Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Superman #11 Review



In Space...... Everyone Ignores You


Written By: Brian Michael Bendis
Art By: Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Oclair Albert, Alex Sinclair, Josh Reed
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: May 15, 2019


Jon's back from Earth-3 and has told his parents all about his seven year misadventure, but now story time is over and father and son have to go and make sure that Jor-El is safe, now that it seems that Rogol Zaar and General Zod have broken out of the Phantom Zone.  As we saw at the end of last issue though, it seems like things may be more dire than originally expected for our Man of Steel because when Jon and him teleported back to Jor-El's location, he found three alien races, battling it out around their destination.  Let's jump into this issue and see if three generations of Els can stop these........ Star Wars....... yeah, I said it.

While I would love to tell everyone out there interested in Superman comics that this issue is amazing, it fills in all the blanks and answers all your unanswered questions, in truth....... it really does little besides for pad itself out and not really tell you much of anything.  Yeah, we find out that the three alien races battling it out around Jor-El's ship....... or for Jor-El's ship are the Khunds, the Thanagarians and the Trilium Collective (Gandelo from Supergirl's race) but as of why any of this is going on........ I have no idea.  Hell, Superman asks Jor-El and he never gives our hero a response so in the long run you are left with Superman making an imposing stand against these three species, which in all honesty is the best part of the book and even shows you the awe that Superman inspires.  Beyond that though, you have no idea why any of this is going on.


On top of the this three-way battle, when Superman and Jon show up to this spectacle they immediately see Rogol Zaar and when he notices our heroes, he high tails it out of there at lightspeed........ which is odd because he shows back up with Zod at the end of the issue and this only leads to more fighting, leaving me to imagine that there wasn't much for him to do in this book until the end so that we could line this issue up with the Supergirl crossover we're getting next month.  


All in all, there isn't much to this issue in ways of story........ or there is and we're not privy to any of the answers about them because whenever anyone asks a question in this issue, they're just ignored or if we wonder how something is going to happen, it just happens and we never get to see it.  As for the art, it does a fair job here.  As long as the panels are large everything looks great, but the smaller ones made me lose track of what I was actually looking at a lot of the time and for a story where I'm trying to grasp at anything for some answers to what's going on....... that's a problem.  It's decent though and even though this is pretty much a filler issue that's full of a big fight that's never explained, there's some fun stuff with Superman here that reminds us why he's the world's greatest superhero.  

Bits and Pieces:

While the art does a decent job this issue, there really isn't much of a story for it to depict beyond a big ass space battle.  I'm serious, as curious as I was to what was going on here it seems that our Man of Steel was equally so, but no matter how many times he asks for answers, he was simply ignored....... This is a strange issue, but by the end of it there were plenty of "Superman" moments that I appreciated....... I just would have liked more story.

5.8/10

4 comments:

  1. 5.8 was very generous. The text was just gibberish in this issue. This one would probably have been better off as a pure picturebook without the text.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Did anyone else notice Superman referred to Martha Kent in the present tense in this issue? When he said "Like Ma Kent SAYS (not said!) 'Let's make a moment'." So does this mean Martha Kent is alive? That's the one thing I disliked about Dan Jurgens's run the fact that he left Ma and Pa Kent dead after "Reborn". Plus over in Young Justice Superboy named his daughter Martha but how could he have even known her if she died before Clark even became Superman? Plus in the latest issue of Justice League there was a flashback where Clark and Jon commemorate the anniversary on Pam's death (but not Ma's?). So is Bendis undoing their death on Clark's prom night? I hope so.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've been so used to the Kent's being dead that I don't know if I need them back at this point, even though I was a huge fan of Clark's time with his parents in different stories from when I was growing up. That is a cool catch though, I don't know if it means something or just something not caught by the editors though.

      Delete
    2. I would love if that's the case...problem is that 2 out of 3 books mentioned are Bendis and I don't know what he thinks is going on continuity wise

      Delete