Scan barcode
A review by rhganci
Superman, Volume 2: Secrets and Lies by Keith Giffen, Dan Jurgens, Jesús Merino
2.0
Scott Lobdell makes a play to get things going in a cohesive direction by the time the annual comes along, but by then, SUPERMAN VOL. 2: SECRETS AND LIES is a pretty messy mix of weird personal crisis, alien threats, and green monsters.
There's really not a lot to say here beyond my view that the story doesn't really communicate anything very heroic beyond the fact that Superman can stop things that he is stronger than, and gets absolutely pounded on when something else confronts him. There's a lot of that--Superman getting punched, kicked, de-uniformed, and thrown into the surface of the moon. Helspont is kind of the central villain, but the rest of the lot comes and goes, especially in a brief arc involving some kind of vestigial Cold War mistrust between the U.S. and Russia, in which some Russian guy named Ivan (really) assumed that Superman was American and decided to steal a Superman, or a Superman-like being, from another dimension. It backfired, predictably, and there was a net change of zero as a result.
I guess that describes the overall effect of the book--the writers cobble a series of similar, and therefore repetitive, storylines together, but nothing comes of it. The entire book essentially kills time, serving only as a mild connective tissue between the early teases in volume 1 and the HEL ON EARTH crossover that is on its way later this summer. There's just not a whole lot of substance here, and the story lacks any discernable suspense or character development to make it a memorable issue.
There's really not a lot to say here beyond my view that the story doesn't really communicate anything very heroic beyond the fact that Superman can stop things that he is stronger than, and gets absolutely pounded on when something else confronts him. There's a lot of that--Superman getting punched, kicked, de-uniformed, and thrown into the surface of the moon. Helspont is kind of the central villain, but the rest of the lot comes and goes, especially in a brief arc involving some kind of vestigial Cold War mistrust between the U.S. and Russia, in which some Russian guy named Ivan (really) assumed that Superman was American and decided to steal a Superman, or a Superman-like being, from another dimension. It backfired, predictably, and there was a net change of zero as a result.
I guess that describes the overall effect of the book--the writers cobble a series of similar, and therefore repetitive, storylines together, but nothing comes of it. The entire book essentially kills time, serving only as a mild connective tissue between the early teases in volume 1 and the HEL ON EARTH crossover that is on its way later this summer. There's just not a whole lot of substance here, and the story lacks any discernable suspense or character development to make it a memorable issue.