By: Sterling Gates & James Robinson (writers), Eduardo Pansica (artist), Wayne Faucher (inker)
The Story: General Lane has turned New Krypton into a pile of rubble, killing almost all the Kryptonians on it. Zod’s navy is on its way to Earth for retribution. Kal-El is the only person standing in their way.
What’s Good: The drama and tension in the book is pretty obvious. The reader is asking himself if Lois will get the story to the Daily Planet before General Lane silences her and if Superman can stop the invading force of Kryptonians. These are two powerful story drivers that make me want to read all the issues of this series already. The dialogue is crisp and pretty solid and although I wasn’t sold on Pansica and Faucher in the beginning, they closed the deal with the first splash panel and the second panel of page 3. There’s a lot of emotion throughout the book and the faces and action sequences are dynamic.
What’s Not So Good: The writing really gave me pause in a couple of places. The biggest plot hole for me was that an American General, wearing an American uniform and deploying (for the most part) American assets, committed attempted genocide that is going to result in the destruction of the Earth. Where is the President in all this? Senate Armed Forces Committee? Secretary of State? How is it that this guy has so much money and staff and yet has nobody watching him? (I have the same problem with the basic premise of Dark Reign.) Another plot problem for me was the senseless fight between Superman and Supergirl. Maybe Kara is grieving and feeling guilty, but is anyone’s first grieving action to slug their cousin? And draw it out and draw it out? And then have her mind changed by a few words? The fight smelled like filler.
My other issues with this issue were more nerd-related, not something a normal person would be bothered by, so be warmed. So…. I know a cardinal rule of comics is that the laws of physics are flexible so you can do cool things on the page, but I found that the writers were really playing loose with physics here. Specifically:
(1) Turning Earth’s yellow sun into a red sun: first of all, Mars is more than 8 minutes away from the sun at the speed of light, so its effects would not be immediate (in fact, the whole sun would take days to change color – the sun is so dense that it takes thousands of years for the light in the center to bounce its way to the surface). Secondly, although this is probably a great way to get rid of Kryptonians, it is also lethal to life on earth (red light carries far less energy, so it wouldn’t take long for the Earth to fall into a global ice age and then eventually freeze into a shiny ball). Third, it’s impossible. The sun’s color is dependent on its composition, so Luthor would have had to transmute a sizeable fraction of the mass of the sun from hydrogen to helium, and the resulting energy would have had to go somewhere, so skip your SPF 10,000,000 sunscreen… The only thing that would save you would be a power ring.
(2) Mars isn’t on the way from New Krypton to Earth, no matter how drunk your Kryptonian pilot is. At best, Mars is 47 million miles off the shared orbit of the Earth and New Krypton, which is already the longest logical way to get from one to the other.
(3) There is no atmosphere on Callisto, no matter how far below the surface you go; it is a solar system fossil. I do, however, think that this was a nice try on the part of the writers to try to make a go of talking in outer space.
(4) Kryptonians are super fast, far faster than the Human Defense Corps; it doesn’t matter what we do in a rocket, unless we had those red sun rifles shining all over the place as spot lights on the outsides of our ships.
Conclusion: If you don’t care about physics or the motivations superheroes have when they fight each other, you’ll probably enjoy this book. (Sorry for the nerd-out moment…)
Grade: C-
-DS Arsenault
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