Earth Two #26 – Review

By: Tom Taylor (story), Nicola Scott (pencils), Trevor Scott (inks), Pete Pantazis (colors)

A good twist is hard to come by in superhero comics. We’ve seen so many of the same kinds over and over—the long-dead character suddenly revealed alive, a major superhero ends up dead or kills someone, someone we trusted turns traitor—that even when you’re surprised, you’re not particularly affected.* The other kind of twist we frequently encounter is the kind that drops out of a clear blue sky. There’s not much craft to it; it’s purely WTF-worthy (which is not a compliment, DC).

It’s rare to get a twist that’s simultaneously surprising and enjoyable, where you realize the clues have been there all along. Taylor pulls off exactly that in this issue, which would make it rec-worthy even if he had accomplished nothing else. Over the past few months, he managed to convince us that Clark had finally been broken into a murder machine, that any hope of him being an imposter was merely wishful thinking. [Spoiler alert!] The revelation that he is actually a Bizarro (“Me am…Superman.”) is not only a great twist, it’s one we could’ve seen coming had we put the hints together: the chains hooked to his crest, the cracks around his eyes.