So here we are — the eagerly anticipated ending.  Prefab numero uno is…

DOOMSDAY

First Appearance: Superman, Man of Steel # 17

“What’s Doomsdays deal?”

Well, if you don’t know already, he’s the guy that killed Superman.

And believe it or not, Doomsday actually hails from Superman’s home planet Krypton.

In an origin story that asks a lot of its readers, a mad-scientist named Bertron attempts to create a lifeform that can survive the ultra harsh environs of ancient Krypton.  He goes about doing this by growing a baby and tossing it into the wild where it can be torn apart by the vicious creatures that dominate the planet’s surface.  Bertron would then collect the remains and clone the child over and over again, until he was able to speed up the evolutionary process, and created a creature that could not only survive the experience, but continiously adapt itself to a point where it could never be killed by the same thing twice.

Things went south from there, and “the Ultimate”, as Doomsday was called back then, was eventually exiled from Krypton only to terrorize other planets in the DCU.  Eventually, he was contained by the inhabitants of Calaton, who then did the same thing as Bertron, and launched him off into space for somebody else to worry about… and of course, he landed on Earth.

He “hibernated” for centuries, before waking up in the ’90s and going totally apeshit across most of the United States.

“No concept of gentleness or beauty… it just wants to kill.”

-Louise Simonson

After Doomsday nearly killed every member of the Justice League, Superman decided to put himself in the monsters way again and again, and become the primary focus of its aggression.  The two of them fought for the better part of a day, before ending up in Metropolis, where Superman pledged to end Doomsday’s rampage once and for all… and died doing that very thing.

“What makes Doomsday a prefab villian?”

“Let’s just kill him!”

As the story goes, that was Jerry Ordway’s stock answer whenever group editor Mike Carlin asked his team “What do we do with Superman?” at DC’s annual Superman summit.

But in 1991, DC found themselves in little bit of a bind, and suddently Ordway’s suggestion seemed like it maybe wasn’t such a bad idea.  Y’see, just a year or so before, the Superman team had set up the engagement and eventual marriage of Clark Kent and Lois Lane.  But ABC was riding high on the popularity of Superman’s TV adventures on Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and wanted to marry them on TV first.  Now, faced with having to push their main storyline back for an indefinite period of time, DC did the unthinkable and announced they were killing off Superman.

But how would it happen?  Who would do the deed?   Shouldn’t it be his arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor?  Probably, yeah, but he’s on the show, too.  Okay, well what about one of his other villains?  Yeeeaaah, sorry… they kind of suck, and nobody’d really care.  But what about creating a brand new villain to take him out?  A guy that no one had seen before, not even Superman… and a character that keeps both existing and the sure to be new readers on the same page.

Enter: Doomsday — a Hulk-like figure that Superman writer/artist Dan Jurgens had been toying with introducing for a year or so.  A muscle bound powerhouse that could stand toe-to-toe with the Man of Steel, and even more, take his life.