For the past five issues I have consistantly enjoyed Jeff Lemire’s Superboy. It has been nothing like the other Superboy books because Lemire is adding his own sense of ‘humility’ into the book. Sure there are some brawls in the issues, but this all boils down to Connor Kent’s hectic social and superhero life. This issue, for some reason, has to tie in to some storyline that has nothing to do with what Lemire has being doing with this book. Sadly this issue throws everything away that Lemire was trying to do with his series and just stomp it into mindless action.

Maybe my hatred for Doomsday and his inability to be interesting made me be disappointed about this issue. But then again Lemire has shown  he can make brawls interesting by not being the norm in comics. For example, the first issue had Superboy fighting Parasite and that ended in a way I didn’t expect. This issue however is yet another mindless brawl with a seemingly invincible monster. Doomsday doesn’t talk, he just wants to crush you. It makes him a very boring character to read because he doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t nothing but punch. The stuff involving Superboy in the beginning with Red Robin is what I wanted most in this book. That’s the type of relationship material Lemire is just perfect at. But with all of this being a massive fight scene it really bored me after a couple of issues.

Now I like Marco Rudy because he brings interesting panel layouts in his work. For example, I did like how he made Doomsday ‘break’ the panels by suddenly attacking Connor. But I gotta be honest, a lot of this looked rushed or just plain ugly to look at. The first half of the book he tries to do 12 panel layouts which make the pencils look very uninteresting since word balloons dominate most of the space. What are in those panels look nothing like Connor Kent and he does a decent job with Tim Drake only because he’s in his cowl the entire time. Other times with Ray Palmer and Simon I had a hard time figuring out who was who. It was obvious that he was trying to emulate Pier Gallo’s art to keep this looking consistant and the muted colors by Jamie Grant and Dominic Regan seem to prove that. But once we get into the massive brawl it got very disorianting and confusing to figure out what was going on. Superboy uses a giant stone fist and a submarine to fight Doomsday but I can’t for the life of me figure out how he did it. Then Rudy’s style completely changes toward’s the end to kinda reference Dan Jurgen’s style for his ‘Death of Superman’ issue. But it just doesn’t work for me. Plus that final splash page? God that was hideous and confusing to look at.

I hope next issue we go back to the way things were. Cause this issue shows that Lemire is not suited at all to write an ‘action packed’ Superboy comic. He’s better doing the more relationship themes he was doing beforehand. Also I hope the next time I see Marco Rudy’s pencils they are much better then inside this issue. His art sums up this tie-in issue perfectly: It’s a confusing and ugly to look at.