Superman #17 Review and *SPOILERS*

When The Parents Are Away.......... Apparently Jon Drops Acid.

Written By: Peter J. Tomasi, Patrick Gleason

Art By: Sebastian Fiumara, Dave Stewart, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $2.99

Release Date: February 15, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Thank goodness we're back in Hamilton County for this one because even though I was initially excited as hell to get our Superman in a big ass Multiversity style story, I found the ending to it as confusing as something that Grant Morrison would have wrote himself.  Yeah, the ending didn't make much sense to me, but ultimately it seems that the only thing we really needed to know was that some gigantic threat is on the horizon and it threatens all life in the Multiverse........... Well, that and Mr. Oz got his hands on the super sucker, Prophecy.  Let's jump into this one shot featuring our new Superboy and see what kind of trouble Jon can get into while his parents are.......... Well, probably having social services called on them because goddamn do they leave him home alone a lot.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins on a cold, dark night in Hamilton County, where Jon, just like a little Eric Shea is wrapped up in a blanket, in the dark and watching himself a horror movie.......... and goddamn is he really into it because when Kathy rings the doorbell, he damn near jumps out of his skin and his heat vision goes a flying.  When Jon composes himself, he finds out that Kathy's grandpa Cobb went out two hours earlier to find a cow that had gotten out and had not returned home yet.  So because Jon seems to have a sort of crush on Kathy.......... and well, he's a good guy, he agrees to help her search for the errant cow and missing grandpa.  

Almost immediately it seems that the two find themselves on the threshold of Deadman's Swamp, which we saw previously in this series is a scary ass place and somewhere that Kathy's grandpa told her never to go into, but since this is an emergency, they both go inside and shit gets crazy right away.  First off, they see a huge shadow man watching them and as they try to get away from it, they're met by giant animals, which seem to only want to hurt our young main characters, but eventually the two make their way to an old creepy mansion.  Too bad that things don't calm down on the creep factor once they get inside.  Yeah, that's right, the house comes alive and starts attacking them with furnishings and at the top of the house, they come across the cow that started their adventure, but find that it too has decided to join in the mind fuckery because it washes them away in a flood of milk and it's only when they make their way back outside and hide in a well that things seem to go back to the way the world should look.  I don't know though because Cobb was gone a long time and it's him and his missing cow that find the two children down there.  

In the end, Cobb tries to explain that the gasses emitted from the swamp have been known to affect people's minds and that must be what happened to them........... but I'm not buying it and as we end this issue we see Jon rush back home, shower and get into bed right as his parents walk in.  Boy does he have them fooled because this issue closes with them saying what a responsible young man they have, but I don't know if Jon should be feeling all that lucky because off in the distance we see what looks like a giant shadow Clark Kent standing in Deadman's Swamp.  

That's it for this issue of Superman and goddamn this was a strange issue.  We're supposedly moving into the big Superman Reborn story next issue so I don't really know what we're supposed to take away from this.  I mean, are we just supposed to remember that shit is weird as hell out there in Deadman's Swamp because from where I'm standing, that's the only thing you can take away because this issue was all over the place with its crazy and I'm not sure what exactly happened.  The art in this issue was okay for the story it told, but overall I look forward to get our regular artists back on this title.  Ultimately though, since we've been getting these really short stories lately, I find that I'm just getting bored of this book waiting around for some event or crossover to happen because really, nothing has gone on in this title in a long time and since there was no explanation to how or why Superman got his powers back in the previous arc, I'm saying that nothing really happened there either.  Just a wink and a nod to future events, but at this point, it's getting kind of old.

Bits and Pieces:

This is a strange ass one-shot that focuses on our Superboy and while I love seeing little Jon doing his thing, this issue was just all over the place with its crazy factor and at the end of the day it seems that this was just here as a place holder until we can get to our big Superman crossover coming up.  Hopefully something does come of the events here because after all that, I need some clarification and some satisfaction.  

6.8/10