Superverse 2018 - Year In Review

[Kuwagaton]

Where last year would be a strong C to a B, this year gets a strong B if not an A. Which isn't about perfect or best ever, but of giving the franchise the best chances to appeal and entertain.

To take it from the top, this was the first year without Berganza. Kaminski helped the Rebirth crew hit some of the highest notes of the phase... which means consistently. January to April had the best consecutive issues. Then if your jaw didn't drop when Forbes hit in February, I dunno what to say. That announcement was remarkable and the fact that all this time Bendis had been this eloquent and productive Superman fan is still pretty surprising. He's really been putting his money where his mouth is and no one has a better list of artists on call. I hope his era lasts longer than the previous one did. Especially because he has things like the return of the true Kon El in his back pocket.

Super Sons and Supergirl are now stronger than they were. New Super-man rode off into the sunset. Doomsday Clock is finally starting to pop. His appearances elsewhere have mostly been to prop up others though. Justice League is the worst with that, wish we still had Hitch or someone else more confident about how to use him in there.

I don't really follow outside media. Happy for the basic existence of his role in Supergirl, will probably check out Krypton at some point, and I'm excited to see both parts of the animated special together. Right now the Cavill situation isn't one thing or the other to me.

[Yoda]

Action 1004 is in no way comparable to One More Day. It breezes past some issues to get the characters where Bendis wants them but it is beyond hyperbole to compare it to selling your marriage to the devil to buy your geriatric aunt a few more years of life.

Action 1004 is a badly executed book. But it’s nothing like One More Day.

[Miles To Go]

Yeah, I probably should dial back on the hyperbole with it. I'm often conflicted on the issue myself, I flip-flop from liking it to hating it

[Jon Clark]

It gets a C from me by default. I can't really identify any story or development that was among the worst Superman stuff ever. No Electric Superman. No Dark Knight Returns mischaracterizations in guest shots. But so far Bendis isn't really giving me anything that really stands out as great either. The Superman book is boring me to tears, but Action hasn't been bad (Lois aside). Outside of the comics there is no real Superman stuff to complain about as Supergirl and Krypton to me are their own things and the cross-over was a blip on the radar good or bad. If the Superverse was a sports team, I'd say this was just the latest in a long string of building years.

[manwhohaseverything]

Action 1004 is in no way comparable to One More Day. It breezes past some issues to get the characters where Bendis wants them but it is beyond hyperbole to compare it to selling your marriage to the devil to buy your geriatric aunt a few more years of life.

Action 1004 is a badly executed book. But it’s nothing like One More Day.

Fair enough, you are right. It might not be OMD level. But it is one of the worst issues of superman in the past 2 to 3 year, atleast for me.
Quite frankly, Clark and Lois pissed me of.And I am supposed to root for them?yeah not happening.
For me, Lois's whole "writing the book" is not a reasonable excuse.Nor is Clark's reaction anywhere near dignified.

[Celgress]

I'll give it a solid B; good but there is certainly room for improvement (Rogol Zar I'm looking at you).

[Miles To Go]

Fair enough, you are right. It might not be OMD level. But it is one of the worst issues of superman in the past 2 to 3 year, atleast for me.
Quite frankly, Clark and Lois pissed me of.And I am supposed to root for them?yeah not happening.
For me, Lois's whole "writing the book" is not a reasonable excuse.Nor is Clark's reaction anywhere near dignified.

The more Bendis tries to justify Lois' actions ("keep reading, you'll find she's hiding things from Clark, and that's why she's distant") the more of a hole he tends to dig for himself and the character...yeah, they're in love, yeah they'll make it work, but for god's sake, don't make Clark so complacent in order to make it work. Depicting him as wanting to remain in amber is almost like a meta-critique on him and readers who want him to stay boyscoutish.

[Yoda]

Fair enough, you are right. It might not be OMD level. But it is one of the worst issues of superman in the past 2 to 3 year, atleast for me.
Quite frankly, Clark and Lois pissed me of.And I am supposed to root for them?yeah not happening.
For me, Lois's whole "writing the book" is not a reasonable excuse.Nor is Clark's reaction anywhere near dignified.

The more Bendis tries to justify Lois' actions ("keep reading, you'll find she's hiding things from Clark, and that's why she's distant") the more of a hole he tends to dig for himself and the character...yeah, they're in love, yeah they'll make it work, but for god's sake, don't make Clark so complacent in order to make it work. Depicting him as wanting to remain in amber is almost like a meta-critique on him and readers who want him to stay boyscoutish.

I don't disagree with either of you really. Behind Superman, Lois is my favorite character in these books. I don't think they work well without her at all. So if this does go completely off the rails in the next six months, I'll be right there with you. But right now, though the execution of Action Comics 1004 was bad and left way to much up to interpretation (and the negative interpretations were actually reasonable takes on the book) I think the goal is to get them back to being true partners, to give Lois back some of the fire and independence as a character and make her an active participant in the narrative of the books instead of a passenger or bystander.

There really have only been a handful of instances in the Post-Rebirth run where I can think of that actually happening, and all of them were in Action. The majority of her stories were either reacting to things happening to Jon and Clark or she was just kind of there with a really over done "Apple Pie & Motherhood" undercurrent to a lot of it. I give Jurgens credit for moving her back to the Planet and trying to give her some stuff to do, but I think that Bendis is kinda taking the Superman run homemaker Lois, and maybe using that as an excuse for Lois kinda needing to get back to what she was good at and what she was before. Bendis has said numerous times that when she's written well she's one of the best characters in the DCU, calling back specifically to how Greg Rucka wrote her in Adventures of Superman. And what I think he means by that is that you can drop her into literally any corner of the DCU and she can integrate into and move a story forward. So keeping her on a farm or tied to Metropolis limits her in a lot of ways narratively.

And as for Clark, now that you mention it Miles, I think this may actually fit in with the overall themes of Bendis's run where he's having Clark challenge himself to actually ask the question of are you doing enough as both as Clark and as Superman. The storyline with Lois could be part of that as well. Not in a negative way, not that she's criticizing him or thinks less of him for wanting a "normal" life, but challenging him to be the best he can be with the extraordinary tools they have. So yeah, in a sense it might be a critique of a sense of complacency or routine that he settled into.

Though if I had to pick worse issues in the last 2-3 years, I think those Robinson fill in issues with the suicidal planet were worse, and I think that time frame gets us back into Truth, which is a whole other animal.

[Celgress]

Action 1004 is in no way comparable to One More Day. It breezes past some issues to get the characters where Bendis wants them but it is beyond hyperbole to compare it to selling your marriage to the devil to buy your geriatric aunt a few more years of life.

Action 1004 is a badly executed book. But it’s nothing like One More Day.

LOL, well when you put it that way....

But in all seriousness, I couldn't agree with you more.

[Stardust]

Action 1004 is in no way comparable to One More Day. It breezes past some issues to get the characters where Bendis wants them but it is beyond hyperbole to compare it to selling your marriage to the devil to buy your geriatric aunt a few more years of life.

Action 1004 is a badly executed book. But it’s nothing like One More Day.

The geriatric aunt might be faster in telling stories than Bendis is.

[SiegePerilous02]

Middle of the road for me, with signs that things may be improving.

The initial Rebirth titles and directions save Supergirl failed to grab me; the methods they used to get away from the New 52 era and back into the marriage with a 10 year old son are messy and beyond stupid to me, even if on paper I don't mind Clark and Lois being married again with a kid (I would have vastly preferred if we'd seen them with a newborn and adjusting to being parents though instead of breezing past that whole development). I gave the Tomasi Superman run two trades to grab me and it didn't. Jurgens on Action didn't grab me in two issues. Nothing that came after that seemed remotely appealing to me, so I'm glad that era is behind us. I liked Orlando on Supergirl a lot (I seem to be one of the few on this forum that did), but even that was let down considerably by the art in the early issues and writing wise it was reliably enjoyable but nothing amazing (few things are in mainstream comics world, though). It gains major points for all the shout outs to All-Star though.

Bendis on the books has been where it's started to turn around for me. It's not perfect, but Clark's voice is on point and the books actually have a direction again. I'm very behind overall, but I'm caught up on the MOS mini, got the latest issue of Superman today so I'm going to re-read the Unity Saga in one go, and grabbed the first two Supergirl issues of the new era*. I'm still only at 1003 for Action, so I haven't read the infamous Lois issue yet, so jury is still out on that. I don't care about what happens to Jon at all honestly, so his aging up isn't that bothersome. I actually like how Bendis writes Jon more than what I've seen elsewhere.

Everything on the movie front is endlessly frustrating, so that's nothing new.

*I've only flipped through the first issue, but already I noticed that it looks like Kara's parents sent her away when Krypton was exploding. What happened to Argo city? And I looked through #25 at the store as well, why the hell does Eliza Danvers have two hands? Like those are not details that are difficult to keep consistent within the same era.

[stargazer01]

I edited my post to include this about reading Action #1000.

Action #1000. I liked it quite a bit. That story with Mr Mxy was a lot of fun. It showed what an epic, grand and versatile is the Superman mythos. No doubt it has made WB lots of $$ over the years and decades, even when they don't use him to his full potential in films.

[Celgress]

The geriatric aunt might be faster in telling stories than Bendis is.

OMD ruins everything, even the Superman Forum!

Sorry, but I couldn't resist.

[Kuwagaton]

Action #1004 is a victim of hype. At this point changing everything forever is an inappropriate threat that just shouldn't have been made. But as is typical with Bendis, despite some funky execution on the surface it's not that deep a problem. I think Bendis has been sounding great in interviews and when I ignore the overpromising, his regular comics are really fun.

But so far I think Man of Steel was the high point.

[Robotman]

I’d say B. The comics have been enjoyable and Bendis has made Superman jump to the top of my comics pile, which is great. I love Bendis’ voice for Supes. He’s both confident yet humble and funny/witty but not quipping or being funny at another’s expense (well except when he teases Batman but that’s been great). There have definitely been some missteps. We still don’t know anything about Rogol Zar which is getting kinda ridiculous at this point and Lois’ characterization was bad. But overall the Bendis run has been fun. Plus there is a freaking all star team drawing Superman’s world each month! I love that DC gets Marvel’s biggest name and puts him on the Superman books. Keeping with the tradition started with Kirby (Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen) and Bryne. I’m not a fan of Jon so I really didn’t mind him being sidelined. Plus having him be a bit older may limit that insufferable little kid “gee shucks” speech pattern that some writers give him.

Action 1000 was pretty good but the lack of a Grant Morrison story was very disappointing.

Loved The Death of Superman animated movie!

Still enjoying Supergirl. Probably the only CW DC show I still watch.

The Bad
They finally gave us a good rendition of Cavill’s Superman in Justice League but then pretty much say there are no plans for MoS 2. Probably the most disappointing news of the year.

A close second for disappointment has to be Rocksteady stating that they aren’t working on a Superman game. Gut punch.