Broken Frontier

Over the years, Superman has had many goofy opponents and one of the generally most scorned of his adversaries has been the Prankster. Like his often partner the Toyman, the Prankster is often an overweight man in a loud suit with no superpowers, and who creates various devices of dubious humour to bedevil the Man of Steel. He generally comes off as a second banana Batman adversary who has somehow decided that fighting Superman was a good idea, and any villain who spends a lot of his time as the Toyman's sidekick is someone in serious need of a make-over.

So how could the Prankster be improved? In what way would a non-powered individual playing pranks on Superman become a convincing and interesting villain? Any of you remember the TV show Lois & Clark: the New Adventures of Superman from the 90s? Because of budget and a general desire to downplay supervillain fights, many of the adversaries of the show used non-violent, non-super ways to defeat Superman, such as pumping him full of radiation so he needs to isolate himself from everyone, or having the city declare it illegal for Superman to fight crime. Though a trope of the show, it is a villain tactic generally absent from the comics.

What if the Prankster's tactics were like that? He doesn't rely on high-tech prank-based weapons but instead on various large scale practical jokes that bedevil the hero without the villain ever directly fighting him.

To allow the Prankster to compete with Superman, make him a computer hacker who operates almost entirely through cyberspace. Thus Superman's powers are almost irrelevant against him because the two never physically meet, instead relying on a battle of wits. A nod to the original comedian version of the Prankster could be the cartoon icon that appears on screen when someone's been “pranked,” a little role-poly man in a bad suit and straw boater who jeers from the computer.

In real life, the Prankster is a totally different person, a teenage computer whiz-kid in South Korea who got rich through Starcraft tournaments and computer fraud and then decided to amuse himself through global mischief, eventually settling on the world's greatest superhero, who he annoys from the other side of the globe. Perhaps he's even discovered Superman's secret identity but chooses not to reveal it to the world as that would remove part of Superman's charm. Prankster would rather use that knowledge to annoy Superman further. It's one of the reasons why Superman has to “play along” with the Prankster's games more than he'd like; if he annoys the Prankster too much or gets him bored, the villain might go public with Superman's secret. In fact, this is one of the few circumstances where the villain knows who the hero really is, but the hero doesn't know the villain's identity.

Thanks to a combination of genius, computer skills, and money, the Prankster can do a lot to make Superman's life a frustration: hack into police files and forge a warrant for the arrest of Superman over the murder of Clark Kent, divert money out of the Daily Planet's accounts so that the Planet is in danger of bankruptcy and all signs point to Perry White embezzling funds, order a necklace for Lois that she thinks was a present from Clark, but actually contains a new kind of Kryptonite. In the end, few things are as dangerous as the new Prankster discovering he's played all his video games and there's nothing good on TV, so once again it's time to create his own entertainment.

In the end, this is a Prankster who's much fresher and modern. He is an enemy who is virtually untouchable, who Superman cannot hunt down, but can only react to. A figure who is ruthless because to him all this is a game to kill time between finishing dinner with his family and reading some comics before going to bed.