Superhero Times: a service of Action Online
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Geoff Johns wants to fix Superman. Different writers at different times wrote different stories that didn’t always make sense if you put them together. Characters, such as Brainiac, have been all over the place in the last 20 years. Brainiac has been a human mentalist, a robot, an alien, and a cyborg mix of all the above. So how can you make all of those stories work if you aren’t going to throw out the ones that contradict each other?
Think outside the box.
Johns has done to Brainiac and the Superman mythos what he did to the Green Lanterns and their weakness to yellow a few years ago. He’s stripped away the silly, re-imagined the back-story, and created a story that reveals how everything you know is false, without it feeling like you’ve wasted your time on all of that history.
Starting at the Daily Planet, Johns puts Cat Grant’s silicone against Supergirl’s sweetness in a comical showdown opening the story with a light-hearted touch. Things quickly turn sour as Lois and Supergirl reveal that Superman has been out of contact long enough to raise their concerns. Where is he? What has he been doing?
Shifting to Brainiac’s ship, we see robotic forms of Brainiac attempting to assimilate Superman into Brainiac’s cosmic zoo. The following 10 pages have only a handful of dialog as Superman makes his way out of the torturous medical facilities and through the ship looking for Brainiac. Gray Frank’s pencils shine here as the storytelling shifts to 99% visual and it all works well. Frank takes us through the facilities where alien life forms are held in stasis and into the place where Brainiac keeps all the miniaturized cities. Here Superman finally finds the bottled city of Kandor and the true form of Brainiac himself.
The revelations about who Brainiac really is and his purpose is startling and changes a lot of what you thought you knew of the character, and yet, it doesn’t retcon everything you’ve read before out of existence. All of those post-Crisis stories still work in John’s new framework which is why it feels so rewarding. The one minor gripe is that the design of Brainiac’s true form may be a little underwhelming. I can see the new DC Direct action figure being sculpted now, but it seems to betray the idea of him being something different from what we knew all along. However, Johns does throw one more mind-bending secret into the mix that changes the very nature of the Superman origin and may make Brainiac Superman’s true arch nemesis, leaving Lex Luthor in the dust.
There are added scenes of Ma and Pa Kent that lend an ominous tone to the story. Johns seems to want to make it clear that something really bad is going to happen, but he won’t quite reveal what it is yet. When Johns finally gets the story back to Metropolis, Brainiac is there too. His miniaturization ship has set its sights on Metropolis and for once you really feel like Superman may not get back in time to save the day.
It’s difficult to describe how well this book rewards long time Superman fans. New readers picking up this issue without prior knowledge may feel left out in the cold, but hopefully it will inspire them to seek out the past stories and see how all the pieces of the puzzle fit.