Superman #12 Review

Like "Kryptonite In My Coffee" Kill Me

Written By: Brian Michael Bendis

Art By: Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Oclair Albert, Alex Sinclair, Josh Reed

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: June 12, 2019

Let's head off back to space, where we left our Super-Family, not only fighting Rogol Zaar, General Zod and Jax-Ur, but three warships from three different alien species, the Khunds, the Trillium Collective and the Thanagarians...... Pretty much, our heroes were in a bit over their heads.  Thankfully though, we had Supergirl show up at the end of last issue to try and even the playing field, but even with our Girl of Steel, our heroes are going to need a lot of help in taking on all of these opponents.  Let's jump into this issue and check it out.

For this issue of Superman we see a giant fight that for the most part kind of makes the Khunds, Thanagarians and Trillium Collective not so important since they hightail it pretty quickly out of this story and to my increasing frustration....... we never find out why they were after Jor-El in the first place.  The only bit of explanation that we get is....... "Most of the galaxy doesn't want unity and peace"...... and that's it.  Pretty underwhelming on that front, but thankfully we get a pretty decent fight, which I would suggest if you do read Supergirl to read that first so that you get some answers to what they're up to by the end of this issue, but really....... a lot of what you get here you'll also get in Supergirl and I mean same as we get some of the same dialog balloons.  It's crazy how close this issue is to this week's issue to Supergirl, but even with that they're both still pretty decent.

While you won't get any answers as to why everyone hates Jor-El, you will get a revelation in this issue as his connection to Rogol Zaar and the destruction of Krypton and while I hate all the double-talk and non-answers that we've been getting out of this book about pretty much everything we're curious about, this revelation is pretty open and doesn't try to change the conservation and I appreciate the hell out of that.  With that, we do get some great Super-Family moments here between our four members of the House of El and if we can get more of that type of stuff going forward I'm going to be a real happy reader.

All in all, the art in this issue is amazing and I just love looking at the fight scene between our Super-Family and Rogol Zaar's crew, but I would like to know more about what's going on because even though we get a huge revelation in this issue to our mystery about Krypton's destruction, it feels like we've been doing this for so long now without anything really substantial happening.  Beyond that though, I love the family feels we get here and I love that our heroes are going to be splitting up between this series and the Supergirl series because that will definitely add to each of the title's fun factors.  Really though, I'm just kind of sick of Rogol Zaar at this point because there isn't much to him and we've had him so long now that I don't really care to know more.

Bits and Pieces:

There's some great moments between our heroes in this issue and we do get a pretty big revelation, all depicted with some amazing art, but by the end of the issue I was left wanting because this whole situation feels a bit forced and we never get a reason behind why Jor-El was getting attacked in the first place.  All in all, there's enough here to keep most Superman fans happy though, I just wish we could do something more with the story, where everyone isn't hiding some kind of diabolical secret.

7/10