Superman #29 review

Now here’s a cover guaranteed to put this comic at the top of my reading pile – a devastated Superman mourning the loss of his old friends in the Legion of Super-Heroes. Artist Dan Mora has come up with the perfect tombstone for what looks like a headless Superman to stare at.

Speaking of headless, this chapter of ‘Darkseid’s Legion’ guest stars the character known for knocking the heads off heroes – Superboy Prime. As he’s recapping his story on the first page, we see one of those moments – in shadow, happily, with the lost bonce out of shot. The young hero driven mad by being stuck in limbo for years, finally redeemed in DC’s Metal event, has been recruited by the Time Trapper to help Superman against the twisted Legion of Super-Heroes he met last issue. Superman isn’t impressed.

And Superboy-Prime pulls out his professional skill – panel beating.

Their immediate mission on reaching 31st-century Metropolis is to find Booster Gold, who’s been forgotten by the rest of the DC Universe since he volunteered to investigate the incursion that (apparently) killed Darkseid. Superman reckons Prime isn’t taking the business seriously enough, but Prime’s looking at it from the point of a longtime comics fan who knows they’ll be attacked by Darkseid’s Legion, only to see the day saved by a cavalry of Legion iterations from different timelines.

This time, he’s wrong. Metropolis is a graveyard of dead Legionnaires, including at least three Colossal Boys, meaning teams from different timelines have already faced Darkseid’s minions. But not everyone is lost – Superman and Prime come across Cosmic Boy burying the dead.

Now that’s interesting – Kinetix and Gold Lantern are from different Legion teams, implying that the survivors aren’t all from the same continuity… could it be that when the big Darkseid storyline is over we’ll get a Best of… Legion? Sounds promising, but I don’t want the price to be dozens, maybe hundreds, of dead Legionnaires. Fingers crossed for a time reset that’ll nevertheless pave the way for an ever-changing Legion supergroup.

I must say, I never wanted to see Prime again after he got his happy ending. But darn it, writer Joshua Williamson has his comeback making sense within the context of the story, and the interaction between the two Clarks is very entertaining. With the stakes so high, Superman doesn’t dwell on the meta-aspect of Prime’s powers, concentrating on getting ever closer to Darkseid, who he’s assuming is alive.

Superman does take the time to deliver a wonderfully inspiration speech to the understandably forlorn Legionnaires – they’ve been under siege for two years – prompting them to join the search for Booster Gold. The last of the Legions rally behind Superman but, of course, where there’s a Legion there’s usually a traitor…

This is a cracking comic, with a surfeit of surprises in its packed 22 pages. Williamson’s script is as smart as it is dense, while Dan Mora’s art continues to redefine ‘remarkable’. This time, as well as a Gary Frank-style mature Legion he sneaks in a glorious shot of more innocent times. The storytelling is spot-on throughout, pacy and thrilling, and beautifully coloured by Alejandro Sánchez and lettered by Ariana Maher.

It’s issues like this that have me wishing for the days when we’d get a Superman comic every week, because I am itching to see what’s next for Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes. For one thing, the final page has to be a feint…