No Utopia On Symar Through Synmar Utopica
It's the end of Brian Michael Bendis' run on the Man of Steel and the epic conclusion to his Synmar tale. Previously, we saw our Man of Steel make his way to the planet Synmar, where he discovered that under the planet's orange sun, the Superman of Synmar was able to finally communicate with our hero, but where our hero was diminished both physically and mentally..... Yeah, you really won't see any of that in this issue, but it was something that was pointed out previously. Let's jump into this issue and see what Symar or apparently what he's called now Synmar Utopica has in store for not only his planet but our Superman as well. Let's check it out.
Alright, with this final issue I'd imagine that everything should come together and make a bunch of sense, but boy did I have a hard time trying to put this story together with the way that it was presented. Apparently, Synmar Utopica was created to one day take on Superman if he should ever come to the planet Symar to conquer, but after a Civil War on the planet, this alien hero went to bring Superman to his planet to inspire the people there but apparently, all he did was screw up the path that every one of Synmar believed they should be on........ and apparently this means that Synmar Utopica took over the planet and the military force is now trying to take it back from this super-soldier......... Holy shit, I have no idea what's going on in this book. I don't know how we got to this point from what was presented to us previously and in the long run, all I know is that Superman is going to have to put on some golden shoulder and knee pads to take on Symar Utopica until the planet Symar is invaded by the United Federation of Planet's brigade.
Alright, let's unpack what we just talked about. Synmar Utopica is a bad guy that took over his planet apparently, he brought Superman to inspire people, but nobody wanted that shit and now it's up to Superman to shut Synmar Utopica down to save this planet, but ultimately the Federation of Planets would invade to save everyone, even though Symar isn't a part of the Federation and this Brigade is led by a Thanagarian, which have a terrible past with the Symar people. It's a weird, convoluted story that is overlaid with the transcript to Lana Lang's Daily Star Podcast, which just tells us how great Superman is, while making reference to Lois Lane's mother, which doesn't make much sense and by the end of this awful run of Superman, our hero tells a local guitar player in Metropolis, he digs her work. The End.
Wow, this conclusion to the story just made my head spin. I don't know what the Symar people are about and I have no idea why Synmar Utopica became a supposed bad guy in this arc at all but with this conclusion, we see that it doesn't matter and the big takeaway in this is that Bendis is leaving this book and on his way out he decided to undercut the Green Lantern Corps by introducing the United Federation Brigade as the new policing faction in the Universe....... even to planets that haven't joined the Federation. It's weird, it's hard to follow but because we don't really have much human dialog for characters to play off of, you don't get the Bendis-dialog that drives me nuts, but even with that plus, not to mention some great art by Ivan Reis, you won't get much of a story here that flows all that well and the only real takeaway that I have is..... At least it's over now.
Bits and Pieces:
Our Symar tale and Bendis' run on this book comes to a close this issue and with that..... it's a hard to follow mess that thankfully looks good but focuses a bunch of the story through narration that doesn't matter just to tell you that Superman is great and that we all love him. This Synmar aspect though is convoluted as hell and left my head spinning in trying to figure out what actually happened in this arc.
You were generous to give this run a 5/10! I would have given a 3 or 4
ReplyDeleteI would've gone lower; this should be an absolute 1. The only thing that keeps this book from being a 0 is the art. Which is the theme for all of Bendis' Superman titles. "At least the art is good." The artists are his only saving grace now.
DeleteThank you for the review. This run has been awful and it's finally over! Hopefully, DC does the smart thing and puts Peter J. Tomasi back on Superman, he's already writing Supersons again. I'm done hoping they'll fire Bendis. At this point, all they can do is get better writers to clean up after him while he moves on to his next target: the Legion of Super-Heroes. Ugh.
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