Prophecy of Doom
Written By: Peter J. Tomasi, Patrick GleasonArt By: Tony S. Daniel, Clay Mann, Sandu Florea, Seth Mann, Dinea Ribeiro, Rob Leigh
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: February 1, 2017
*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*
With Superman going all one man army corps on Prophecy last issue, leaving the rest of our Supermen that they collected throughout the issue seeming like they had absolutely nothing to do...... thus making the issue come off as pointless....... Well, I wasn't too happy with it. Yeah, there were some cool moments and I'm sure that there will be some explanations here, but as an individual issue, it came off a bit lackluster. Here we are though, the last issue to this Multiplicity story arc and I really hope that our heroes pull something out of their collective asses to turn this arc around for me because where I originally thought it was going to be epic, with it only being a three issue story and with the second issue to that arc being "meh", well I need this one to come out and pull out all the stops to make this a story worth remembering. Let's jump into this issue and see if that's the case and find out the fate of all our Supermen. Let's check it out.
Explain It!:
Our issue begins with us realizing that we're not going to see a knock down drag out fight that I thought we might because immediately we see Superman in Prophecy's grasp.......... since he's gigantic as hell and also because he's already taken Superman's powers with his "Superman power sucker machine".......... I think that's the technical name for it. So yeah, we find out that Prophecy is doing all of this so that he can be strong enough to take on some Multiversal doom that's on the horizon and when he's done spouting off about his master plan, he tosses Superman into a pit with the rest of the powerless Supermen and Superwomen.
While Superman checks out his new pit home and his new pit neighbors, the Justice League Incarnate are trying to figure out what they're supposed to do now that they don't have a ship to get back to Superman with........ which leads Red Racer to create a new one really quick, but somehow this leads him to die like Barry Allen did in Crisis on Infinite Earths and I'm guessing that it has something to do with compressed time and dealing with that....... I'm guessing that because it was a random line thrown out there, but even with all that, I really don't know why this killed Red Racer. What I do know is, our Justice Incarnate team use the tones of the previous ship to track where Prophecy is and they plan on making sure that Red Racer's sacrifice isn't in vain.
In the end, Superman out of nowhere gains his power back and so do all the other Supermen and Superwomen in captivity and this seems like it may be due to Superman being an anomaly and with that blue glow he sometimes has, but with the Superman Annual seeming like it took care of all that, I really don't have an explanation about how or why everyone gets their powers back or why they all start glowing out of their symbols, but they all come together to take down Prophecy.......... Which they do, but it seems like the villain is transported away before complete defeat. As our issue closes, we see Kenan Kong and Superman having themselves a talk back on New Earth, since it's pretty much their first meeting and also............ we see that Mr. Oz was the one who teleported Prophecy away and he now has the villain chained up like we previously saw Doomsday in Action Comics.
That's it for this issue of Superman and I have to tell you.......... I'm really disappointed with this story arc because for all the flash and bang that it had going for itself right out of the gate, this story really didn't have anything going for it besides for the reveal that Mr. Oz was going to take the big bad at the end. Red Racer sacrifices himself and I'm not really sure why he had to do that, all the Supermen and Superwomen get their powers back and I'm not sure how and the only thing that seems to be redeeming is that we had a reason for Superman using himself as bait in the previous issue so that the Justice League Incarnate could track Prophecy back to where all the other Supermen were being held. The art in this issue is great, but besides that, there really isn't a lot going on here and I leave this arc just being really disappointed.
Bits and Pieces:
Things and stuff happen here, but for the most part they just happen and I don't have an explanation about how or why. We just rush to a conclusion so we can get a interesting cliffhanger and that's about it. Luckily, we had awesome art all the way through........ it's just...... we didn't have much of a story at all.
5.8/10
Proof that time travel, infinite crises and multiverses kill any good story and make it a convoluted heap of trash. Multiversity as a concept is interesting but it has messed up so bad the core of classic DC and it hasn't even given readers a logical explanation why new 52 earth exists. It messed up the beyond timeline suggesting it is some kind of Brother Eye post-apocalyptic future. Futures End was the terrible nail on the new 52's coffin. Not to mention Convergence that did nothing except for bringing back Post-Crisis Superman and his family although there is a huge temporal discrepancy in recent Lois and Clark series compared to new 52 stories. Rebirth has to change its trajectory away from everything New 52, to call it soft reboot only aggravates the situation. Titans and other heroes were greatly damaged by Flashpoint. Why try to fix what's not broken with gimmick stories?
ReplyDeleteBy far the most unforgivable failure of this issue was the failure to reveal how the Supermen and Super women got their powers back. It made absolutely no sense why suddenly their S's glowed white. The jarring artistic changes only heightened the failure of the narrative. This was the worst Superman issue to date. The infection of Morrison is to blame. Multiversity was an imaginative series but it lacked a necessary clarity if writers are to expand its influence into Rebirth. This issue did the concept absolutely no favours. The number one characteristic of multiversity was its confusing chapters and pretentious approach to telling its stories. And it seems that Tomasi and Gleason set out to deliberately duplicate the confusion with, unfortunately great success. Tomasi and Gleason are BETTER writers than this. How hard would it have been to explain how the Supermen got their powers back? Anyways,..... this issue is a rare misstep with Superman so far.
ReplyDeleteLet's face it , DC doesn't know how to do team books . Justice League sucks and this Superman arc felt like I was reading Justice League . Superman , Batman , Hal Jordan are the only books worth reading from DC . And let's hope Gleason or Mahnke goes back to art duties because this art in Multiplicity doesn't cut it .
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