Action Comics #31 – Review

By: Greg Pak (story), Aaron Kuder & Cameron Stewart (art), Rafa Sandoval (pencils), Vicente Cifuentes (inks), Wil Quintana (colors)

The Story: Looks like someone’s gonna have to start the Cure Doomsday Disease Foundation—and fast.

The Review: If you’ve read my reviews of Action Comics and Superman/Wonder Woman
from the last couple months, you’ll know that I haven’t exactly been looking forward to the Doomed arc; been actively dreading it, really. Despite many assurances from Pak and other writers involved that this will be a Doomsday story unlike other Doomsday stories, Doomsday itself is just so flat an antagonist that no story in which it features seems likely to be that compelling.

If there’s any success to be had from this storyline, then, it’ll be by removing Doomsday from the picture altogether. You don’t even really get to see him in this issue at all, his appearance apparently limited to Doomed #1, an issue which I never picked up. That’s one of the more irritating hazards of a crossover event, but fortunately, Pak helps us out using a tool from his Marvel days: a recap page, in the form of a Daily Planet printing, which tells us that after a Herculean effort, Superman defeated Doomsday in Smallville for the second time,* though he may have inhaled a bit of the monster’s spore-like remains in the process.