The Big Tease That Is Summer of Superman Special #1

For some reason, I’ve been in the mood to read a Superman comic lately.  Maybe it’s some early anticipation for the movie that’s coming out this summer but I think it’s more because I haven’t read a good Superman story for some time now.  Now, I’m not talking about another monthly issue of Superman or Action Comics which are fine I guess (via my perusal of them through DCs’ Infinite app or whatever it’s called.)  And I’m not talking about Absolute Superman which I have been reading but that feels so far removed from the mainstream Superman, much further away than either Absolute Batman or Absolute Wonder Woman do from their more standard versions.  And sure, there’s Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s classic All-Star Superman but I feel a bit been-there/done-that with going back to that book.  Maybe the closest to what I’ve been hankering for is Mark Waid and Bryan Hitch’s The Last Days of Lex Luthor but that book just feels so distant and uninviting, largely thanks to Hitch’s art.  It should be thrilling but it just feels so 2001.  No, none of that.  Give me a good, old-fashioned Superman book, whatever that may be.  So maybe it’s a good thing that the Summer of Superman Special #1 (as if there’s going to be an issue 2 at some point?) came out on a relatively light week at the old comic shop.

But it still wasn’t a given that I was going to pick it up but there was one huge thing on the first few pages that grabbed me— Lana Lang in Smallville.  As girlfriends of Superman with the initials L.L, goes, here’s my ranking of them:

3.) Lois Lane— yes, I’m the one who never really understood the marriage thing.  I guess the will-they-or-won’t-they thing thing of the 1970s and 1980s can only get you so far and what do you do after you kill and resurrect Superman in the 1990s?

2.) Lori Lemaris— the doomed portion of this relationship always got to me— she’s a mermaid and can only really live underwater.  Now that’s romantic, much more so than the office romance with Lois ever was.  

And coming in at #1…

1.) Lana Lang— Come on, she’s the childhood sweetheart, the best friend, and the one who got Clark Kent.  They were meant to be together so the opening of this book, in a chapter written by Mark Waid, flashes back to when they were still just awkward teenagers sitting on the Kent’s porch and Clark about to tell Lana his secret… I don’t know but for some reason, I just wanted to see where this was going.  

Ultimately Summer of Superman Special #1 is a fairly standard teaser comic that DC is so apt to do these days.  It’s a sequel to that DC All-In Special from months ago, the one that killed Darkseid but had some really nice Wes Craig artwork in it.  These specials are meant to get you excited for what’s coming but not for what’s in front of you.  And this one features some nice Jorge Jiménez artwork.  As house-styles go right now, DC is in a fairly good place having Jiménez and Dan Mora (who drew the epilogue) as the two artists who are defining how their mainline books should look and trying to get other artists to follow them.  Jiménez’s art, finished by Belen Ortega for a third of the book, is a lot of fun, bouncing back and forth between human moments like two kids sitting on a porch swing wanting to tell each other their secrets and the action scenes of Superman punching a big bad guy through time and space.  There’s plenty of both of those types of sequences in this book and Jiménez seems to be having a lot of fun that comes through in every drawing.  

The story is split into three parts, written by Mark Waid, Dan Slott, and Joshua Williamson.  There’s nothing distinctive about the stories, nothing that makes you think that three different writers were contributing to the issue.  Lana is getting married to John Henry in Smallville and like all comic book weddings, the ceremony is attacked by a major threat.  Oh, and Lana is a superhero now so I guess that’s a thing.  I guess if you hang around an alien for too long you’re just going to get superpowers.  So three writers, one super-powered best friend, one super-powered wife (yes, Lois has powers too,) and the Legion of Super-Heroes villain Validus.  That’s a bit going on in one issue.

If I was jonesing for a Superman story to read, this isn’t a bad read as it caught me up with where Superman is circa April 2025 and teased what’s coming.  Waid, Slott, and Williamson play up the unknown threat aspect of this story; from the beginning, Superman knows that Validus isn’t any kind of mastermind so there has to be something or someone manipulating him in these attacks on Smallville.  This special ends up being a whole issue of someone pulling the strings and sending Superman on wild goose chases trying to find out what’s going on.  And when you get to the end of this issue, you realize that this is the follow-up to another teaser comic that is also trying to tease the next big thing on some conglomerate’s publishing plans.  It just has better artwork than most of these things usually have.  But maybe it’s an indication of something that when I got to the end of it, I got more excited by an advertisement for an upcoming book than I was by this book itself.