Superman #21 Review

King Of The Earth

Written By: Brian Michael Bendis

Art By: Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Oclair Albert, Alex Sinclair, Dave Sharpe

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: March 11, 2020

It's time to deal with some repercussions for Superman revealing his identity to the world, or more accurately, it's time for Lois Lane to deal with those repercussions because now that a video has been sent to the Daily Star from the Unity Day speech that created the United Planets, people believe that Superman is declaring himself King of Earth because he said to a bunch of aliens that he would speak for the people of Earth........ Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous and that's not even talking about the idea of an alien live streaming the events and sending an email to the second-best newspaper in Metropolis.  Let's jump into this issue and see if things work themselves up or if the press work themselves into a frenzy.  Let's check it out.

For this issue we essentially see Superman fight Mongul, where it appears that Superman was able to stand his own against the threat off-panel, but it seems that Mongul has achieved what he set out to do........ which is kill some world leaders and that, of course, leads to every alien race that was there to start fighting against each other instead of the threat that killed their leaders.......... of course.  There really isn't much to this section of the book beyond Superman giving an inner monologue about the United Planets and then eventually getting home, where Mongul seems to have shown up.....

The real interesting parts to this book and I use the word interesting loosely, is Lois being ambushed by Bethany Snow, who wants a comment about the so-called statements of Superman, where she's exaggerating the situation and saying that he's declaring himself the King of Earth.  The reason that this is interesting is because it shows off how easily people will turn on anyone at the drop of a hat and possibly shows how easily people could warm up to Lex Luthor's line of thinking because for the most part ever since Brian Michael Bendis took over this book he's spent most of his time showing us that everyone just loves Superman, but all it took was one out of context video for the people of Earth to lose their damn minds about him.  Is this section of the book great?  No, but it's way more interesting than anything we do with Superman this issue.

All in all, the art in this issue looks great, but even with that, I'm not a fan of the panel layouts for Superman and Mongul's fight off-world because everything becomes so small and condensed that it's hard to make out what exactly is going on.  As for the writing...... Well, it just feels like we have Superman fighting Mongul for no real reason here because we get a conflict between a bunch of alien races that doesn't really feel like it makes sense for the situation and the only other reason that it's here is so Superman can be away from Earth while the shit hits the fan.  I'm really hoping that things get better now that the United Planets seem to be in shambles because I never found that part of this book interesting and a good old fashioned attack on Earth from Warworld might just be what the doctor ordered, but really....... I'm not going to hold my breath.

Bits and Pieces:

The art like usual is the best part of this book, but even that has its problems at times, but beyond that, we're just dealing with what we had the last issue, just extended a bit, where all it does is lead to a new character to the story.  Like previously, the Superman part of this issue was the weakest link and it's a shame when I don't even want to deal with Superman in his own book.

5/10