Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason, the creative team best known for their New 52 Batman and Robin run, try and recapture that title’s magic by applying a similar formula to Superman Rebirth, giving Superman a young son sidekick - and unfortunately the result is not nearly as good.
Superman has a son now? you might ask, and, yeah, apparently he does! The New 52 Superman is dead and a flashback to the famous Death of Superman storyline where Superman fought Doomsday establishes that this is a pre-New 52 Superman (minus the red pants); except that dude wasn’t married to Lois and had a kid called Jon, so I don’t know which Superman this is! Did DC need to make this that complicated? Nope, especially as this is intended to be a jumping-on point for new readers (goddammit, they didn’t learn from their mistakes with the New 52!). I have no idea what plans they have for the character but I hope it’ll make sense in the end.
Damian Wayne may have been a little shit but he was at least interesting - Jon isn’t. Aside from the occasional moment where he’s wigging out over his developing powers, he’s a bland kid character without much personality.
The story of this first book is a shameless rip-off of Terminator. Really? Really. The Terminator-esque Eradicator wants to kill off the half of Jon that’s human and preserve the Kryptonian half, which makes no sense - how the hell do you do that without killing him?! Utterly ridiculous. Anyways, Superman and Jon fight Eradicator and you can imagine how it plays out – that’s the whole first volume.
It’s underwhelming, unimaginative stuff per Tomasi’s other Superman books. Gleason’s art is strong and striking at times, there’s a handful of sweet family moments, and it’s readable enough, but not a lot of the first Superman Rebirth book did much for me. For the most part it was disappointing, derivative tedium - a weak start to this Superman run.
No comments:
Post a Comment