Review: Batman/Superman: World's Finest Vol. 1: The Devil Nehza hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)
In the midst of Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Vol. 1: The Devil Nehza, it occured to me: “Oh, right, Mark Waid.” It’s been a while since I’ve held a Waid comic in my hands, a writer who in his heyday seemed able to do no wrong. In heroes shouting their pathos, in Waid’s admirable ability to create urgency in a medium that only goes so fast as you read the next panel, I had flashes (no pun intended) of Waid’s classic Flash: Terminal Velocity, a book that’s high up there in my personal comics canon.
Weirdly, World’s Finest is an exceptionally exciting book in which the stakes are almost nil, occurring as it does in the past. At least two major characters are teased to have met their ends in this story; even discounting comics' usual suspension of belief since we know the villains will never truly defeat the heroes, the danger is doubly undercut since we know the characters are walking around hale and hearty in the time period after these adventures.
Thus, we find ourselves in a place we’ve rather found ourselves before with the Superman/Batman and Batman/Superman comics — a book advertised as being absolutely central to the ongoing DC Universe, but given the numerous other titles that each of these characters appears in, a book that from the jump has to tiptoe with conceits like taking place in the past. I even know the extent to which Devil Nehza ties in to DC’s upcoming (for me) events, and still I’d be willing to say that what we have here so far is “just” a Batman/Superman story. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but still DC doesn’t seem to have cracked the code on making Batman/Superman more than an anthology title since the way back Jeph Loeb days.
[Review contains spoilers]
I’ll reiterate that World’s Finest is witty and exciting and clever — I’ll call out specifically the final Phantom Zone bit with Superman’s quick thinking and Batman’s cleverness, and also Supergirl and Robin’s banter over a mission gone wrong involving a monkey and a fountain. But indeed even as Waid explains away conflicting depictions over the years of Robin Dick Grayson in his classic and New 52 outfits, he introduces a continuity wrinkle in making Kara Zor-El now contemporaneous with the early years of the first Robin.
[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]
I won’t be a stickler — DC’s continuity is nothing any more if not fluid. And I can appreciate Waid and DC’s motivations — Dick and Kara were contemporaneous once upon a pre-Crisis, and if you’re re-launching Batman/Superman, wouldn’t you want DC’s most recognizable heroes alongside their most recognizable sidekicks? But out of the gate it feels Batman/Superman is already doing things to complicate and mitigate itself, and that seems a slippery slope to the bad final days of the modern Superman/Batman book.
(The book deals with time travel, though, and I’m disinclined to underestimate Waid; I’ll be impressed if Kara’s presence turns out to be an intentional anomaly.)
Were Kara not here, I might be more forgiving of Nezha being set in a kind of faux Bronze-ish age, Wonder Woman in her swimsuit and Flash Barry Allen in his cloth costume — really the definitive DC Super Friends era. Too, here’s another recent appearance of Batman with his yellow oval, something between Batman Vol. 6: Abyss and Batman: Shadow War it almost seems like DC was trying to make a thing again for a second.
Artist Dan Mora’s made a splash since his recent DC work on Detective Comics, and given the book’s specific time period, it’s nice to see influences of Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez here. At other times, for a book very much about Superman and Batman’s friendship, both Waid’s dialogue and Mora’s art call back to Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo on Dark Nights: Metal and Death Metal. And Waid is well in Superman/Batman/Batman/Superman company with the almost obligatory Batman-Superman mash-up scene (now with extra Green Lantern).
I’ll be curious to see where World’s Finest goes from here. I know Waid is going to some Waid-y places, appropriate and well within his rights, though whether the book upholds the “kicks off the next big events in the DCU” promise or if this was it remains to be seen. I’m pre-judging the events that follow without having read them, but if World’s Finest’s greatest impact is being the lead in to Batman vs. Robin that leads in to Lazarus Planet, that’s hardly the central position that DC would constantly like to claim the Batman/Superman titles fill.
Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Vol. 1: The Devil Nehza is perfectly good; now I’d just like the book to also mean something.
[Includes original covers and 20(!) variant covers, including some that must’ve been old index covers]
Good point that Loeb and Morrison each had the benefit of a new-ish (or new for that era) approach. It still boggles my mind that we had a good few years after Crisis on Infinite Earths, up to about Death of Superman, where the idea of Superman being ubiquitous or leading the Justice League wasn't a thing (see "Panic in the Sky" and elsewhere, where Superman actively demurrs from taking on leadership roles). Also that "Dark Knight Over Metropolis" was a big deal because Batman and Superman rarely teamed up in their own titles. Of course the pendulum had to swing back toward Superman leading the DCU and Batman and Superman in constant partnership, but I amazed just how long DC stuck with Superman on his own.
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