Flashpoint: Project Superman #3 – Review

By: Scott Snyder & Lowell Francis (writers), Gene Ha (artist), Art Lyon (colorist)

The Story: It’s a bird, it’s a plane—it’s a flying muscleman with Super-Seiyan hair!

The Review: If you’re going to write one of these Elseworlds-type stories, my unsolicited suggestion would be to really take the plunge into the alternate universe aspect of things.  Play into the unexpected and steer clear from the predictable and the familiar.  No sense in putting in a halfhearted effort and ending up with a world that’s only a hop, skip, and a jump away from we already know anyway (see Flashpoint: Hal Jordan #1).

Much of the success from this series comes from Francis keeping Superman a distant figure, even within his own title.  We’re so used to seeing him take charge, the star of the only comic with action in its name, that to see him a passive, even tangential character to others has a quietly unsettling effect on your psyche.  His hesitation to act or speak, even in a narrative sense, feels so unnatural that you know without a doubt you’re in a strange, new territory here.

Superman’s wariness allows other characters to step up and assert themselves, not the least of which is Subject Zero.  As a villain, he exists in an interesting state between cliché (the well-intentioned person mad with power) and sympathetic (a deeply-rooted loneliness).  He’s veered back and forth throughout the series, but in the end, he falls closer to the cliché, raving like a lunatic, throwing around his abilities for the sheer pleasure of showing off his omnipotence, before proving the focus he needs to keep in control is more tenuous than he believes.

Flashpoint: Project Superman #2 – Review

By: Scott Snyder & Lowell Francis (writers), Gene Ha (artist), Art Lyon (colorist)

The Story: “I’m only hurting you because I love you so much,” takes on all new meaning.

The Review: Traditionally, we tend to see Superman’s values and virtues as something bred in him by the good, wholesome, Midwestern upbringing of Ma and Pa Kent.  It’s what allows us to believe that such an all-powerful alien would have such adamant devotion to a world full of bickering, selfish, violent earthlings.  In this title, we remove the Kents from the picture entirely, and discover that perhaps Superman’s goodness is more innate than we give him credit for.

After all, in the Flashpoint world, he has extremely little reason to care for anybody on Earth, given the circumstances with which he arrived and has been treated since.  We’re spared nothing regarding his suffering; we see him in crawl spaces, a bowl of food on the floor and a hamster-like water drip against the wall; he’s forced to endure dozens of humiliating and painful scientific inspections; his captors coldly put him through frightening “drills.”

During this early period of his life, he forms attachments only with Subject Two (in our world known as Krypto) and General Sam Lane, the former proving to be sadly short-lived, the latter tenuous at best.  Lane’s affection for Kal (as he insists on calling what everyone refers to as “Subject One”) is touchingly ironic, but naturally portrayed.  It makes sense Lane’s military work drove his family away, leading him to turn his fatherly eye on a child, even an alien one.

Flashpoint: Project Superman #1 – Review

By: Scott Snyder & Lowell Francis (writers), Gene Ha (artist), Art Lyon (colorist)

The Story: What, you think you’re better than us?  Oh, you actually are?  Never mind.

The Review: In the world of Flashpoint, a lot of things have gone wacky, and one of the most significant ones is there is no man in red cape and undies flying around in sight.  That leaves you very sincerely asking, whatever happened to the Man of Tomorrow?  But you also have to wonder, in the vacuum of Superman, what kind of people will try to take his place, and how will the world change for it?

To answer those questions, Snyder and Francis begin their story well in the past, just as in Snyder’s other Flashpoint tie-in, Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown.  One vaguely familiar figure from that series, General Adam, cameos in this issue, stressing the connections between these two minis.  But before you agonize over if you have to drive back to your comic book store to pick up Frankenstein, just know this series stands completely fine on its own.

The story stars one Lieutenant Sinclair, a man who’s had a lot of run-ins with post-WWII metahuman threats, who winds up the recipient of a Super Soldier program that stress the patriot in “Soldier.”  The whole thing soon spirals into a kind of Flowers for Algernon breakdown for Sinclair, who becomes more unbalanced as his ever-growing powers increasingly separate him from his fellow man.

Ultimately this dehumanization of Sinclair comes from his own misuse of one of Buddhism’s four noble truths, “Attachment leads to suffering.”  He enters the program by severing all ties to his former life, and so reduces his world to constant tests in an underground lab.  Humans are social animals, and without society, they strip away an essential part of their humanity.  It’s a subtle commentary on what makes Superman, for all his powers, so grounded

Sinclair’s sole link to the man he was is General Lane, about the only character with any ties to the DCU.  Lane retains his traditional distrust of metahumans, but here comes across as a little too idealistically ambitious, someone trying to have his cake and eat it too as he’s determined to create a superhuman who at heart is still human.  But his isolation of Sinclair clearly results in the opposite effect, and he exacerbates the situation with his hypocrisy; it’s no coincidence that just as Sinclair feels most alone, Lane runs off to join his growing family.