Superwoman #5 Review

This One’s A Headcase

Written by: Phil Jimenez

Art by: Matt Santorelli, Jeromy Cox & Tony Avina

Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: December 14, 2016

Here I come to save the day yet again by taking over a series from someone else. I’m the guy who is given the leftover pig slop that not even an animal will eat. That’s what Superwoman feels like when it was given to me to review. I regret taking this on but it must be done. For the fate of the DCU and the clamoring for better stories, I review a streak stain in the underpants of Mr. DC’s dirty laundry basket. This is Superwoman #5, unfortunately.

Explain It:

Little recap of how I feel about this title, it’s crap and I don’t like it. I honestly think Reggie was being a little nice in his reviews for this thing. So, what happens in this issue? Not a whole lot. Lena Luthor monologues to herself, while Lana gives us a recap of what’s been going on. If you’ve been reading this title up until now, the recaps are so unnecessary, especially since this run has been FILLED with dialog. I’ve never seen so many damn words in a comic before. It’s like reading a novel with pictures to go along with it. The recapping of the story early on in a run has been an issue in a lot of comics, too. If you’re reading this in a trade, it’s literally recapping what you read not even a minute ago, so this has to stop. I wouldn’t mind recaps at the beginning of arcs, not on issue #5.

Anyway, now that the Bizzaro Women are destroying the city, it’s up to Traci 13 and Natasha Irons, Steel’s niece, to save the city. And they fail, epically hard, that was fun. Lena Luthor’s body armor is also failing too as she needs power cells. I mean, if she plays Jak and Daxter, she wouldn’t have this problem. It’s shown that she’s just a head so that her body's energy can just be focused on her brain power which is just so silly. Throughout this issue, Lana is still being haunted by Lois’s ghost or is becoming schizophrenic from PTSD. It is, of course, not clear because this comic thinks it can be deep and meaningful. If Lois is going to still be in the title as a ghost, why kill her so early on? I feel a Superwoman comic would be much more fun as Lois being the main chick in charge. That’s what issue #1 suggested but that was quickly shoved aside. Lana tries to jump at Ultrawoman’s hot rodded Gestalt to go confront her but is stopped by a Bizzaro Woman and a shape shifter who beat the supe out of her. We’re left with a cliffhanger that didn’t grab me at all since I have no idea what the context is supposed to be so I wasn’t shocked.

The art in this issues, well really the whole run so far, is so terrible. It’s so hard to look at and every time I do, I want to puke. The pages are jammed and DP'ed full of panels and dialog bubbles that they are shrunken down to the bare minimum size to even fit in the page. The blobs of paint that try to resemble a character are so forced in there that it’s overflowing out into the white boarders of the page. I feel like Jimenez has so much to say and doesn’t want anything cut that he tries to cram the maximum amount of garbage into these pages. I get that but it really needs to be spaced out. It gives the feel that he wants this all wrapped up in around 6 issues to make this a single trade for the arc and writers need to stop trying to do that.

Bits and Pieces:

This issue was terrible. It’s not that it even pissed me off, it’s that it’s just so boring and nothing happened. It’s so hard to look at from the bad art and the overly wordy bubbles make this issue such a chore to get through.

4/10