As might go without saying, there’s many iterations of “lost” in Christopher Priest and Carlo Pagulayan’s Superman: Lost. The Man of Steel himself has been lost, on a literal (if not also “literary”) 20-year journey to return to Earth; upon his return, Lois Lane is perhaps even more “lost” than Clark, enacting a particularly dangerous gambit to bring Superman back to himself. An alien species is “lost” in its own self-destructive cycles, light years from Earth but reflecting problems very familiar. And the farther things spin, the more operatic events become, there’s some question whether Superman: Lost might not get a little lost itself toward the end.

Lost is an impressive Superman epic from Priest; yes, go and read it, and if you can do two issues a night for five nights as I did, stretching it out and living with it a bit, all the better. It surely speaks well of the book that the chapter where Lost begins to go off the rails is also a chapter of impressive narrative prowess; that is, Lost’s “worst” is still a storytelling masterclass. Life, Superman: Lost shows us, can change in an instant; but for a few stumbles, I wonder if Superman: Lost might’ve become an instant classic.