#greg pak

One issue of the Millennium crossover does standout however, Adventures of Superman #437 written by Byrne with pencils and co-plot by Ordway. Luthor discovers one of the evolved humans, Celia Windward, from the Millennium story line. Most of the issue divides the page in half. In the top half, Luthor spins a tale for Windward about Superman fighting a villain named the Combattor. In Luthor's telling, the Combattor's attack brings out the worst in humanity, and Superman stops him while being in different to everyone around him. The bottom half of each page, captioned by an article diegetically written by Lane, show how during the actual attack (which Superman missed due to the Millennium event) played out, with people helping each other and Gangbuster (Jose Delgado), an unpowered hero, giving everything to try and stop Combattor. Hardly a stand-alone issue, Delgado's injuries here would have consequences that would play out over quite some time, even after Byrne left the Superman titles. It stands as a great example of the well-oiled machine the Superman books were for sometime even before attracting attention with the Death/Return storyline.

Superman: For Tomorrow by Brian Azzarello, Jim Lee, and co.

Following the commercial success of Hush with Jeph Loeb on Batman, Jim Lee decided to take a crack at Superman and for some reason opted for Brian Azzarello, then arguably at the height of his popularity three or four years into the run of 100 Bullets, as his collaborator. Having a writer known for gritty crime writing can (sort of work), as evidenced by Greg Rucka's run on Adventures of Superman which began the same month as For Tomorrow or Brian Michael Bendis's at the end of the 2010s, but Azzarello's pen has more of cynical edge to those examples, and it makes him a poor fit for Superman. It does not help that Azzarello writes For Tomorrow as what we now call a mystery box (note that it preceded the debut of the TV series Lost by five months). The story opens a year after “The Vanishing,” an incident when hundreds of thousands of people, including Lois Lane, disappeared at once while Superman was off-planet. He visits a priest dying of cancer, Father Leone and speaks to Leone about his guilt over the incident, and how it relates to his actions in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. There, following the initial disappearance, he becomes involved in an uprising there, lead by a man named Nox, who is supported by a super-powered being called Equus. The character is another issue with the story, as despite ties to Jack Kirby OMAC, the character is clearly based on Seth from Mark Millar and Frank Quitely's Authority run, to the point that if DC did not own Wildstorm, they would probably have been sued. After the uprising ends, with Nox and Equus victorious, they and Superman find themselves with the weapon that caused the Vanishing. The former rulers of the country used it to try and get rid of Nox; they missed. Superman wants it to try and save the missing people, Nox is mainly concerned with it not being used against himself again, while Equus needs to bring it back to the handlers who sent him to aid Nox. During his clash with Superman over the device, Equus uses the device, which disappears both himself, Nox, and thousands more people. This second Vanishing causes conflict between Superman and the Justice League (especially Wonder Woman, partially due to the involvement of another Amazon named Halcyon), and the general public, who are aware of Superman's presence when the weapon was used the second time.

Superman eventually uses the device on himself, and the reader learns the truth behind the Vanishing(s)-- seeking to create a way to save everyone on Earth were it to face imminent destruction like Krypton, Superman created Metropia, an Eden-like pocket dimension where Earth's population could be shunted, and staffed it with robots of Jor-El, Lara, and Clark Kent. Meanwhile, Orr, Equus's handler, plies Leone for Superman's secrets by offering to cure his cancer, which he does by turning him into Pilate, the next step up of OMAC from Equus.

In Metropia, Superman confronts a rebellion led by General Zod,* as Superman built it within the Phantom Zone, and had sent the device that could transport people into it there. Zod found it and sent it to Earth, hoping that doing so would eventually bring Superman into the Phantom Zone. Equus and Leone pass through a star of some sort and wind up locked in combat elsewhere. Zod opts for apparent death over being rescued by Superman when Metropia collapses. Superman rescues everyone else and builds a new Fortress of Solitude in a jungle after the old one was compromised.

In the sketch book included in the Absolute edition of the storyline, Jim Lee writes:

Most people imagine Superman to be always in the light, that he's not as darkly shadowed a character as, say, Batman. But I wanted to challenge that notion, reverse it and start throwing serious blacks onto Superman's costume.

While Lee is speaking literally about the visuals of the character, his approach seems to dovetail with Azzarello's approach as a writer. He writes a Superman full of self-doubt, uncertain of the right thing to do... Oh. Zack Snyder must have read this and loved it. Well, that approach may work for a young Superman, it usually does not turn out so well with older versions of the character, at least not unless the writer is Alan Moore. Or maybe this could have worked without the mystery box style plot, which needlessly obfuscates things.

Back, briefly, to Lee's art. I am very mixed on him. As a tween, like most of the comic-book reading public at the time, I loved his flashy art on X-Men, but his work in the 2000s, which includes both this story, Hush, and All-Star Batman and Robin, feels quite flashy and empty, driven more by what looks cool on the page rather than storytelling logic. The nadir of his career is probably the fold-out of the Batcave from All-Star, which depicts an incredibly full Batcave despite the story taking place at the beginning of Wayne's career. In context, the darkness he tried to bring to Superman discussed in the quote about a paragraph back feels less like innovation and more like a refusal to adapt to a different character. Worse, his versions of Lois Lane, Wonder Woman, and Lara are all indistinguishable from one another. A lot of artists, including Lee, can struggle with differentiating faces, but rarely has it been such a pronounced issue in his work. Dressing Lane in a flowing, vaguely Greek-looking pseudo-toga did not help matters. *Note that this is the fourth post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis version of Zod, though two of those were alternate reality versions and the second a mutated human.

Superman/Wonder Woman v2: War and Peace by Charles Soule, Tony S. Daniel, and co. This second volume of Soule's run consists entirely of crossovers. It contains #8-12 and Annual #1 of the titular series, all of which are part of the Superman: Doomed crossover, where Superman is infected by a viral form of his old foe Doomsday. It closes out with Future State: Wonder Woman and Future State: Superman/Wonder Woman, two parts of a different crossover. The two Future State issues at least comprise a full story. The parts of Doomed, other than #8, which works fairly well on its own, do not. It makes most of the volume an incredibly choppy, nonsensical read. That Daniels draws #8 and only parts of others does not help. DC should not have released this volume, and only collected the Doomed issues together. It feels like a cash grab that has no other to exist.

Batman/Superman v1: Cross World! by Greg Pak, Jae Lee, and co, This other New 52 team-up book opens with the first chronological meeting between the New 52 incarnations of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, the latter wearing his pre-Batman outfit from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Year One while posing as an unhoused person. They meet again that night, in costume, fight, and wind up being transported to an alternate world effectively run by themselves as sort of a soft dictatorship. An Apokolipitian being named Kaiyo caused the world shifting, and did it as a contest to decide which Earth she would use to side from Darkseid in. Ultimately, she selects the New 52 Earth, as she sees its Wayne and Superman as being more ruthless than the alternate ones.

Stories where alternate versions of superheroes meet have been a staple of the genre since at least Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino's “Flash of Two Worlds” in 1961. They usually serve highlight aspects of how the characters have evolved over time, and Cross World! Is no different. Unfortunately, its conclusion, that the New 52 versions of Superman and Batman are the most “ruthless” underscores the issues most readers have with the New 52, and its obvious fetish for early 90s Image comics. The best part of the volume is Jae Lee's wonderful art, but unfortunately, he draws maybe half of the four-part story (the volume actually ends with the Pak-penned Justice League #23.1, telling Darkseid's new origin). It seems, at times, like there is supposed to be pattern of when other artists step in (Lee draws the New 52 universe), but that quickly seems to be abandoned in favor of a scattershot approach with no rhyme or reason, other than probably when pages were turned in.

Superman: Day of Doom by Dan Jurgens, Bill Sienkiewicz, and co.

This tenth anniversary story for the Death of Superman story line does not deserve a full review because it fails to convey a complete story. New Daily Planet reporter Ty Duffy gets assigned to cover the anniversary of the Death of Superman, a story he calls “a rehash,” but gradually discovers that the real story lies in the other people who died in Doomsday's attack or its aftermath but did not come back. Given that Jurgens later reveals that one of said people was Duffy's father, this makes the four issue series feel a little disjointed, as if he wrote it without a plan or that it had multiple writers. Meanwhile, a literally shadowy figure calling itself remnant causes disasters along Doomsday's path of destruction, and believes Duffy a sympathetic ear. In the end, Superman saves Perry White and Duffy from Remnant and... that is it. The character would not appear again for 15 years, when Kate Perkins and Stephen Segovia have a version pop up in two issues of Superwoman. Instead of chasing after Remnant, Superman lectures Duffy about his own use in the world which is odd. Frankly, much of the dialogue between the two characters reminds me of nothing so much as Sally Floyd meeting Captain America in Civil War: Frontline #11 by Paul Jenkins and Ramon Bachs, one of the three worst comics I have ever read.