Notice! Contains spoilers for Action Comics #1072!
There are many powerful villains in the DC Universe and Superman You don’t always have the strength to defeat them. Sometimes he has to resort to other methods of victory, such as trapping them in the Phantom Zone. While Superman has always done this as a last resort, he may have to abandon it completely now as the Phantom Zone has become much more dangerous.
While most fans know that being in the Phantom Zone is not a pleasant experience, it has just been upgraded to a whole new level of misery in Action comics #1072 by Mark Waid and Clayton Henry. The Phantom Zone has always been a miserable place because of how it freezes the prisoners in time, never letting them feel hunger or temperature or anything, they can’t even age.
If this sounds like a miserable experience, the mysterious Aethyr agrees and arrives to try and make the Phantom Zone more habitable. He started by removing the intangibility of the people trapped inside, but quickly learned that allowing a bunch of homicidal and violent criminals to physically interact with each other doesn’t end well.
Aethyr made the ghost zone much more miserable
Action comics #1072 by Mark Waid, Clayton Henry, Michael Shelfer, Matt Herms and Dave Sharpe.
The Phantom Zone is one of the darkest legacies of Superman’s father, Jor-El. Originally, Krypton would use regular prisons or simply send its criminals into space to get rid of them. Eventually, Jor-El managed to discover the Phantom Zone, which he hoped would be a more human answer. Using the Phantom Zone, criminals could serve their sentences and simply think about what they had done and reflect on their crimes. When the sentence ended, they would not have aged a day, which would allow them to return to society without losing their life span. It was a noble idea.
There is no temperature or climate, no physical touch or smell. There is nothing there, it could easily be considered mental torture.
While the Phantom Zone has the benefits of preventing people from aging, as well as unwittingly saving them from Krypton’s destruction, there are also some serious drawbacks. The Phantom Zone is essentially a giant sensory deprivation chamber. There is no temperature or climate, no physical touch or smell. There is nothing there, it could easily be considered mental torture. Because of this, Aethyr changed the Phantom Zone so the Phantom Zoners were no longer intangible, but they immediately began murdering each other, leading Aethyr to summon destructive weather and monsters to populate the Phantom Zone.
The Phantom Zone is now DC’s worst prison
No one deserves to be sent here
While Aethyr’s goals were noble, there is simply nothing for a group of criminals to do in a kingdom with no need for food or water, which is just an empty zone. Literally their only option is to start fighting and killing each other to assert dominance. While Aethyr tried to make their lives easier, he ended up making the Phantom Zone even more of a hellish prison, with tons of dangerous dangers, made even worse by the fact that the prisoners could now die. While Superman has always used the Phantom Zone as a last resort, he may never be able to use it again in good conscience.
Action comics #1072 It’s on sale now at DC Comics!