Superman: World of New Krypton #7 – Review

By James Robinson and Greg Rucka (writers), Pete Woods (artist), Nei Ruffino with Pete Pantazis (colorists)

The Story: After the attempt on Zod’s life, New Krypton is paralyzed. One faction wants to declare war on Earth, and the other doesn’t know what to do. Then Zod comes out of the hospital long enough to promote Kal-El to General (and leader of the Military Guild) and say they can’t go to war… yet. Kal-El takes over, but the threats to New Krypton haven’t stopped. They’ve gotten worse.

What’s Good: The character work: General Zod, as always, sucks up the attention of any room he’s in. He’s much more charismatic than Kal-El, and even though we only see him for three pages, his decisions drive almost every issue. However, Kal-El gets to show some steel later on and it’s fun to watch.

The art works well for the story and there are a few moments worth mentioning: floating, glowing heads in the council chambers, holographic computer readouts, a staggering General Zod, the expressions on Tyr’s face, and especially the Jovian moon Callisto.

What’s Not So Good: Not a lot seemed to happen in this month’s issue. Yes, we get a couple of moments, but moments don’t make a story. Even the ending, which has an epic kind of feel to it, failed to pull the tension any higher. Part of this is the sense that, why exactly should I be worried for a city full of Kryptonians? Other than the weapons they themselves made, and one apparently made on Earth (used on Zod), can anything other than kryptonite kool-aid hurt them? DC has spent seventy years looking for something to challenge the man of steel and the best they’ve got is still just a red sun or kryptonite in its rainbow flavors. Early in this series, when the conflict was among Kryptonians (equals), the sense of tension was really good and we knew that even Kal-El might have to take one on the chin. But given any external threat to a Kryptonian, it’s hard to get worked up about it as a reader.

Conclusion: This issue continues the steam-losing descent of this series since the high point in issue #3’s.

Grade: C

-DS Arsenault