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Warning! Spoilers for DC Horror Presents… #4!DC Comics has potentially the largest collection of superheroes out of any publisher. Naturally, not all of these characters can have amazing and fantastic powers. DC has plenty of goofy characters, such as Matter-Eater Lad, who just got a story that will likely give me nightmares for weeks due to how horrifying the story made his powers.
The Legion of Super-Heroes of the 31st century is a team full of powerful characters, such as a descendant of Brainiac, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad. Its silliest member may just be Matter-Eater Lad, but after the second story from DC Horror Presents… #4 by Steve Kostanski, Brendan Hay, and Logan Faerber, I don’t think his powers are all that goofy anymore.
Being a legionnaire can be a tough job. The Legion of Super-Heroes is a superhero team from the far off future that is full of both teenagers and young adults. This team deals with inter-galactic level threats and has often traveled through time as well, even recruiting a young Superman at one point. But now DC is finally exploring the team’s horrific potential.
Matter-Eater Lad’s Powers Are Completely Horrifying in a New DC Story
DC Horror Presents… #4 By Steve Kostanski, Brendan Hay, Logan Faerber, and Simon Bowland
Matter-Eater Lad is a Bismollian, which gives him the power of superhuman digestion. Matter-Eater Lad does as his name implies; he can eat any form of matter at all, including solid, liquid, and even gas. Things like ray-guns taste pretty good to him, and iron chains are evidently like chocolate cake. Even more concerning is that Matter-Eater Lad is capable of eating matter at super-speed. He can’t do anything else at super speed, but when he’s eating, he will continually move faster and faster until he runs out of food.
Matter-Eater Lad doesn’t exactly want to eat the corpse of this villain…
I never really saw this power as all that scary, considering Matter-Eater Lad never seemed to use it offensively. He’d just eat through walls or vault doors or whatever the Legion of Super-Heroes needed. My perception changed after reading this issue, however, as it’s revealed that one of Matter-Eater Lad’s jobs on the team is to consume contraband and various garbage. He claims that he once ate seven years of United Planets shipping receipts. But by far the most disturbing request was having Matter-Eater Lad consume the corpse of an executed criminal to dispose of him.
I Won’t Be Able to Sleep for Weeks…
Matter-Eater Lad doesn’t exactly want to eat the corpse of this villain, which results in the villain resurrecting and transforming everyone into zombies. Seeing the infection threatening to break out of the space station they’re on, Matter-Eater Lad simply goes on an eating rampage. He consumes every single infected person, and he does it in only a matter of seconds. Terrifyingly enough, Matter-Eater Lad mentions that this isn’t the first time he’s eaten living or undead flesh, as he’s been in situations where he’s had to eat conscious beings before, which proved to be traumatizing for everyone involved – including me.
This simple story took a character who was mostly a goofy side character for a superhero team that most people don’t know about and transformed him into a being of my nightmares. When I was growing up I always saw images of Matter-Eater Lad doing silly things like eating an entire plane, but now I have to deal with the image of him consuming dozens upon dozens of zombies in under a few seconds. At one point, when someone realizes that they’ve been infected, they even beg Matter-Eater Lad to eat them before they transform, which was a surprisingly dark turn.
This Once-Goofy Legion of Super-Heroes Co-Star Is Now the Scariest Hero in DC’s Roster
Why Couldn’t Matter-Eater Lad Have Stuck to Eating Planes?
A lot of characters have incredibly terrifying applications for their superpowers. Superman, after all, is capable of performing a quick lobotomy on someone with his heat vision. Spider-Man can use his sticky grip to rip the skin off someone’s face, which he actually did once. There are many terrifying uses for superpowers, but usually the goofier a power is, the less interested a creator is in exploring its horrific potential. Everyone wants to write a twisted, scary Superman, but I didn’t expect Matter-Eater Lad to be the true horror in the DC Universe.
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At the end of the day, Matter-Eater Lad is a hero, and he proved that when he quickly devoured what was nearly a zombie outbreak. He ate everyone in his path and saved the day. I just don’t think I will be able to get the image of his true, terrifying potential out of my head anytime soon. It certainly didn’t help that the villain in question was a red gooey alien, allowing Matter-Eater Lad to leave giant red smears everywhere as he consumed everyone. While some people find characters like the Joker or Doomsday to be scary, I’ll always be terrified of DC Comics’ Matter-Eater Lad.
DC Horror Presents… #4 is available now from DC Comics!
“}]] This goofy DC hero just got a nightmarish story. Read More