Unlimited, there's Action, there's obviously Supergirl… Paul, one day, was like, “What if it's Reign of the Superboys? What if we repeat history a little bit, but with a modern twist and we do something unexpected?” I was like, “Yes, perfect.”

Then we started building it out and looking at where all the Superboys were. Where was Conner? Where was Prime? Where was Jon? And can we find a home for all of them? We started talking to the books’ writers. At the time, we knew Action was going to be about young Clark. This had been built in for a while. So, you have a book about young Clark being Superboy for the first time. We also have Jon Kent. All these pieces. Then it’s a question of how does this all connect? How can we tell our own stories?

We started looking at all the pieces that all of us were building, and it just organically came together. It just worked. We knew Superman was going to go missing and then the conversation was, “What happens next?” Which is always the fun part.

How might this storyline impact things moving forward?

Part of the goal was for these books to each be their own individual story. I'm doing the Prime story. Waid is doing the story where Booster leads a team of Justice Leaguers to try to find Superman and they end up in the past. Unlimited is going to focus on Jon Kent and the adventures he’s having. We knew Supergirl was going to go into Kandor, and Conner is going to be with her.

We each wanted to make sure we were telling our own stories. However, each one will have pieces that will build to a collision. We will have a big crossover story afterwards. Everyone's going to tell their stories. For the ending, there will be some important Supergirl connective tissue. Because obviously we're having the Summer of Supergirl.

Prime is the Superman character everybody loves, but many might be afraid to admit they love. Why do creators keep bringing him back?

I really liked him from the get-go. He was the voice of the audience in a weird way, but not completely. He was the voice of the fan that was obsessed with nostalgia in the past. He was that for a while. Then he became the voice of the trolls and the voice of the internet. He became all these things. He started out as misguided. He's had these extremes, where he went evil, and he embraced his role. He embraced his anger. Then we brought him back around.

Years ago, Scott Snyder, James Tynion and I were at a convention together and we were talking about Death Metal, about what we wanted to see. We were like, “Oh man, I really want to see Prime versus Batman Who Laughs!” So Geoff Johns ended up writing that issue, Death Metal: The Secret Origin, and it ended up being his wrap-up of what he felt was Prime’s arc. By the end of it, he became a much more sympathetic character.

It was the beginning of what I see as a redemption arc, and I was going to pick it up. But you can do things with him and say things with him in a different way. I think that's where the fun of it is. He's also us—the idea that we all love comics, we're all very opinionated about them. Then if we were suddenly thrown into that world, how would we react? You get to have a very different kind of meta message with him. He has his own point of view on things. You feel for him because he wants to be a hero so badly, but he's so misguided. He's so getting in his own way.

I personally am obsessed with continuity, but I've grown up to be like, “I can honor it and then move forward.” That's my attitude towards a lot of things. “Yes, it happened. It's awesome. I love it. We have to move the ball forward.” I would hope at this point, after everything Prime has gone through, that he has grown a bit. But he's still a nerd.

Can you say what role the other Superboys will play in this event?

After K.O., Booster Gold says he feels a responsibility to find Superman because Superman found him. So, he tries. He takes a team from the Justice League to go and find Superman. In the process, they get sidetracked, they end up in the past, and he gets to meet young Clark. But they're stranded there. So young Clark—instead of, in the past, where the first superheroes he met were the Legion of Super-Heroes—here he meets Booster Gold, Mary Marvel and Martian Manhunter. It’s a very different experience, his first time meeting heroes from the future. You get to see Clark's little adventure that he goes on with them and that'll play a bigger role in the summer. With young Clark getting to see this much bigger world outside of Smallville and seeing this wild future, what does that mean for him?

Sophie [Campbell] is doing an amazing job on Supergirl. It’s so much fun… We don't do enough with Conner, so I'm really glad he's in that book and he'll be important to stuff we have planned. Prime and Conner have a very difficult history. They do not like each other. I think Prime would probably be a little bit like, “Water under the bridge. It happened in the past.” Conner would be like, “No, you killed me. I'm very mad about that. I'm going to punch you in the face now.”

When we get to that, it'll be really fun and interesting. We'll get there eventually. The first time you end up seeing them together, one of them has the other one in a headlock. [laughs]

Then Unlimited is still going to carry forth some of the plot points from the stuff that's been going on with the Kryptonite Kingdom. But we're also going to explore this young Jon Kent—what happened exactly? It's this big mystery of who Tomorrow Man is and what's going on with young Jon Kent.
 

Superman #36 by Joshua Williamson, Dan Mora and Alejandro Sánchez is available this week in print and as a digital comic book.