Waiting for the Trade - Superman

Waiting for the Trade

By Bill Miller

 

Superman: Reign of Doomsday

By Paul Cornell
Collects Action Comics 900-904
 

Why I Bought This: I had read the previous trade (Return of Doomsday) in which Doomsday returned to take on all of the Reign of the Superman characters and that one had ended on a cliffhanger with Doomsday victorious. While that trade was only okay, I was still likely to pick up the conclusion once the price dropped online sooner or later.

The Plot: the Reign of Superman heroes awaken on a space station containing a pocket universe and Doomsday. Supes goes to mount a rescue mission of the Reign characters only to be waylaid by a newly omnipotent Lex Luthor.

Chapter 1 – Supes finds out about Doomsday defeating Steel and heads off to find him. The Reign heroes wake up on a space station that Steel’s scanners reveal is infinite in size with no escape because it loops in on itself spatially. Doomsday arrives and attacks the heroes with Cyborg deciding to work against the other four heroes. In space Luthor has obtained infinite power and uses it teleport Superman to him. Lex obtained his power from the Phantom Zone where a heretofore unknown entity has been suffering for years because it is empathic and the Kryptonian criminals stored there only have negative emotions. It was on its way to our universe to destroy the source of negative emotions when Lex found and forcibly merged with it. He tries to give Superman pain by forcing human emotions on him, which is just an excuse to have a bunch of flashbacks to key events in the Superman mythos since this chapter was originally Action Comics 900. Lex doesn’t understand why his plan isn’t working as he refuses to believe Superman already has human emotion until he mind-probes him and learns he’s Clark Kent. Lex doesn’t take the news well, ranting about his own poor childhood and how Supes being Clark makes a fool out of him. He tries to kill Supes but the entity begins to exert influence and holds back the power he needs to do the job. Back on the space station Doomsday is mimicking Eradicator’s power when the heroes drop down into a bottomless pit but he just reappears seconds later using Superboy’s powers. Back with Lex and he merges with the entity more fully to gain access to its full power and this causes him to unleash a wave of universal bliss. While Lex is happy now and has plans to use this power to right all of the wrongs in the universe, the catch is if he uses the power for a single negative act he will lose it, which in his words means not only can he not kill Superman but Superman gets to live out his life blissfully happy. Lex finds he can’t abide that choice and attacks Supes. He immediately begins to power down but the power lasts long enough for him to trade punches with Supes for a few pages. Once all the power leaves him, Lex of course has instant amnesia and then gets sucked into a black hole but not before mentioning that he’s behind the Doomsday attacks on the Reign characters and letting Supes know where the space station is. Supes arrives and sees the way in as a one-way event horizon but dives in anyway to help his friends. Together they find Doomsday’s dead body in a lab, where Lex has been performing experiments on him. The result of the experiments is he has in fact cloned Doomsday into four separate entities, each one mimicking the powers of one specific Reign character.

Chapter 2 – With three Doomsday’s attacking (the fourth is still falling in the bottomless pit), Supes rips out Cyborg’s heart so they concentrate on the main threat, which is not as hardcore as it sounds since Cyborg will come back to life as soon as the heart is put back in his chest. The heroes run away with the original Doomsday’s body, while a mystery villain watches the proceedings and begins to pilot the space station. The heroes try to come up with a plan, while Steel notes that detached from Luthor’s machines the original Doomsday is beginning to resurrect. The three Doomsday clones arrive and attack and generally have the heroes on the defensive. The space station is on a collision course with Earth that if successful will destroy the planet, and is just 10-minutes away to impact. The heroes become aware of the impending collision and go looking for a control panel but instead the mystery villain—a new character by the name of Doomslayer, who looks like Doomsday only with bigger claws and a metal breastplate. Doomslayer then kills the Eradicator with ease.

Chapter 3 – Doomslayer reveals he’s an evolved Doomsday with intelligence and awareness of what his origins are. He says Doomsday has killed millions and must be stopped. His plan therefore is to not only kill Doomsday but also any world that has ever encountered him so as to erase all knowledge of him from the universe. Steel hacks the door open and the supermen work on stopping the space station. Their strength decelerates it enough so the threat changes from planet-wide to continent-wide to city-wide (and of course it’s heading for Metropolis), at which point Superman has the others clear out and flies it into the ocean. It creates a massive tidal wave but the other three stop that from hitting Metropolis. Doomslayer then unleashes plan B and sets the Doomsday clones on the Earth.

Chapter 4 – The Reign heroes are making one-on-one stands across the world while Supes takes the original Doomsday to Star-Labs. Doomsday wakes up, but with Eradicator’s intelligence is in control of him. Doomslayer is working on sending his pocket universe into the Earth’s Core as a plan C of destruction. Meanwhile the Reign heroes have been joined by various Justice League groupings to face the Doomsday clones while Superman takes the fight to Doomslayer. We get big brawl of a fight scene and Eradicator kills one of the Doomsdays but notes the original will soon reassert its intelligence. Superman meanwhile has made way to the core of the space ship when Doomslayer powers it up in hopes of killing him.

Chapter 5 – The second Doomsday clone is defeated in the opening panel, leaving just one more to go. Meanwhile Supes learns the spaceship is alive: it’s not happy about having been used by Lex and Doomslayer but Supes gives a rah rah speech and it agrees to help him save the world. Supes now takes on Doomslayer physically as the ship begins to depart. The JLA’s heavy hitters put down the last Doomsday and the clones are disposed of in a space warp by GL. Doomslayer is about to kill Supes when Eradicator arrives (still in the original Doomsday’s body). Together their combined strength is too much for Doomslayer. With his last though Eradicator tosses Superman from the space station, which then seals up and self-destructs to end the threat of Doomsday and Doomslayer. Afterwards Clark and Lois have dinner and reflect on what Superman means to America.

Bonus Chapters – A story of how Jor-El sent Clark to Earth. Superman meets a Buddha Hippo Alien and they compare notes on what it means to be human. Lois and Superman throw a dinner party for the Legion of Super Heroes in four pages. Superman helps out protestors in the Mid-East and almost creates an international incident. Plus pin-ups and a partially illustrated script of Supes racing a former football player wearing Iron Man style flight suit.

 

Critical Thoughts: I have a mixed reaction to this. It’s not that it’s a bad story, it’s just not the story I wanted. I bought this hoping for a slice of 90’s nostalgia; not unreasonable when you consider it is playing off the history and characters of the most famous story of the 90s. Whereas this story, for reasons I completely understand, is also trying to be much bigger than that with the penultimate Superman vs. Luthor fight and trying to give Superman and Lois some closure. Again this is a logical creative choice since this trade encompasses both the landmark 900^th issue of Action Comics and I believe is the last Superman story before the New 52 reboot; but the result is a jarring a mix of things that don’t seem to fit together easily. There absolutely should be a last Superman story focused on Luthor and Lois, but I don’t think that needs to be in the same story with Doomsday and the Reign characters. As someone who rarely reads Superman and picked this up because of the prior trade (which was a crossover in a bunch of spinoff titles and not the main Superman titles) for this to open with omnipotent Luthor is a really jarring beginning vs. what the cover promises. That Luthor chapter feels like it needs to be the last chapter of some other chapter and not the first chapter of this one.

As far as the Luthor stuff goes, I liked Luthor’s choice that he can create or universal peace or try to kill Superman and being a villain he gives up the former for the chance of the latter. I will say this is the first comic I’ve ever read where the hero is okay with universal alteration as Superman encourages Luthor to let the universal peace wave ride out. Usually superheroes are a lot more concerned with free will or the integrity of the timeline or not playing God or whatever. I always think of Zero Hour where the heroes insist Hal Jordan shouldn’t be allowed to alter time even though his goal was to save millions of people who died in Coast City and a help a few heroes who came to bad ends like Batgirl as a poor example of that cliché where they against universal change on the basic principal rather than the end goal.

I’m also not sure why Luthor is so pissed off when he learns Superman is Clark Kent unless the Smallville continuity is in effect. Since from what I’ve seen of their adult personas Lex seems to be barely know Clark, when he deals with the Planet it always seems to be through Lois. That’s my biggest problem with DC. They change their continuity so often it’s hard to keep track of which one is in effect at any given moment/story.

As for the actual Doomsday story I bought this for, it’s okay. I would have liked to have seen Cyborg have a bigger part since he really is the ultimate big bad of that era. Doomslayer is pretty lame character with overblown motivations, but in that sense he does fit the 90s nostalgia kick perfectly: He’s just like Doomsday only bigger and with more metal and a cheesier name. If he had an over-sized gun he’d hit the 90’s cliché trifecta. There is a nice sense of action in the last two chapters, but overall the story just feels like its missing something.

Also for someone who hasn’t seen Steel in decades when did his tech get so good? In the Reign titles (and the Shaq movie) he had some low level armor with construction-themed weapons like a sledge hammer and rivet gun. Now he can instantly scan a universe sized spaceship in seconds, and reprogram alien technology? I know all comic characters have a tendency to enjoy power level creep over time but he seems to have gone from street level to cosmic over the years.

 

Grade: D+. It’s not terrible, but it still doesn’t feel coherent. It feels like two stories crammed together because of an editorial deadline so that ultimately neither story works as well as it should. I think as much as I bought this for the Doomsday story, it’s actually the Lex story which suffers more as that some big ideas that it doesn’t have the time to flesh out; and then the Doomsday stuff can’t properly follow it.