About Heroes

Writers: Geoff Johns & Richard Donner
Artist: Eric Powell

The second arc of Johns and Donner starts here, without the first even being finished.  Moving past that, this is an enjoyable story, but a quick one.  I think I read this in about 5 minutes, whereas most comics take me 15 minutes to get through.  This is because there is not a whole lot of dialougue in the Bizarro World pages.  Well, there's some Bizarro dialougue, but that's so confusing to get through, I just skimmed over it.  Sometimes Bizarro is talking normally, and other times in the same sentence he's talking backwards.  Jeph Loeb did it right where it was ALL backwards (the one good thing from that last arc) but here, without any note to tell you how to read it, it just gets skimmed and ignored.  Another thing, we don't get any real reason as to why Bizarro World exists, Superman arrives after Bizarro kidnaps Johnathan Kent and takes him to Bizarro World.  We get some mention of what the Blue Sun does to Superman, but the Jor-El hologram doesn't say much else other than that it may make Superman stronger.  One thing I did have a problem with was how Superman found Bizarro World.  Jor-Ello-gram simply sends his son to the closest planet around the closest Blue Sun, which he just assumes is Bizarro World.  What if it wasn't?  It's too convenient and took me out of the book.

Johns and Donner clearly have a plan for this book, and this arc, but this first issue doesn't show it.  It's more focused on action than story, and even though it's called Action Comics, I wanted a little more exposition on who this Bizarro is (is he a clone or alien?) and the existence or purpose of Bizarro World.  It would seem to make sense to put it here in the first issue, since this is only a 3 issue arc, and the next two issues be slam-bang action.  Eric Powell draws a great zombie-ish Bizarro, and his Superman looks straight out of the Max Fleisher cartoons from the 1940's.  It's this stylization that brings the book together.  Superman doesn't look all emo like he does in JLA or Superman, he looks tough, and like he's all business.  He should be all business since his father is missing.  Anyway, Powell is a great addition to this book, if only for 3 issues, it's too bad that it failed to grab me and rock me like I was hoping.  C-