Source: Blackest Night: Superman (2010)
Type: Alternate Earth/Villainous copy
Back when the multiverse had an infinite number of parallels, one parallel's Superman became a hero who, when his reality collapsed, chose to go beyond the wall of the reconstructed universe to prevent a paradox. Later, he returned to the universe and was killed. Then, a Black Lantern ring recreated him as a zombie with all the same memories, but not the original's morality and personality. That is a pretty convoluted premise for a character. But if could have been worse...
5 Ways to Make Black Lantern Superman's origins more convoluted
1. Blackest Night was all a dream made manifest by Guardian energy tapped from the Power Battery on Oa.
2. The Superman of Earth-2 who returned in Infinite Crisis is actually a Durlan spy.
3. Grant Morrison has written a 3-year story about the character and its roots to the Silver Age, covering 4 series and an untold number of connected mini-series and specials.
4. The spirit inhabiting its corpse time traveled from a far future when everyone's been resurrected; however, it (and all other Lantern spirits) went insane in the time vortex.
5. Midichlorians!
(More convolutions in the comments!)
Type: Alternate Earth/Villainous copy
Back when the multiverse had an infinite number of parallels, one parallel's Superman became a hero who, when his reality collapsed, chose to go beyond the wall of the reconstructed universe to prevent a paradox. Later, he returned to the universe and was killed. Then, a Black Lantern ring recreated him as a zombie with all the same memories, but not the original's morality and personality. That is a pretty convoluted premise for a character. But if could have been worse...5 Ways to Make Black Lantern Superman's origins more convoluted
1. Blackest Night was all a dream made manifest by Guardian energy tapped from the Power Battery on Oa.
2. The Superman of Earth-2 who returned in Infinite Crisis is actually a Durlan spy.
3. Grant Morrison has written a 3-year story about the character and its roots to the Silver Age, covering 4 series and an untold number of connected mini-series and specials.
4. The spirit inhabiting its corpse time traveled from a far future when everyone's been resurrected; however, it (and all other Lantern spirits) went insane in the time vortex.
5. Midichlorians!
(More convolutions in the comments!)
Comments
Or, Superman-2 sold his soul to Mephisto in exchange for Mephisto undoing Crisis on Infinite Earths--but, ironic fate, Geoff Johns had already done that, so Black Lantern Superman is cursed to blah blah...
And it's already more convoluted that you present it because we're not just talking one random parallel world Superman but the original one, and then you have to explain how the current one isn't the original one, and how the current one isn't really the one that replaced this one either, although exactly what happened to that one [in-universe] is opaque at best and probably convoluted enough to satisfy anyone if fully explicated...
First all the different Corps started to show up, each with a color from the rainbow representing an emotion. And if there were colored Lanterns, then there was also a Black Lantern, and the colored Lanterns had to fight the Blackest Night (from their oath). All the black rings came out of Anti-Monitor's corpse or something and went to the hands of every dead person in the DCU, thus zombies.
Brightest Day (also from the Oath), seems in part about who will be the White Lantern of Life. It's the Green/Yellow scheme of the Green Lantern mythos taken to its extreme logical point.
But ask and ye shall receive: How about tomorrow?