Action Comics #1014 Review

A Five Pound Bag

Written By: Brian Michael Bendis

Art By: Szymon Kudranski, Brad Anderson, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: August 28. 2019

Get your journalistic hats on because we're heading to Metropolis, looking for a scoop...... or maybe we're just looking for a decent Superman story.  Either way, we're Metropolis bound and in our previous issue we saw Lex Luthor offer Red Cloud help with her powers, Rose & Thorn going after drug dealers in Suicide Slums and the Daily Planet doing Daily Planet things.  Yeah, there's a lot of things on the surface in this book, but somehow nothing ever seems to be happening.  Hopefully all that changes here so let's jump into this issue and check it out.

There's something very odd going on in this book because every issue seems to add a new aspect of something to the story, but no matter how many issues we seem to go forward, I can't say that Brian Michael Bendis ever finishes a story or even a thought with the way that his dialog is written.  Here we have Marisol Leone introducing herself as the new owner of the Daily Planet and beyond that and the idea that she wants to report real news, there's nothing to really write home about this part unless you were really concerned about the type of columns that Perry White would be running in the future or if his reporters were making what they're worth.  

For our Superman portion of the book we see that Brian Michael Bendis forgot about Star Labs in his pursuit to destroy all of the DC Comics organizations and is now rectifying that mistake, but the problem is.... it's just Superman fighting a monster, the idea that this might have something to do with Leviathan's teleportation technology, but ultimately coming down to STAR Labs doing unlawful science.  It's odd, but what makes it even odder is that we had to be told this through a article written by Clark Kent, even though we see him looking at the building with his X-ray vision, which apparently meant something to our hero, but just looking at it myself I had no idea what was going on.  Throw in some Red Cloud with new powers..... I guess because besides for her fighting Thorn, who herself is going after the Apocalypse drug, there's nothing really here to make me think that Red Cloud's status quo has changed.  Now, if that wasn't enough, we also have someone show up to meet Superman for our cliffhanger and I'm just wondering how much more shit we can try to shove into this bucket of a comic because we just keep adding and nothing is being resolved and it doesn't make for compelling storytelling.

All in all, this comic is packed full of stories, people, but nothing comes of any of it.  It's just awkward dialog and me wondering what happened to Action Comics because I found this issue a slog to get through because nothing really interesting happened at all and when I thought that Brian Michael Bendis couldn't add anything more to what's going on, he told me to hold his beer and just continued throwing characters and names of things in whether it needed to be there or not.  As for the art, I'm usually a fan of Kudranski and Anderson both, but for some reason this issue just didn't look right.  It felt like the style of art changed constantly, where we had a clean look, detailed and then when we got to Red Cloud and Thorn I just had no idea what was happening at all.  So yeah, very uneven art this issue on top of a story that really did nothing and that seems to be pattern for this series anymore.

Bits and Pieces:

If you're looking for anything to be resolved in this issue...... well, you're going to be disappointed, but if you want two to three more things added instead, that really don't go anywhere, where character continue to have awkward dialog, then maybe this is for you.  I wasn't a huge fan of the art this issue and really, I'm just looking for anything interesting to happen here because I find myself bored reading this book.

5/10