I may have to throw out my Starman hardcovers. Superman 689 was one of those issues that’s so bad it makes you doubt if the author could ever have written something good. It’s so bad you want to hop in a time machine to the future just to hear Tom Katers hilariously summarize its absurdities in 2029’s Tom Vs. World Without Krypton. It’s so bad I don’t want to take the usual time and come up with a theme to unite my grouchy complaints and will instead list them in no particular order. –Mon-El claims Superman told him “The World is a Fickle Charge”; does that sound like Superman? –Mon-El begins the issue giving his inner dialogue in (outdated) thought balloons and then inexplicably the inner dialogue switches to captions halfway through the issue. –Mon-El’s trip through the world is so saturated with clichés it borders on ignorance and even racism. Does he have to mention chupacabras because he’s in Mexico? Must he fight a giant robot in Japan? Must all the European heroes he meet be pretty white people; look at Paul Cornell’s MI-13—that’s just not Europe anymore. Particularly galling is that his trip to various specific European countries (England, Spain, Germany) is followed by a trip to generic “Africa” where he meets “Congorillia” and “Freedom Beast”; is it too much to ask that Robinson do enough research to at least pick a country in Africa where Mon-El was going, and not insist on representing the entire continent with a shot of a grassy plain, a large gorilla, and a half naked guy in a loin cloth? (For the record, Freedom Beast operates out of South Africa and, I assume, Congorilla operates out of Congo.) During this trip Mon-El isn’t learning anything about earth you couldn’t get from the cartoonish depictions of the world found in a Superman comic in the 1950s (about the time of Congorilla’s debut); all the people he meets are national and racial clichés. –Lane’s assassin is code named “assassin” (not too much of a code is it?) and sports a ridiculous bright blue leotard with an upside-down boomerang on the cover. –The Steel sub-plot uses the ever clichéd nano-technology to explain everything that happens, except how this amazing nano-technology can’t see through a “cloaking device”. –The dialogue on the bottom of page 20-21 makes no sense: “because the best forgery technology on the planet created my background. Needless to say, I’m not Tom Curtis, John. Because a Cloaking Device fakes my appearance.” —and on, and on, and on. I know Robinson is a good to great writer. I know he’s not racist or ignorant of the stories beyond the clichés, and I know that he’s capable of outstanding work. Therefore, I am left to conclude that this issue was either composed thoughtlessly (or lazily) or as a post modern joke, mocking the reader by purposefully putting forth an inferior product and daring us to like it. I hope it’s just laziness, because then I can still keep my beautiful hardcovers and claim that these were simply written in better days.