Adventures of Superman: Book of El #6 – Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Writer; Scott Godlewski, Artist; Alex Guimaraes, Colorist
Ray – 9.5/10
Ray: For the first five issues, we’ve been following Superman as he works his way through the future, searching for his children Osul and Otho – and running into one strange descendant of his after another, from countless eras of his immortal life. But now, after facing off against a Sun-Eater, Superman is near-death – and we finally turn the focus to the children he’s searching for. They’re not in the same place, and they’re on the same quest. First is Otho, Superman’s daughter, and a tense flashback to the day they were taken shows how they were separated. Otho winds up alone in space, and quickly encounters a band of renegade Kryptonian descendants. Known as the people of the Warworld Engine, they have a militaristic aesthetic and are obsessed with training to be warriors. They capture the young girl and try to hold her – and it goes about as well for them as you’d expect.
This group of descendants is a very interesting choice. They don’t seem evil – they have a strong sense of community and are dedicated to making the cosmos safer – but they’re still anathema to what Superman usually stands for. It’s a very interesting dynamic to have them essentially have learned the wrong lessons from an era of Superman’s life when he liberated Warworld. Along the way, the mad Phaelossian warrior Kryx-Ul continues to deteriorate, finally embracing a dark power that he’s been sampling for many years. With Superman weakened and Otho possibly the only hope to save him, the people of the Warworld Engines give her the chance to gain the power to heal him – by challenging a cosmic force that Superman himself fears. This series so far is bigger and wilder than the Action Comics run that preceded it, with Johnson getting to fully embrace the Kirby influences that spawned it.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes
