War of the Supermen #0

Another leftover: This is from last year's FCBD, but I picked it up this past weekend.

Title: War of the Supermen
Issue: #0
Date: June 2010
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: James Robinson, Sterling Gates
Penciler: Eddy Barrows
Inker: J. P. Mayer
Art For Second Story: Julian Lopez, Bit, Aaron Lopresti, David Finch, Joe Weems, Gary Frank, Cafu, Ethan Van Sciver, Diogenes Neves, Vincente Cifuentes, Blond
Colorist: Rod Reis
Letterer: John J. Hill
Editor: Matt Idelson, Will Moss

If (like me) you're clueless about the storyline that leads up to this "war", you should read this book in reverse order. The second story is basically a recap, told in the form of Lois Lane's notes for her story on New Krypton. Or you could just let me fill you in. New Krypton is what became of the classic bottle-city of Kandor of Silver-Age fame. The bottle-city was a Kryptonian city shrunk down to micro-scale, which the writers would find various reasons for Superman to be unable to find a way to restore to full size.

Well, someone finally realized how silly that was. Actually, what happened was that someone realized that the concept was silly, and instead of leaving it where it belonged (as a nostalgic memory along with Jimmy Olsen as Elasto-Boy), they decided that the story would be less silly if they went ahead and un-shrunk Kandor.

Nope. Still silly.

So now you've got an entire population of super-persons on an artificial planet, presumably on the other side of the sun from Earth. And they've gone and elected Christopher Reeve era villain General Zod as their supreme leader. Superman, suspecting that Zod has evil intents, has infiltrated the General's forces. But he still acts shocked when it turns out that, yes, the evil villain who was exiled to the Phantom Zone turns out to really be an evil villain. Shocking, I know.

Superman comes crashing through the wall, but everyone's got superpowers. Ursa (last seen losing her powers and then getting taken out with one punch by Margot Kidder at the end of Superman II) has a kryptonite knife. Really. A kryptonite knife. Apparently just so they can show a bit of blood, because we all know that you can't have a really good Superman story without blood.

The most annoying thing about this, really, is that Superman behaves like an idiot through this entire scene. A lot of people have gripes about the Superman character, but what I've always liked about him is that when he is written well, he thinks his way out of problems rather than slugging his way out. This is not one of those stories.

And even the attempt to replicate the "I destroyed New York twenty minutes ago" bit from the Watchmen fails to make Zod into a particularly compelling villain. He brags that Ursa is going to show Kal-El what a "precise" strike is, and she proceeds to inflict, well, only a flesh wound. He also does all of the usual villainous gloating and revealing of plans.

I liked the Lois Lane recap bit better than the opening story, but it was still only a recap. There's only so much you can do with that.

Bad concept to begin with. Badly executed.

Rating: 4.5/10