Superman: Action Comics #1084 – John Ridley, Writer; Inaki Miranda, Artist; Eva De La Cruz, Colorist
Ray – 9/10
Ray: The Superman: Superstars initiative will be coming to a close soon after a two-part run by G. Willow Wilson next month. While most of the arcs so far have focused on explosive action and event-style storytelling, that’s not the case for this run by John Ridley. Rather, it’s focused on some thorny issues of criminal justice reform – and what happens when it goes wrong. With Major Disaster in jail after apparently killing a man, Superman investigated what went wrong – and discovered a conspiracy to sell the DNA of supervillains. While it provided a life, energy, and power boost to those who took it, it unbalanced the psychology of the donors. The culprits included obscure alternate-reality villainess Scorch – and Intergang leader Bruno Mannheim, one of the most significant Superman villains of the 90s. And the true masterminds were a mysterious alien race with a selfish motivation.
The first part of this issue is a battle segment, albeit one with some pretty funny dialogue, but these aliens are all too human – they’re essentially cruel capitalists looking to buy themselves another hour of life at the expense of humans they consider less than worthy. But once that battle is over, and Scorch has made a fateful choice about the direction she wants to go, there’s a much more personal mystery at work here. Major Disaster may have reformed, but he was always kind of a dirtbag – both in his everyday life, and towards his family. That leads to the return of a plot thread that most people have likely forgotten, and it reveals the truth about the man who died in that initial earthquake – and why he’s taking the fall for it. And so Superman is left to wonder if he should follow the cause of truth – or justice. This comic tried to combine a lot of different elements, but I think it came together into something compelling.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
