Superman traded his best defence for ten seconds of his own future

*Spoiler warning: this discusses events in Superman Unlimited #17 and the ongoing "Kingdom of Zod" storyline.*

DC's current Superman event has an unusually nasty premise. As ComicBook.com's feature describes it, General Zod releases infected Kryptonite across Earth, turning ordinary people into zombies while remaining lethal to Kryptonians — a weapon that attacks the population and the hero with the same substance.

Superman Unlimited #17 resolves the immediate crisis through escalation. Per the feature: Superwoman Lana Lang absorbs what she can from Clark and heals him, nearly tearing herself apart in the process because the Kryptonite carries an altered energy signature. Superman then realises his own cells have begun metabolising that radiation, and — protected by his Golden Form's two-hundred-second Kryptonite immunity — flies the world absorbing the infection from every person and object it has touched.

Pushed past his reserves, he transforms. His missing eye regrows and his costume becomes that of Superman Prime, his far-future counterpart, for roughly ten seconds. Long enough to purge Lana completely. The cost: he returns to normal having lost the ability to turn gold at all, and is now as vulnerable to Kryptonite as he has ever been.

That trade is the actual story. A power-up that ends with the hero weaker than he started is doing something more interesting than a power-up.

Superman Prime — often called Superman One-Million — is the version who spent fifteen thousand years inside a sun and emerged with effectively limitless power. As ComicBook's feature argues, the character has never really functioned as a power set. He functions as an assertion that the future contains someone still doing this job. Reaching that form briefly is less a preview of DC One Million's timeline than a statement that the version of Superman who saves everyone remains the destination.

Whether the lost Golden Form comes back is not addressed. We are not going to guess.

Event issues that hinge on a permanent status-quo change are also the ones worth cataloguing carefully. Titles like this see multiple covers, and the entry in a collection should record which printing and which cover you actually hold — the distinction that will matter in five years.

Details reflect the issue as reported on 18 September 2026.