Secret Origins #49 (June 1990)
Secret Origins #49 (June 1990)
The secret origin of Project Cadmus! Or not so secret since we already found out about it in Superman Annual #2, but this does fill-in some important details.
Cadmus, as you may know, is a secret DNA-experimenting facility dedicated to cloning people and creating weird shit (or DNAliens™). One time, a pervert from space forced the five founders of Cadmus to clone young versions of themselves, so now they have mini-mes running around the place. In this issue the founders reminisce about that time, and also another time when their most brilliant scientist, Dabney Donovan, went crazy, created some monsters and then killed himself.
Meanwhile, the mini-mes (or “Newsboy Legion,” as they voluntarily call themselves) have sneaked out of their room to explore the underground caves around Cadmus. One of them, Gabby, gets separated from the others when his friend’s butt accidentally shoves him down a shaft. Gabby ends up in lush subterranean garden full of bizarre stuff, including a giant spider that tries to eat him. The spider is then scared away by a big, furniture-eating creature called Angry Charlie, whom Gabby tames by giving him chewing gum. No, I didn’t just make up everything in that sentence.
Anyway, Gabby runs into a rather disheveled-looking but still alive Dabney Donovan (the one who killed himself was presumably a clone). Donovan says that everything Gabby sees in this secret garden is his creation, then sics his personal vampire, Dragorin, on the kid. Once again Charlie saves Gabby and deposits him safely back on Cadmus, where he’s found by the other Newboys and their protector, The Guardian. And of course, no one believes a word of what Gabby says happened to him. THE END?
Plotline-Watch:
I’m not gonna include every vaguely Superman-related issue of other comics in this blog, because most of them are just throwaway cameos that add nothing to the continuity, and also they’re boring crap. This issue is both non-boring and continuity-relevant, though, since it’s written by the great Karl Kesel, who will eventually join the Superman books as a writer. In fact, it’s amazing how much stuff Kesel planted in this short story that would only pay off years later:
Dabney Donovan, who was first seen in Superman #39 (he created Simyan and Mokkari), will play a HUGE role in a HUGE upcoming storyline featuring a certain red-haired Australian. Also, Donovan using clones to fake his death will become a grand tradition.
It’s briefly mentioned that Cadmus cloned a gangster called “Bullets” Barstow just to see if they could make him non-evil by tweaking his DNA. The experiment is deemed a success, but considering that Barstow’s clone will become a Superman villain in 1996, I’m not so sure about that.
There’s some vague talk about how the clones created by Cadmus have weird brain activity. Also, one of the DNAliens Donovan created before faking his death was “defective” and spontaneously combusted. It is my (totally unsupported) theory that this is the origin of the Great Clone Plague of ‘94.
Someone mentions a plan to create “miniature marine troopers” using the DNA of the rowdiest Newsboy, Scrapper. That… actually happens.
Not a future plot but a past one: since this issue takes place before Superman #34, when the Newboys are sneaking out of Cadmus they see the winged kids created by Skyhook, who hadn’t been cured yet.
WTF-Watch:
This issue is full of references to the old Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen comics by Jack Kirby where Project Cadmus first appeared, including the mention of “giant green Jimmy Olsens” here:
Let’s overthink what was clearly meant as a joke, shall we? Didn’t Donovan leave Cadmus when Jimmy was just a little boy? We know this because Jimmy’s government agent dad abandoned Jimmy as a kid to look for Donovan’s rogue creations. So why does Donovan want to create a giant green version of a random Cadmus employee’s kid? At least this gives some historical precedent to Mokkari and Simyan’s inexplicable obsession with Jimmy’s mom.
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