Action Comics #986 Review and *SPOILERS*

Super Lex No More?

Written By: Rob Williams

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

Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: August 23, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Let's jump back into Action Comics, where last issue we saw Superman go through the trope of accusing Lex Luthor of being up to no good because The Machinist is using technology that Lex created to control people's minds.  Too bad that Lex has been on the up and up for the most part since Forever Evil and I find myself bored to tears from using this as a means of creating drama because it just doesn't make sense anymore.  So yeah, the two Supermen work through their problems and team up to take The Machinist down, but Lex goes and gets one of those mind ticks The Machinist is using to rob people of their free will on him.......... even though it shouldn't have pierced through his force field and we ended the last issue with Lex trying to kill our Man of Steel.  Let's see what happens when DC Comics' oldest foes go at one another and see if Superman starts trusting Lex more by the end of it.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with Lex and Superman going at it, but to my shock and horror, Rob Williams went and decided that even though Lex has been using his Apokolyptian super suit for over a year...... now, the more you use it the more you become like Darkseid......... and I'm not just talking about acting like, I mean that Lex is going all stone faced and ugly from trying to kill Superman and by this point in the book I'm just angry as hell because this is out of nowhere and doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  

Eventually, after more fighting and Lex getting uglier, Superman seems to get through to Lex and get him to understand that if he keeps using the suit, he'll only become worse, which allows Lex to have a brilliant notion that if he uses everything he has on Superman that the suit will be out of power and he'll revert back to normal........... even though this would lead me to think that he'd just look like a native of Apokolips, but it seems to work and as Superman and Lex fall back into Earth's atmosphere, the mind tick is burned off of Lex.......... even though he's perfectly fine.

In the end, with Lex having his wits about him again and not trying to kill our hero, Superman goes after Machinist, which he finds immediately and the problem is over.  Lex and Superman have themselves a little sit down, which gets them their trust back, even though we had that before this little arc.  As our issue closes, Lex is working on his super suit and finds that one of the people the Machinist was controlling had himself a tattoo of a Z surrounded by a O........... so pretty much an OZ tattoo and with that discovery, Mr. Oz shows up and deletes Lex's records before humiliating him and destroying the Superman symbol on his suit's chest.  

That's it for this issue of Action Comics and I don't know if all of this was to set Lex up as being a bad guy again further down the line or getting Lex pissed at Mr. Oz when his identity reveal story starts next issue, but I don't like it.  Not only was it odd to see Lex looking like Darkseid out of nowhere because he happened to use the suit that he's been using for over a year, but the resolution to all of that didn't make much sense to me at all and the resolution to Lex and the Machinist just came way too quick to give us our Mr. Oz cameo at the end.  Everything just felt forced in this issue and in the last and I wish that I could say that the art made up for it, but even though I'm a fan of Guillem March, I didn't like the art in this issue at all.  

Bits and Pieces:

Concepts are thrown out at us in this issue that seem to come out of nowhere and make little sense to me and if that wasn't enough to raise your blood pressure, it all seemed to be filler to get us to our conclusion so that we're all ready for Mr. Oz' big reveal in the next arc.  I wish I could say that the art was strong here to try and make this sound better, but that too was pretty weak and I walked away from this issue and and this two issue arc wishing that I didn't read it. 

4/10