After not having read comics for maybe ten or fifteen years, Superman was one of the first titles I picked up this past April.  It took an issue or two for me to get even remotely interested in this whole Mon-El story line, but a few months into my new, ridiculous, too expensive habit, and I'm really enjoying it.  So when I picked up this month's issue and found it to be little more than a pamphlet advertising future issues and storylines, I was pretty f*&^ing bummed out.

    The whole Steel side-storyline has been pretty uninteresting from the get go, and the Steel/Atlas fight that opens this issue (which lasts about three times as long as it needs to) doesn't really do anything to energize a storyline that's seemed pretty unimportant to me from the outset.  I feel pretty much the same way about the Science Police officers and their reassigning and even more so with the Zatarra/Parasite/Some-Old-Dude story.  The only brief bits that held my attention at all were the Dr. Light/Guardian "let's-hang-out-in-the-park-and-make-doe-eyes-while-our-kids-run-around" and the Sodam Yat "I-gotta-go-hang-out-with-my-buddy-the-Daxamite" bit.  But even there, I felt that either bit would have worked much better and been much more interesting to me (as would the SP storyline) if it had been sandwiched in the middle of a Mon-El story rather than stuck in there as yet another random couple-page bit that was trying to get me to buy an annual or a one shot that, as a Superman reader, I'm probably gonna be dumb enough to buy anyway!  Basically, it's hard to put 5 fairly disparate and super truncated stories into context with the larger narrative when the larger narrative is not even part of the narrative.  It's like a world without a "World Without Superman."

   So, yeah, I'm bummed that this particular issue is not really in line with the past four, as I've really been enjoying those, but it was still a good looking book and a pleasant read that suffers mostly due to the strength of it's predecessors.  I'm only hoping that as we move forward into next month's crossover thingie, we're all done with bs set up and can get back to some good storytelling.  I'd never even heard of Mon-El until a couple of months ago, but they've done a great job of hooking me on him.  So bring the f%*&er back, pretty please!