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Sunday 14 May 2017

Superwoman, Volume 1: Who Killed Superwoman? Review (Phil Jimenez, Joe Prado)


I’ve come across A LOT of dire, depressingly shitty books as I’ve made my way through DC’s Rebirth line and after finishing each one I’ve naively thought to myself “Well, that’s the worst of the bunch, that’s the bottom of the barrel - nothing’s gonna be worse than (Blank)!” The first was Aquaman. And then along came Nightwing. And then Titans. And then it snowballs as you realise in horror that most of the line is utter garbage. Deathstroke. Hellblazer. Cyborg. Blue bloody Beetle. 

Seeing as I’m now (thankfully) nearing the end of the Rebirth range, I think I can confidently assert this: Superwoman Rebirth is THE ABSOLUTE WORST! You won’t find a more wretched comic than this anywhere else. And I mean anywhere, even outside of Rebirth. Phil Jimenez proves himself to be yet another artist who cannot write, only this dude is exceptionally incompetent and shockingly bad at writing than most others.

The Superman line is a fucking nightmare to follow these days. I think there’s at least two Supermen flying around at the moment plus a Clark Kent who’s totally separate from them AND Lex is pretending to be Superman AND there’s John Henry Irons/Steel; so five Supermen? Then there are the ladies: Lana Lang is Superwoman. But so is Lois Lane - of which there are two, I think? There’s also a Bizarro version of the Superwoman from Earth-3. Fuuuuuuuuck. WHAT A MESS!!!!

This is Jimenez’s badly written/conceived story: Lana has to restore electricity to Metropolis after Lex’s giant battleship somehow knocks out power to the city. Wow, electrical maintenance - just what I’m looking for when I’m picking up a superhero comic! Also there’s suddenly an evil female Lex Luthor called Lena who has generic villain motivations - take over the city, make everyone pay, yadda yadda yadda. A female Superman and a female Lex battling each other. So unimaginative and contrived. Honestly, it took me two weeks to wade through this drivel because it was so unbelievably boring.

And what’s worse is that Jimenez has no clue how to tell a story well. So each page is filled with too many panels full of writing and none of it is worth reading - it barely progresses the crappy story. I’m not even convinced Jimenez even knew what story he was trying to tell it’s so unimpressive, sloppily executed and confused. After reading dozens of these cluttered, dreary pages, imagine the misery turning each page was for me and seeing yet another worthless cascade of instantly forgettable dialogue and captions! And this death-march goes on and on until the end. It’s about as fun as toothache. 

Lex is written out of character as this weak cuck of a man, Lana is Bland Tough Lady, Lena Luthor is an unmemorable baddie… there is nothing good about this one. Not a single, remote thing. I’d give a more detailed, systematic breakdown of this garbage but it doesn’t deserve it - it’s not even good at being entertainingly bad, it’s simply plain awful. Also that would mean re-reading the book and it’s just not worth it. I don’t have the energy and it would exceed my threshold for pain. I’ll literally die before re-reading this book again. And, believe me, I’m staying well the hell away from any comic written by this guy in the future!

The title of the book asks Who Killed Superwoman? The answer’s right there on the cover: Phil Jimenez.

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