Publisher: DC Comics

Reviewed by: Jonny Botsch

DC continuity is more messed up than Joquin Phoenix becoming a rap artist! As Braniac continues his search to extend his knowledge of the universe, Superman uncovers a new aspect to the Braniac character we’d never known before - the fact that all the manifestations we have met previously were just drones and the real Braniac hasn’t actually left his ship in hundreds of years! This book also sums up the pre-Crisis city of Kandor story as well. For the uninitiated, Kandor is a lost Kryptonian city that has been shrunken down and put in a bottle that Supes keeps in the Fortress of Solitude and protects (being that all of its inhabitants are still living inside). What makes this so confusing is how Superman is only discovering Kandor now. There are other stories about him and the city and it has become part of his lore, yet here in this book he is just now encountering it. So, we’ll chalk this one up to any Crisis we can get our hands on, Infinite, Identity, Final, Countdown, maybe even 52. You could Wikipedia the subject but I don’t think that will even help you!

Other than that, the book is pretty solid. Fans of the Christopher Reeves movies will love the rendition of Supes that Gary Frank has done as it is a blatant nod to the silver screen Man of Tomorrow, which is a fitting follow up to Geoff Johns run with co-writer Richard Donner. If you read it stand alone, it is a pretty sweet story and it has some lasting ramifications by the end of it that are epic in scale and quite personal. Geoff Johns is clearly trying to bring his special recipe to the Man of Steel as he has done with Green Lantern, Teen Titans, JSA, the Flash, and it could work sans disjointed continuity.