Review: Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Tom Taylor’s Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent is the most Tom Taylor-written Jon Kent adventure of Tom Taylor-written Jon Kent adventures so far, and that’s a good thing. I’d be happy to see Taylor continue in a series of miniseries with Jon Kent just like this one.

At the same time, no matter how deftly written Adventures is, how it continues to show what the epitome of Superman would be like grafted on to the modern age, and with stellar art from Clayton Henry, one could assuredly argue that Adventures tries to do too many things and ends up not doing any of them well. Jon Kent chases down his own demons here and — I don’t think I’m wrong in saying — a few of Taylor’s, either one of which could make its own book. Both get handled, but not with the fullness either deserved. That’s a shame; for as long as we’ve waited for Taylor to put these things to rest, it all feels anticlimactic.

Still again, there’s plenty titles out there without such peppy heart, and I’ll take that peppy heart over more standard fare any day.

[Review contains spoilers]

Yes, Adventures is the book where the heroes of Taylor and company’s former Earth 2 come calling to enlist Jon to take down Ultraman, who infamously kidnapped and tortured Jon in his youth, and Ultraman is subsequently killed by the Injustice universe Superman, drawing Jon into the Injustice conflict that Taylor and company penned. And so if you follow that structure, what we have are two Taylor deep cuts (Earth 2 and Injustice) sandwiching the chief existential threat and modern motivating factor of Jon Kent, that his kidnapper stole years of his life and remained (till now) just a multiversal excursion from coming for Jon again.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Writing Jon Kent against the Injustice universe, by the way, is really a stroke of genius. Consider in the early 2010s when Injustice debuted, Jon wasn’t even a glimmer in his parents' eyes, so to speak, short of the unborn child who died as part of Injustice’s premise. Come forward 10 years and not only did Taylor write his way through Injustice, he’s among the names best associated with Jon Kent, the “superboy” whose alt-universe death was among Taylor’s start. I wonder at what point that irony dawned on Taylor himself; the combining of the two was surely inevitable, and about the only way worth resurrecting Injustice again.

So it’s not that I wouldn’t want to see Jon Kent visit the Injustice universe; it’s just that dispatching with Jon’s first face-off with Ultraman in the span of two issues (one, really) and then spending four issues on Injustice feels lopsided (if not probably a better financial move for DC). The reunion with Ultraman feels frankly boilerplate — a bit of hitting, Jon having the opportunity to really hurt Ultraman and then not doing so, because indeed, as Jon says, compassion is his strength and not his weakness. That’s not at all off-brand for Jon, it’s written well by Taylor, but one imagines — I mean, Ultraman abused Jon for years. Safe and self-actualized as Jon is now, I expected Jon would have a lot more to say — even more to say about the Injustice Superman killing Ultraman — than unfortunately it seems Taylor has pages for.

But even with the last four issues, neither do we get an Injustice ending either. Taylor and Brian Buccellato’s Injustice was perpetually frustrating in that wherever the often imaginative plot went, a lot of things always had to come to naught to continue to line up with the video game. As well, the Injustice Superman could never satisfactorily explain his motivations to the audience because what worked for a video game synopsis was far less reasonable over about 60 issues of a comic book. I might have thought that at this point, even just under the auspices of a comic where Jon Kent visits Injustice, we might be in a place where we could see some different outcome for the Injustice-comics Superman. But, even at the end of Adventures, it seems generally like the status quo is restored. The book is subtitled “Countdown to Injustice,” such that I thought maybe we’d get some indication of further Injustice comics on the way, but that doesn’t seem to be the case either.

At least if we get no good conclusions here — in what’s still an enjoyable book overall — it looks good doing it. Clayton Henry’s panels are often huge and sparse, usually when depicting one of Jon’s reactions. Arguably denser paneling might have meant more story, but it gives the book a big and bright aesthetic — the book feels young and natural and modern. For every beautiful Bruno Redondo issue of Injustice, there were many, many that didn’t look very good, but probably the Injustice characters as a whole have never looked better than under Henry (see their arrival in Chapter 5). Darick Robertson guests for one darker, Injustice-focused issue, and he, too, hits his marks, particularly Batgirl Barbara Gordon’s face when she hears about the Nightwing of “our” Earth.

But in all, as mentioned, Adventures is the Tom Taylor-est of Jon Kent stories so far. Jon immediately ducks the “fight” part of “fight and team-up” with Earth 2’s Val-Zod (“I’m not really a lashing-out-without-provocation person,” Jon says), and in the end his secret weapon against Injustice-Superman is a super-speed hug. Taylor has long posited Jon as the 21st century Superman, the activist Superman, the social reform Superman; Jon’s talk-before-acting approach is on full display here, and it’s this depiction that makes me want Taylor to keep writing Jon more and more.

Charitably, at the end of Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent, Tom Taylor does tie Jon Kent and the Injustice-Superman’s traumatic pasts together, each resonating with the message left for Jon by Lois Lane. That was clever, though still not quite so much on the page as I’d wanted. There’s a point in the book where Harley Quinn apologizes to Jon for killing (the alt-Earth, unborn) him, which I wondered if it didn’t have a modicum of the author’s voice within it. Nothing to be sorry for, when it comes to Injustice, but probably not nothing to not be sorry for, either.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.75