Action Comics #985 Review and *SPOILERS*

Metropolis' Finest

Written By: Rob Williams

Art By: Guillem March, Hi-Fi, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: August 9, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Okay, the Superman Revenge Squad has been put down and now it's time to get into another bit of action, only this time we've got Rob Williams and Guillem March driving the adventure forward.  There isn't much to say to get you ready for this comic except that Superman's had a pretty hard time lately with everything he's been dealing with and now he's got the move to Metropolis to worry about now that things have finally calmed down.  Yeah, that's about it.  Let's jump into this issue and see what this creative team has in store for us.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with Superman doing Superman things as a way to get out of having to help with the move and Lois calling him on their new comm device so that she can call him out on it in the guise of being worried about him after all they've dealt with recently........ Yeah, I might be reading more into this than is actually there, but I can read between the lines.  No time to talk about feelings or not helping with the move though because Superman hears screams and gunfire in the distance, allowing him to have a guilt free way to end the call.  Once he gets to the disturbance though, he may have wished he simply packed some boxes up back at home.

Over in the country of Georgia, our Man of Steel comes across terrorists and wild wolves that seem to be attacking a small town in tandem, but soon our hero discovers that The Machinist is involved and is controlling the men and the animals by computerized mind ticks, but once he shuts them down he discovers that the mind ticks are designed by LexCorp.  So yeah, Superman's not happy about this and neither am I because even though we've made great strides with Superman and Lex Luthor being allies now, it all seems to be completely forgotten here when Superman doesn't give Lex the benefit of the doubt about his involvement and we're forced to deal with the old hat trope of Superman and Lex not getting along.  

In the end though, Lex tells Superman that he can track the mind tick's signal back to its source if they team up and while it's more Lex wanting to shut down whoever is stealing his tech instead of him just wanting to be the hero, which I really enjoy, we do get the two Supermen going to India and working together, but it's quickly over when The Machinist plants a mind tick on Lex and commands him to kill Superman.......... Well, so much for that team-up.

That's it for this issue of Action Comics and while I've been wanting to see Superman and Super Lex team up again, I feel that we wasted valuable page space to explore an old concept about our two heroes not trusting one another and at this point, it just feels odd and I would have loved to see an interaction where the two were amicable right off the bat instead of getting more of what we always end up getting.  So yeah, that was a disappointment and to my surprise, so was the art by Guillem March, who I am normally a big fan of, but here Superman and Lex Luthor just felt wrong in the way they were conveyed through his art and it screamed of an early 90's comic more than anything else.  All in all, I'm interested in this arc's concept but felt that this first issue in both art and story were just not up to snuff for what we usually get out of this series.

Bits and Pieces:

The concepts of how the characters in this issue interact with one another comes off feeling odd for how much we've seen their relationship grow since Rebirth and while I wish that was the only thing that I wasn't a fan of in this issue, the art here wasn't that great either and at the end of the day I am hopeful that we'll get something memorable out of this arc, but sadly it won't be from this issue.

6/10