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By Kurt Busiek, Geoff Johns, Pete Woods & Renato Guedes
(DC Comics)Â ISBN 1-84576-348-3
After the never-ending calamity of the DC Infinite Crisis event, the company re-set the time line of all their publications to begin one year later. This enabled them to refit their characters as they saw fit, provide a jumping on point for new converts and also gave themselves some narrative wiggle-room.
During that missing year, Superman vanished and Supergirl became the guardian of Metropolis. Clark Kent and his wife lived a normal, happy and successful life. Clark had adapted to a human scale of operation, but now that’s all about to change.
Lex Luthor is freed from prison – corporate lawyers never lose their powers – and moves to retake ‘his city’, the ex-Man of Steel still consorts with the likes of Green Lantern and Hawkgirl, but chooses to fight evil with a typewriter and a press pass. So when a plague of villains attacks, he’s helpless to resist the assault. Luckily that’s when his powers start to return, just as Luthor takes control of an ancient Kryptonian warship and moves to conquer the world. Can a gradually recovering but markedly under par Superman defeat the limitless power of the Kryptonite warship and regain his pre-eminent status as Earth’s greatest hero?
Of course he can. There’s no suspense here, and I suspect no attempt was made to create any. Everybody knows how this will end and the creators have wisely concentrated on spectacle rather than narrative. After the establishing set-ups there is a dogged trudge to the inevitable triumph and then the board is cleared for new adventures. This is not a great start for the rebooted Man of Tomorrow but it is a necessary one, although I do wonder how this story would have evolved if the movie Superman Returns had been released in a different year…
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