When I saw the cover and solicitation for this book, I immediately thought of my favorite moment from the most recent iteration of the Batman/Superman line. Bruce and Clark meet as kids and have that baseball moment while Jonathan and Alfred male-bond over a broken-down car. It was awesome, because it highlighted the qualities of all four characters and provided readers with the very cool “I’ll hit” moment for Bruce. Yeah, this isn’t that.
Instead what we get is Wonder Woman, who is apparently a centuries-old Amazonian warrior who must protect Bruce and Clark. The only problem is, rather than doing the cool thing of having all three come together, she must save them separately at two different locations. This still being an origin story and whatnot, you have all the “required” tropes: Clark on a farm doing farmboy clichés (like chewing a piece of wheat, the king of farm clichés), Bruce staring a bats (which he says are beautiful or something), mugger attacking the Waynes, and the appearance of a Kent (but not Jonathan; I’m still recovering from him being laser-beamed by Bizarro).
And of course at the very end of everything, we get the “oh the main characters will forget about everything” shtick that happened in Batman/Superman. It’s like this is a less interesting Batman/Superman clone. It’s so uninteresting that there’s actually almost nothing to spoil. The only cool part of this issue comes from Lois’ own “memory” which wasn’t even her memory because she too gets her memory erased. Apparently the Greek gods imparted her with a wind spirit, which is foreshadowing for her becoming Red Tornado. I mean, it makes absolutely zero sense that the narrator would be bringing up things that she could not remember, but it was cool.
Unfortunately, I also was not a fan of the artwork for this issue. Jed Dougherty’s stuff is certainly not bad, it just is not my preferred style. Everything feels like there is a lack of detail, and there’s a lot of close ups on faces that look more like porcelain dolls than humans. This is totally nitpicky, but I believe Bruce’s eyes were green. It’s weird that I would notice that, because I’m not really a details kind of person, but I just stared at his face for maybe a solid minute and couldn’t help but think that that looked very wrong.
- Wonder Woman totally didn’t know that Steppenwolf was from Apokolips? Way to make the ultimate Amazonian warrior seen like an idiot.
- So many porcelain doll faces…
- The woman from last issue appears to take Clark away, hinting further at Apokolips’ desire to get their hands on Supes.
- MAJOR SPOILER: Neither one dies. Because, you know, they die in Earth 2 #1
Recommended If…
- You like seeing your heroes as kids.
- You’re a fan of Wonder Woman.
Overall:
There’s really not much to be said. In a universe full of potential stories, the fact that we would get another Batman/Superman title just is not appealing, regardless of the differences made in the fabric of the story.
SCORE: 2/10
