Warning: Spoilers for Tales From The Dark Multiverse: Flashpoint #1 ahead!
Deep within the folds of the Dark Multiverse of DC lore, Cyborg is borrowing a page from Spider-Man’s book. When it comes to famous taglines, mottos, mantras and one-liners, Spider-Man’s “with great power comes great responsibility” is one of the all-time greats, if not the greatest superhero slogan in all of comics. Not to be outdone by a human spider, the human machine known as Cyborg has his own battle cry and victory line in the popular phrase, “Booyah!” an exclamation that is now synonymous with the character in all of his iterations. In Tales From The Dark Multiverse: Flashpoint #1 by Bryan Hitch (pulling double duties as writer and artist), a different version of Cyborg fights the good fight with Spidey’s iconic mindset in tow.
Taking place in a recent issue of the popular series Tales From The Dark Multiverse, which shows what would have happened during DC’s most iconic events such as Crisis on Infinite Earths or Blackest Night had the bad guys gotten the upper hand and won, this issue in particular uses the continuity-altering Flashpoint event from Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert as a jumping-off point to tell a story where Reverse-Flash, aka Eobard Thawne, successfully kills the Flash and takes the world for himself.
And it’s here that Cyborg, now inside the fully robotic body of one of the soldiers in his all-machine army, does Spidey dirty by slightly modifying (yet still totally stealing), his famous motto. When discussing why he and Flashpoint Batman are about to attempt a jail-break, Cyborg tells Bats, “We have power and it should be our responsibility to use it to help those who don’t…” a suspiciously similar statement and reasoning for why Spider-Man does what he does and why he uses Uncle Ben’s iconic phrase as a moral compass on the daily.
Seeing the sheer chaos that Thawne has wrought in the wake of becoming the “owner” of the entirety of the United States (yes, really), and the fact that he has taken out nearly every threat that can stand against him – Flash included – Batman, aka Thomas Wayne, and Cyborg take it upon themselves to search out and free a mysterious man imprisoned deep underground linked to a secret called Project: Superman, a man that might just be strong enough to stop Thawne once and for all.
So while Spider-Man and Cyborg might be entirely different in terms of their superhero antics, their mindset in why they are – at heart – superheroes to begin with can be summed up in these two comparable comments. And who knows, maybe somewhere else in the Dark Multiverse another version of Cy actually is spouting the phrase verbatim, so let’s hope Spidey is getting some kind of royalties for that one.
