- Didn't like the opening scene. It overplays the whole "look at how good and humble Superman is, we should all be in awe of him!" thing. Honestly, if this were Clark instead of Superman, or if Glen had acted more confidently regarding their friendship, it might have made its "point" far stronger.
- I like the page of Clark just entering the Planet. Sandoval really sells the whole chaos of it, and the moment with Clark's offer of kindness getting taken advantage of was well done.
- I liked Lois here. She's the right degree of confident but also questioning whether she's really making the right choices. And Sandoval does her body language really well.
- And more praise to Sandoval: It's incredible how well he can convey "Meek-mannered reporter Clark the fake persona", as opposed to actual Clark from the previous pages, simply by drawing his hair a little neater. The forced smile is obviously what catches the attention, but I really like that incredibly small change in hair.
- And, of course, the smile is soon gone. It's incredibly effective at conveying just how seriously he takes the Blue Earth Movement; he can't even keep up the facade that he must have intentionally chosen earlier on.
- The green gem gets our attention. I'd like to believe it's not Kryptonite, since I'd assume Clark would be familiar with how that feel by now, but, well, PKJ was going to explore either "the secret of Kryptonite" or "Lightray Is", and there's no Lightray in this story since Warworld...
- Clark's and Norah's conversation is... well, it's great. Clark's "My folks were relieved when I graduated" and "I'm not hiding a lie detector" are both blatant lies (the first likely literally, the second in spirit), and his expression as he asks if they can start makes him look as dangerous as the actual villain. As for Norah... well, the narration boxes telling us when she's lying also make it very interesting when they don't appear. We don't know how loyal she actually is to her family. We can intuit she was telling the truth when she says they expect big things from her, but what about when she says she's not interested in the "family business"? Are we going to see her betraying her family?
- Interesting that PKJ went with Norah being as young as she looks.
- I also really like how Norah says that Superman is offering protection from "super-powered alien threats". It works in so many ways. 1) This is clearly her pitch to the people she recruits. 2) In-universe, this describes a lot of what Superman does, but it conveniently ignores how his one big enemy is very much Lex, who's been framed as an incarnation of very Earthly evils for a long time. 3) Coming from PKJ, the guy who started his run taking Superman away from Earth for a long time to fight a super-powered alien threat, it does feel like it may be commenting on his own work (though I assume this won't be the last we read along those lines).
- The actual "fight" (it's not one, but you know what I mean) flows well from the incredibly tense scenes before it. And the reveal of what I assume is Norah's plan is so much better than the simple "de-powered Super-family" thing described in the solicits (even if that's still a part of it).
Overall, a great start to the arc, as PKJ tends to do. His problems lay in actually finishing them (though his endings aren't bad, they're just... not as good as his starts). Let's see how this goes.