Welcome to Take It Or Leave It, where each week I pick out new comics and tell you if they’re worth the price and you should take them, or if you should just leave them on the shelf.
I’m gonna do this a little differently this week, since the first 3 parts of Superman: Doomed all shipped together this week, I’m going to take them all on as a whole. And then some Star Trek for good measure. Because of course I would.
The original Death of Superman is the story that got me into comic books when I was a kid. I remember eagerly awaiting my shipments from Entertainment This Month of the whole set to blaze though. I wouldn’t exactly call it a “good” story by any stretch of the imagination (what with it nearly killing the comic industry), but it was a pretty huge deal in its day. Superman: Doomed doesn’t feel like a massive event to me. That could be because I don’t really read DC all that much, but it doesn’t have the same grandiosity Death of Superman had. Especially since their are ads for next month’s issues in the books that make it look like the storyline is gonna be over and done with by then.The first time around, there were 7 full issues of Superman tracking and fighting Doomsday, which lead up to one final book that was nothing but double page spreads of a massive slugfest. In Doomed the fight is only a few pages, strewn across so many cluttered & splashy panels, it’s hard to tell what the hell is even happening. It wasn’t until it was explicitly stated in the later books that Superman punched him so hard or something, that I realized Doomsday was vaporized. Superman then breathes those vapors in, and now he’s turning into Doomsday himself. I like some of Doomsday’s new powerset, and Superman as Doomsday has some interesting potential, but the actual fight is kind of lame compared to the epicness of the first time around. I’d take Parts 1 and 3 for the story, but you can skip part two, nothing really happens in it you’ll miss.
Verdict: Take Superman: Doomed and Superman/Wonder Woman, Leave Action Comics
Star Trek – New Visions #1 – The Mirror, Cracked
This is the first in an ongoing bimonthly series of photonovels by John Byrne. Frankly, the amount of work that goes into this is more than a little staggering. But it’s very clearly an effort of love, and Mr. Byrne really knows his stuff when it comes to Star Trek. The story comes off like a very well written episode of the show, despite the inherent limits of the form. This does occasionally lend itself into some wonky compositing and layering issues if you know the underlying frames, but it’s nothing major. The story isn’t wholly original, being somewhat similar to the Shatnerverse Mirror Universe stories and Rise Like Lions, but it’s still a very well written and interesting story of what happened after “Mirror, Mirror”, and being able to actually “see” it as well as read it makes it quite enjoyable. My only real issue is that the issue costs $7.99 for 42 pages of story. I can buy a 500 page Star Trek novel for the same price, and get far more material. But for the amount of effort it takes to make these photonovels, and for how good they come out, it’s definitely worth a read.
Verdict: Take It
JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company.
