Action Comics #1013 Review

Offers All Around

Written By: Brian Michael Bendis

Art By: Szymon Kudranski, Brad Anderson, Dave Sharpe

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: July 24, 2019

We've got Leviathan going around making his offers to people, while we have Lex Luthor doing the same thing here..... I'm waiting for a war of offers coming down the line all Highlander style, where there can only be one.  I doubt that will happen, but it's certainly a weird set of things going on in Action Comics.  Let's jump into this issue and see if we learn anything new about Leviathan, Red Cloud or Rose and Thorn.  Let's check it out.

For this issue of Action Comics we're really diving into the reporter aspect of the book, where not only Clark Kent is working on the Leviathan story, but Robinson Goode is doing her own based on what she learned from Rose Forrest during her interview, where it seems that if you don't take Leviathan's offer, he seems to take it personally.  That being said, we get to see more of the silly looking foot soldiers of Leviathan here and how they seem to try and carry out their masters orders and what happens if they get captured.

The most interesting part of this book though in my mind........ since we're really just kind of treading water with learning things about Leviathan is that we see that Robinson Goode's powers seem to be getting more and more out of whack and it seems that Lex Luthor has offered to help her with this problem.  My problem though is........ we always seem on the verge of learning something in this book just for it to get to an ending, where it seems like.... Okay, okay, we'll learn everything next issue, but the answers still never come.  Hell, at the end of this issue it says, NEXT: Naomi, and I'm still not convinced that we'll learn anything about here because I barely found out anything about that character in her own six issue mini.  These are just my frustrations though.

All in all, we get Leviathan, we get Lex and we get the Invisible Mafia here and besides for Lex offering Leone a gift and then offering Red Cloud a cure to her power problem, there isn't really anything new to this issue or anything that really compels me because it all feels like the same stuff that we've been getting for almost a year now, where I just want some answers, but get the inside structure of a newspaper business instead.  That being said, the Red Cloud stuff is interesting, but the rest just kind of bores me, when it doesn't just downright make me wonder why Superman would let Thorn go around shooting guns at people, in the air, to her left and to her right for no real reason.  Rose and Superman feel odd together here and I hope more is done with the character than just being here for the action element to Action Comics.  With all that though, I did love the art in this issue and like most Bendis books at the moment, that is always the highlight to his books.

Bits and Pieces:

We continue to take baby steps in this issue to learn anything about anything as Brian Michael Bendis makes the inner workings of the Daily Planet the focus of this book.  That being said though, we do have Leviathan offering people things, Lex offering people things, Rose and Thorn getting offers and Leone getting presents.  There's things going on here, they just don't seem to be going anywhere.  The art is great though and I look forward to hopefully getting some answers about Red Cloud coming up.

6/10