Not All It Is Promised To Be: Blackest Night Special Edition #1 Is Hardly Special!

The Good: Compliments the action figure set fairly for two of the figures, Good artwork
The Bad: Entirely incomplete story, Short, Low collectible value, Odd coloring issue, Does not include two of the four characters from the box set!
The Basics: Blackest Night Special Edition #1 is a bonus book in the Blackest Night Action Figure Box Set . . . which provides unfortunately minimal context for the figures in the set!


When my wife was shopping for birthday gifts for me recently and she was on the fence about getting me the Blackest Night Action Figure Box Set (reviewed here!), one of the selling points that actually pushed me over into wanting the set (and asking her for it) was the Blackest Night Special Edition #1 book that came in the set. My hope was that the exclusive comic book would include a lost chapter for me in the Blackest Night Saga (reviewed here!). After all, despite my love of the Saga, I could not remember any chapters that included Black Lantern Blue Beetle specifically.

Upon receiving the gift, I enthusiastically broke out the figures and it took me a few extra days to get around to reading Blackest Night Special Edition #1. Unfortunately, for those looking for a grail in the boxed set, Blackest Night Special Edition #1 falls short; in fact, it does not even live up to the promise of its own table of contents! Blackest Night Special Edition #1 includes two issues of Green Lantern which were culled from the anthology Agent Orange (reviewed here!). The story is actually the story of Larfleeze, but it includes the brief time that Hal Jordan was a Green and Blue Lantern (simultaneously). The table of contents in Blackest Night Special Edition #1 promised Booster Gold issue #26 . . . but then does not actually include it! Instead, it has two covers, both featuring the Black Lantern Blue Beetle . . . but no story to go with it! That is a huge letdown for the fans.

In fact, Blackest Night Special Edition #1 poorly sells the set it is included in; it does not have any stories that include Munnk and only the pictures of the Black Lantern Blue Beetle. Rather ridiculously, the way the story is consumed with the tale of Larfleeze, fans reading the book are much more likely to wish the boxed set included a limited edition Larfleeze figure (it does not!).

What Blackest Night Special Edition #1 includes – outside incongruent covers and advertisements for the Blackest Night and Brightest Day action figure lines – are two chapters of Agent Orange. In them, Star Sapphire Fatality accepts her life beyond the Sinestro Corps as a member of the Star Sapphires. She journeys in search of Green Lantern John Stewart in an effort to find him and forgive him for the destruction of her homeworld. The main plot, however, has the Green Lantern Corps converging upon the Vega System. No longer a forbidden system, the Guardians insist the Green Lanterns go there to stop the criminals in the sector from fleeing to the rest of space.

On Okaara, the Green Lantern Corps encounters the universe’s sole Orange Lantern, Larfleeze. Hal Jordan, still wrestling with trying to get the blue power ring off his finger, tries to aid the Corps as it infiltrates Okaara. Once there, though, he falls to the mercy of Larfleeze while his compatriots are shocked at the quartering of Green Lantern Gretti . . . and his subsequent resurrection as an Orange Lantern construct. While the other Green Lanterns battle constructs, Hal Jordan gets the backstory on Larfleeze and John Stewart comes face to face with Fatality!

The adventure in Blackest Night Special Edition #1 is entirely incomplete. The story lacks a beginning and a resolution, so it is little more than an advertisement for Agent Orange, though the story in the book is engaging enough.

The artwork is generally wonderful, though Fatality’s coloring is much lighter than the action figure would have one believe for the character! The Fatality storyline is abruptly presented and left entirely unresolved, which is frustrating for readers hoping that Blackest Night Special Edition #1 would actually flesh out the characters in the box set.

In short, as people break open their Blackest Night Action Figure Box Set and Blackest Night Special Edition #1 books hit the secondary market independent of the toys in which it was included, it is very easy to pass by.

For other special comics, please visit my reviews of:
Wonder Woman 100-page Spectacular
Man Of Steel: The Prequel

2/10

For other reviews, please visit my Book Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman Is A Distant Tangent Of Relevance To The Flashpoint Saga.

The Good: The colors, Booster Gold’s story
The Bad: The Traci 13 story is utterly unnecessary. None of it truly holds together or is in any way vital.
The Basics: The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman is one of the least worthwhile tangents to the main story of the Flashpoint Saga.


For those who do not follow my many reviews of graphic novels, I now find myself deeply immersed in the Flashpoint Saga. I was resistant to get into Flashpoint, but as the subject of my study for the year in graphic novels has been the Flash, it seemed unavoidable that I would get into the Flashpoint Saga. As I realized upon reading Flashpoint (reviewed here!), though, the supplemental stories to Flashpoint are distant tangents to the main story and in no way vital to the Saga, in stark contrast to many of the volumes in the Blackest Night Saga. Even so, there were a few World Of Flashpoint books I was looking forward to reading.

The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman was not one.

The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman seems to be selling itself mostly on the Superman name (which is not a selling point for me!). Flashpoint disposes of Superman in an interesting way, but his presence in the main story was just enough to annoy me. It is always refreshing to me to see a major DC Universe crossover that does not hinge on Superman and using Kal-El to resolve part of the main thrust of Flashpoint left me peeved. So, I was not looking forward to The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman.

Not at all a linear story, The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman is a collection of four tangent stories that merely flesh out the background of Flashpoint. The book is made up of stories that focus on Project Superman, The Canterbury Cricket, Booster Gold, and characters unique to the Flashpoint universe.

The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman opens with “Project Superman.” In that, General Lane works, thirty years before Flashpoint to create a super soldier using DNA from “Project Six.” Unfortunately, Sinclair, the test subject, quickly evolves abilities well beyond super strength, speed, endurance and healing. When his project is about to be terminated, fate intervenes and Metropolis is struck by a small alien ship carrying Kal-El. From his prison, the altered Sinclair watches the tests done upon Kal-El and communicates with him, waiting for the moment they can break out of the facility. In the attempt, Subject Zero and Lane get teleported to the Phantom Zone and Subject One meets Lois Lane and develops a crush. And, when the main story of Flashpoint occurs, the team that infiltrates Project Superman unwittingly releases Subject Zero from the Phantom Zone.

The Project Superman story unfolds in an interesting enough way. As it progressed, I became deeply curious about what Project Six was that leaves Sinclair so altered and the payoff was worth the wait. My biggest issue with this section of The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman was that the artwork steadily degrades throughout the three chapters until it is almost stylized like anime by the last portion of this part of the story.

The section that follows in The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman are focused on Traci 13, a character who apparently is not unique to the Flashpoint Saga. One of the DC Universe characters I had not heard of before now, Traci 13 is a magic user who loses her mother (who had the ability to see the future) and saves her father when the Atlanteans sunk Paris. She recalls the regular DC Universe and is confused by it. In the Flashpoint Universe, she is a sixteen year-old girl who is an exceptionally powerful mage. She teleports around the world on a quest to try to stop her father from utilizing H.I.V.E. satellites to destroy the Amazons and Atlanteans and killing 118 million people.

This set of three chapters is little more than a travelogue of the World Of Flashpoint. Traci 13 is a marginally interesting character who interacts with the Flashpoint variants of Guy Gardner, Circe, and Jason Todd (and looks entirely age inappropriate while doing it). Her quest is fine, but given how very distant a tangent it is to the story of Flashpoint, it feels entirely gratuitous. Indeed, when it came to whether or not Traci 13 might succeed or fail, writer Rex Ogle entirely failed to get me invested.

Booster Gold is one of the characters I have honestly come to enjoy, largely because of his heroic arc in Justice League: Generation Lost (Volume 1 reviewed here! and Volume 2 reviewed here!). His story in The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman is a four-chapter arc that has Booster, armed only with Skeets and a blackboard of information about the new world, going out into Coast City and getting shot down by the military, namely Nathaniel Adam (Captain Atom in the regular universe!). Booster Gold flees as Doomsday is set upon him by the U.S. military! Booster, with his new friend Alex, must work together to survive Doomsday and track down Barry Allen.

The Booster Gold section of The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman is arguably one of the most engaging. The U.S. military, characteristically, is utilizing something it does not quite understand and given that Booster has confronted Doomsday before, the conflict “reads” as very true to the character and the story. While the end might seem a little cliché, it works. However, it is not enough to make the book worth buying.

The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman closes with the story of the Canterbury Cricket, a unique-to-Flashpoint hero. Once an arrogant young man, the Canterbury Cricket survives the Amazon attack on the UK and is transformed into a giant cricket by god. He then joins the Resistance against the Amazons. The Canterbury Cricket’s section is well-rendered and includes the demon Etrigan, though none of his Resistance comrades are familiar to me. The story is basic and not at all distinct in the Flashpoint peripheral stories.

The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Superman, at best, rises to average thanks to its inclusion of the Booster Gold chapter. The rest of it, though, could easily be avoided, even as it fleshes out the inconsequential world of Flashpoint.

For other Flashpoint-related books, be sure to check out my reviews of:
The Flash: The Dastardly Death Of The Rogues
The Road To Flashpoint
The World Of Flashpoint Featuring Green Lantern

4/10

For other graphic novels, be sure to check out my Graphic Novel Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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World Without A Superman Is A Boring, Self-Referential, Ultimately Pointless Reaction To The Death Of Superman Event!

The Good: A sensible progression of the Superman corner of the DC universe, Good moments that explore grief.
The Bad: Casts far too wide a net, Lack of focus, Requires intimate knowledge of many ongoing subplots, Ultimately goes nowhere, No superlative artwork.
The Basics: The most tedious graphic novel I have suffered through in a long time, World Without A Superman realistically presents all the varied elements in Metrolpolis grieving the death of Superman.


I have become a bit of a fan of the graphic novel medium. When done well, the graphic novel can tell an amazing, deep, and very rich story without falling into prose that is revealing, pedantic or inarticulate. But, as someone who is highly literate, I am very able to acknowledge that there are a lot of bad graphic novels out there. In fact, most graphic novels aren’t even graphic novels, they are trade anthologies of comic books that were previously released in single issue form. And, alas, many comic books live down to their reputations. World Without A Superman is a trade paperback anthology that lives down to some of the worst expectations of what comic books can be.

World Without A Superman is the immediate follow-up to The Death Of Superman (reviewed here!). World Without A Superman chronicles the mourning period between the death of Superman, the rise of four people and beings who take up the mantle of Superman and the inevitable return of the original Superman character. In retrospect, World Without A Superman probably appears even more silly than it ever did at the time because the resurrection and return of Superman was not, at the point this was released, a foregone conclusion. Instead, World Without A Superman treats the death of Superman as if it were real and final (while laying enough clues as to it being a near-death experience) to at least take itself seriously.

World Without A Superman illustrates how messy and complex a storyline can be when it has endured for decades and has an incredible number of subplots and characters to service. In fact, the problem with World Without A Superman is not that it is too ambitious, it is instead that it has too much to do, so it does none of it particularly well. Instead of being an intimate portrait of Lois Lane’s grief, World Without A Superman, following the funeral and internment of Superman’s body, becomes a complicated rigmarole of exceptionally minor characters and organizations scrambling for their own self-interest around Metropolis.

As someone utterly unfamiliar with the Superman corner of the DC Universe – I believe this is the third or fourth Superman title I have read and reviewed - World Without A Superman is almost entirely inaccessible and calls upon so many events and characters from before either this book or the prior one as to make more of a mess than tell a coherent story. The net result is that the only character that really has any development is Lois Lane and what grief she is able to explore is quickly pushed aside to service other characters and plot threads that do not have any sense of character engagement.

Some of the many plotlines/characters in World Without A Superman, following the confirmation that Superman is dead and having a funeral for him include:

Lex Luthor revitalizes Supergirl, who was damaged in the attack that killed Superman and Doomsday. Following that, he uses Supergirl to run missions for him. Following transforming one of the parks in Metropolis into a mausoleum for Superman, Lex Luthor is as shocked as others when the Cadmus Project beats him to robbing the grave. Supergirl investigates the disappearance of the body and ends up in a fight with the genetic mutants of Underworld, trying to save a cop who is underground as well,

Ma and Pa Kent and Lana Lang come to Metropolis for the funeral, which they do not actually attend. While Lois worries about the Kents, the Kents fear that Lois may crack under the grief of losing both Clark and Superman. Upon returning to Smallville, Pa Kent begins to suffer dementia until he collapses,

The kid whose house was destroyed in the Death Of Superman story feels guilt and journey’s to Metropolis, where he runs into Jimmy Olson and Bibbo. Bibbo keeps popping up, talking like Popeye, to try to keep the streets of Metropolis civil following Superman’s death,

Inspector Henderson of the Metropolis Police Department resurfaces to bug Gangbuster, who is making the choice as to whether or not to take up the outfit again. Henderson’s presence starts off a pissing match between Metropolis PD, the Federal Government, and the Cadmus Project about where Superman’s body belongs,

Guardian starts patrolling the streets of Metropolis, until he is brought back to the Cadmus Project by the scientists there. One clones the Guardian and uses the clone to try to steal a digital representation of Superman’s DNA. This leads to a ridiculous chase with young clones of Cadmus leaders who talk like they are from the 1940s,

Sadly, that interaction is not nearly as bad as the journey into Underworld that Lois makes to find the source of flooding when Cadmus Project charges go off underneath Superman’s monument. Filled with giant creatures and homeless people the journey goes nowhere and seems only to happen to showcase the weird art and characters of the location,

And then, after Lois uncovers that Superman’s body has been moved to Cadmus, she enlists an unlikely ally to get it back.

With so much going on, the book never quite lands. World Without A Superman reads like a sloppy writer’s pitch where everyone in a single writer’s room had a different plotline they were working on in their own different Superman comic book and with their stories abruptly cut off, they had to figure out how their disparate part of the Superman world fit into the story. Frankly, the Underworld plotline – and the divergence with Waverider – feel like filler and only add confusing elements to a book that lacks a cohesive story or voice.

The less said about the “Newsboys,” the better.

The artwork in World Without A Superman is nothing to write home about; most of it looks more like a comic strip than what one expects from a comic book. There is a distinct lack of detail and the colors are nowhere near as rich or vibrant as fans of the medium are used to these days.

As one who is not vested in the series or characters, World Without A Superman was an utter waste of time for me. I would have been at least as well off if someone had just told me, “Superman died, characters whined, he came back” without actually trudging through the stories associated with it. You need not make the same mistake. World Without A Superman may easily be passed by.

For other books that focus on Superman, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Kingdom Come - Alex Ross
Sacrifice - Greg Rucka
The Black Ring - Paul Cornell and Pete Woods

2/10

For other book reviews, be sure to check out my Book Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Comic Book Event Of 1993 Is A Remarkably Dull Graphic Novel: The Death Of Superman !

The Good: Some of the artwork, Concept
The Bad: No real character development, Anticlimactic, Much of the artwork.
The Basics: With The Death Of Superman, readers are teased over a non-event that is too-rapidly undone, but also stands on its own as a surprisingly bland book.


I remember when I was in high school and the news reported the forthcoming comic book storyline about Superman getting killed. I did not care much about comic books or Superman at the time (I still am not a fan of Superman comics), so it was pretty much a non-event for me. Even so, I dutifully bought a copy of the issue that culminated in Superman’s death (I’m not sure why, even then the pundits were suggesting it was so over-printed that it would end up being worthless in the future) and saved it, forgetting about it somewhere in all of my many moves since. So, when I picked up The Death Of Superman from the local library, there was less a sense of nostalgia and more a sense of inevitability; I had already read the end, I might as well see how the story got there.

Actually, I picked up The Death Of Superman because sometime since I started reading graphic novels, I saw a cover of one of the issues contained within The Death Of Superman that featured the Justice League Of America. The Justice League Of America gets cut down prior to Superman and I, having an interest in many of the characters, thought it would be interesting to read how that happened. That is why I picked up The Death Of Superman.

The Death Of Superman is a remarkably straightforward story, in fact, too straightforward. This is not a complicated event and the villain, nicknamed Doomsday, is hardly a compelling villain. The Death Of Superman is a triumph of brute strength over the strength of a familiar character, with incidental plots running through the book that are more likely to confuse the reader than make them care – like the Blue Beetle having an epiphany as to the identity of Bloodwynd (a character I had never-before seen).

North of Metropolis, a creature breaks out of the earth. With one arm still restrained behind it, the creature begins destroying everything in its path. This leads the Justice League Of America – comprised of Guy Gardner (as Warrior), Fire, Ice, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Maxima (an alien whom I was unfamiliar with before this), and Bloodwyng – to intervene and get their collective asses kicked. They delay the creature, whom Booster nicknames Doomsday, long enough for Superman to arrive at the ruined homestead. After a fierce fight, the creature only gets stronger, which pits Superman against an enemy who has the power to wound – and mortally wound – him.

The Death Of Superman is exactly what it promises . . . for a time. Of course, Superman does not die for real or forever and that is the collosal mindfuck of DC Comics. They won’t let anything that makes them money be buried. I still think that there should be an entire crossover event that explores the final, permanent, death of each character in the DC Universe. The Death Of Superman is not that.

Instead, The Death Of Superman is one surprisingly short march of the creature Doomsday toward Metropolis and the slaughter of Superman in one final attempt to save humanity. The Death Of Superman is a fast read, but it is not a particularly good one.

The story within The Death Of Superman is utterly lacking in subtlety or character development. Doomsday is simply the biggest, meanest, least-vulnerable creature Superman has yet encountered. The result is a plotless conflict that does not make any larger statement on Superman, his values or his time on Earth. Instead, this is just one end to Superman (temporarily).

In addition to having nothing stellar in the character development department, The Death Of Superman has mediocre artwork. The sense of movement within the panels is nonexistent and much of the artwork is simple, more like a comic strip than a comic book. The Death Of Superman lacks artwork that has any realistic sense of coloring and shading and no real depth of color. Ironically, some of the best artwork in the book comes at the outset, while Superman is fighting the generic villains in Underworld.

The Death Of Superman is easy to look back at and complain about how it did not actually do what it promised, but even in context, the book is largely unsatisfying. Superman is the Alpha Good, so his death should be either a glorification of that (he dies fighting for his supreme principles) or the corruption of that (in his final battle, he somehow learns that his efforts have all been in vain). The Death Of Superman gives readers neither option. Superman stands up, as he always does, to try to save human life and a mindless brute punches him real hard. Such is the literary legacy of The Death Of Superman.

For other books that focus on Superman, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Kingdom Come - Alex Ross
Sacrifice - Greg Rucka
The Black Ring - Paul Cornell and Pete Woods

2/10

For other graphic novel reviews, please be sure to check out my Graphic Novel Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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