Superman #44 Review and *SPOILERS*

Bizarro's Going Out For A Pack Of Smokes

Written By: Patrick Gleason, Peter J. Tomasi

Art By: Doug Mahnke, Jaime Mendoza, Wil Quintana, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: April 4, 2018

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

It's time to go back to Bizarro World......... even though I really don't want to.  I mean, how the hell can we get an entire arc that's full of Bizarros talking their nonsense backwards talk and our heroes doing their damnedest to try and talk the same way?  I must be in hell.  Even with my hate for Bizarro talk, I will tell you that I really enjoyed last issue and thought I saw a glimpse of a story dealing with abuse in the background and it's that part that I really gravitated towards and I hope we get more of that here........... or, maybe I just looked way too deep to find that story and it was never there in the first place.  Either way, let's jump into this issue and see how our heroes plan on saving Bizarro World from the Legion of Fun.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with me realizing that this issue is going to be completely full of Bizarro talk and once I stopped rolling my eyes, I saw that Bizarro is the key to everything on this world and with him not being a complete part of it........... since he didn't have a Reborn like our Man of Steel did, it's actually that bit that's changing the world to become a sphere and the Legion of Fun is simply trying to have themselves a little "fun".......... or the reverse of fun with the Super-Foes before everything is destroyed.  

Really though, this issue is full of Superman and Bizarro fighting it out while Superman tries to get through to his reverse doppelganger with no avail.  While that's going on, we have Superboy, Beacon, Nobody and Boyzarro going off to stop the Legion of Fun after getting the information from a thawed out Hawkzarro.  It's just a huge fight scene that made little sense to me because I had no idea what the characters were talking about and while I normally love Doug Mahnke's art, this all felt rushed and had little detail because of the small panels that were used for this fight.

In the end, our heroes prevail, but Bizarro has had enough with this world and his friends and family.  Before the planet explodes, since it's tied to Bizarro's connection to it, Bizarro tells Boyzarro that he's not a good father and blasts off in his rocket ship to leave everyone to die.  Thankfully, our heroes whisk Boyzarro back to their world before the planet is destroyed.

That's it for this issue of Superman and while I think there was some really cool stuff here in what would have happened to Earth if Superman never had his Reborn, it's not really explored here and what elements of it that we did talk about was riddled with backwards nonsense that really made this issue a chore to read........ especially since we had so many characters this issue.  Overall, this is probably the weakest of this arc so far, where I didn't care for the art that much and the dialog was killing me and my entire takeaway of the story.

Bits and Pieces:

I hate Bizarro talk and boy do we get a shit load of it here.  There's a really cool story in the background of this issue, which we never get the chance to fully explore and while that's a shame, the bigger problem here was the rushed art and small panels depicting the story.  Hopefully the next issue comes off a little bit clearer in both art and dialog because goddamn was this issue hard to read.

5.5/10