Superman: At Earth's End / YMMV

Accidental Aesop:
- Guns really are the answer. Even when people tell you they're not.
- Settle your disagreements not with words, but by screaming "I AM A MAN!" and punching someone in the guts.
Broken Aesop: Superman loses (most of) his powers and has to rely on a gigantic machine gun to solve his problems. After using his gun to kill two Hitlers and a Batman zombie (don't ask), he tells his allies (some little kids with guns) that he's dying. The little kids then bawl and say that guns killed Superman before throwing all of their guns into a bonfire. Of course, no one bothers to point out that guns also saved the kids from two Hitlers and a Batman zombie! Worse is the fact that Superman himself admitted that the only thing keeping all these kids alive in this After the End GOTHAM was those guns.
Complete Monster: The DNA Diktators, revealed to be cloned twins of Adolf Hitler, are two biology-perverting madmen obsessed with continuing their work from World War II in creating a "Master Race". As clones of Hitler, the Diktators happily take responsibility for their original form's crimes, and continue these in the present by rounding up thousands of innocents, performing horrific experiments on them that leave them in constant agony, then grinding them up into raw material to create an army of mutant Nazi stormtroopers. After their mutant monsters fail to murder numerous children who escaped the Diktators' grasp, the Diktators order the children, alongside Superman, all murdered by their various creations, even having defiled the corpse of the hero Batman by using his corpse to create nightmarish bat monsters that they sic on Superman to torment him. Utter sociopaths with delusions of godhood and megalomania, these clones of Hitler display all of their original's cruelty and evil in their quest for a perfect race.
Continuity Lockout: The storyline in general doesn't depend too much on having read Kamandi At Earth's End and can mostly be taken as its own post-apocalyptic Elseworlds story. That being said, the opening sequence can come across more than a little confusing to people who haven't read the prequel, likely leaving them wondering why Superman looks so old, why he's in the company of a bunch of cyborgs, and why these cyborgs want to destroy Gotham City.
Fan Nickname
- Due to this Superman's inability to act like Superman by using a giant freaking chaingun to combat the DNA Diktators instead of... you know, punching them, Linkara starts calling him "Bearded Idiot" and at one point, refers to the comic itself as "Bearded Idiot: At Earth's End".
- There was also Super Santa Claus... due to him... looking like Santa Claus with a Superman suit on.
Ho Yay: This ramps the traditional Superman/Batman subtext up to eleven, an impressive achievment with one of them long dead. Superman talks so much about Batman... and as if this wasn't enough, he immolates himself at the end... while holding Batman's corpse.
Memetic Mutation:
- Linkara helped turn "I AM A MAN! *punch*" and "Of course, don't you know anything about science?" into memes.
- Bearded Idiot. ^Explanation
Narm: Most of the comic, but in particular a scene where the Batcave has the gun that killed Bruce's parents... explicitly labeled as such in a display case Adam West-style.
Signature Scene
- Thanks in part to Linkara, the first scene that immediately comes to mind for people when this book is mentioned is Superman screaming "I AM A MAN!" and punching right through Ben Boxer early on in the story.
- Superman picking up the Expunger out from Batman's stash and letting loose with it.
So Bad, It's Good: The over-the-top nature manages to get some fans that laugh at its ridiculousness. A comic where a Santa-bearded Superman fights twin clones of Hitler with a giant chaingun while decrying the use of firearms is certainly something that needs to be seen to be believed.

YMMV / Superman: At Earth's End

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