Action Comics #1073 review

Behind the poster-worthy cover by illustrator Clayton Henry and colour artist Tomeu Morey, the Phantoms serial continues, with this chapter opening on Jor-El inventing the Phantom Zone projector. Superman muses on the dichotomy that while his father inadvertently spared Zone prisoners death as Krypton exploded, turning people into living ghosts, stuck in a realm of […]

Action Comics #1072 online

Superman recalls a bittersweet moment from his boyhood, when a ship from the stars brought an explorer to Earth, a young man circumstances led him to believe was his big brother. Today, Superman and Mon-El are reunited in the Phantom Zone, to which the Man of Steel has come to learn what twisted three inmates […]

Action Comics #1070 review

A few years ago DC added a back-up strip to Action Comics, around the time that Supergirl lost her ongoing title (again). And since then I’ve regularly suggested Supergirl take the spot as a nod to where she started, back in the Silver Age. And now, 694 issues since she departed her solo series in […]

Justice Society of America #12 review

… or, as it should say on Mikel Janín’s terrific cover, Stargirl 25th Anniversary Special. Because that’s what this final issue of the limited series is – not the epilogue to the lengthy story we’ve followed over the last few years, but a love letter to Courtney Whitmore. I’m not inclined to moan too much […]

The Flash #12 review

Wally West is lost Not as lost as I am. How can this dizzyingly frustrating story still be going on, it’s been a full publishing year of the Earth being assailed by weirdo geometrical beasties and the Flash Family members finding their powers glitching, their moods all over the place and Reality being somewhere to […]

Alan Scott: The Green Lantern #6 review

It’s the end of the mini-series telling us about the early days of the DC Universe’s Golden Age Green Lantern, who was recently retooled as a gay man. The book opens with the Justice Society having joined Alan and boyfriend-turned-enemy Red Lantern to battle mutual enemy Crimson Host. After a short tussle on the streets […]

The Flash #8 review

There are a lot of superheroes in this issue, as Flash Barry Allen leads the young Flashes in a race across the world to tackle multiple incursions of extradimensional menaces. But my big hero is his wife, Iris Allen. Yes, it’s Amanda Waller, ubiquitous in current DC books, and equally annoying in every one. Here […]

Alan Scott: Green Lantern #4 review

If this issue’s cover had a blurb it’d be ‘ALL-OUT EXPOSITION ISSUE’ because it’s flashback time for villain of the piece Red Lantern. He’s captured Green Lantern Alan Scott in our hero’s own apartment and is telling him that His Love Was a Lie. Yes, Alan’s long lost love is the Red Lantern, he’s not […]

Action Comics Annual #2023 #1 review

After almost three years at the writing helm of Action Comics, Phillip Kennedy Johnson wraps up his Warworld sequence with a battle royal played out across two worlds. Warworld orphan Othol-Ra, taken into the Kent-Lane household and given a new start, has been targeted by Janan al-Ghul, sole survivor of the ruling family of the […]

Action Comics #1059 review

That’s a heck of a cover by Steve Beach, with not one, but two literal men of steel facing a bunch of bad guys. The barely restrained power, the determined expressions… excellent. Inside we learn that the people with their back to us are Blue Earthers – but not the garden variety Metropolis xenophobes, these […]