Preus
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- For other uses, see Preus (disambiguation).
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Preus is a fictional character and supervillain who appears in stories published by DC Comics. First appearing in Superman (2nd series) #202 (2004), he was created by Joe Kelly and Talent Caldwell.
[edit] History
For years, Sergeant Preus had proudly served the Citizen's Patrol Corps, a police force that kept the peace in Kandor under the Kryptonian banner of El, their "creator." Due to the compression of time, more than a century had passed inside the bottle city (compared to only a handful of years outside it) during which Preus and his fellow Kandorians had come to worship "The Superman" as their "god in heaven" above.
The Corpsman was also a devout xenophobe who dispensed justice against "non-K" (Kandorian) dissidents that threatened their way of life, especially a citizen named Kal-El who forever tainted Paradise when he seemingly murdered several Kandorians.
Preus swore a solemn oath to make the murderer pay, not realizing that Kal-El was actually the Superman he and others had worshipped for so long. He was also unaware that the "victims" were constructs created by an alien telepath, Lyla, who had brainwashed Kal-El into believing that Kandor was a never-exploded Krypton. Eventually shattering the illusion, Superman escaped Kandor and confronted Lyla back in Metropolis. Preus followed them, but exposure to Earth's air and yellow sun drastically affected him, giving him strange, new powers equal to Superman's while amplifying his already-unbalanced racist views. Convinced that Kal-El defiles the legacy of "The Superman," Preus swore to assume that responsibility himself, and that all of the impure would die by his hand.
His xenophobia led him to a group of white supremacists in the American desert, who he forced into worshipping him and his views. However, in time, the people of "God's Peake" (as the camp was called) came to worship him as their cult leader. His increasing prominence eventually led both Martian Manhunter and Jimmy Olsen to investigate, only to have both of them captured by Preus and his men. This forced a confrontation with Superman, who at the time was dealing with the effects of Gog's synthetic yellow kryptonite, which had significantly aged and weakened Superman in a short period of time. So weakened, Superman was barely able to deal with Preus' legions alone, and quickly found himself outclassed by the (at the time) much more vital Preus. A last-ditch gambit using kryptonite to try and weaken Preus failed, as Preus revealed a previously unknown resistance to kryptonite. However, he was finally defeated when Superman attacked and destroyed a key portion of Preus' armor, rendering him unconscious. Afterwards Preus was injured from that attack and had to be hospitalized. His current whereabouts are unknown.
