Review: Batman/Superman: World's Finest Vol. 2: Strange Visitor hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Mark Waid and Dan Mora’s Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Vol. 2: Strange Visitor has a breezy approach that neither offends nor asks too much of the audience. On one hand, that’s good — it’s good to see Superman, Batman, and Robin Dick Grayson palling around, it’s good that various heroes in their 1980s form flit in and out of this book, never angsty, always happy to help. We’ve needed that at times when DC’s house portrayal of their characters has swung too far the other way.

On the other hand, much as I enjoyed Strange Visitor, I finished it feeling like I hadn’t felt much. Despite some impressive action-disaster sequences, despite dramatic character moments and a villain at peak scariness, the significant lack of interpersonal conflict might ultimately be a detraction.

I am sure this is affected by my foreknowledge of Strange Visitor’s big twist; had I not known it, maybe I’d be singing this book’s praises wholeheartedly. But at the same time it’s easy to separate what we learn of the future from what happens in this book proper, such that my assessment might have been the same irrespective. At least, the twist didn’t arrive in the manner that I was expecting, so I’m still left interested in the mystery that will unfold over the subsequent volumes.

[Review contains spoilers]

Late in the book, we find that Superman’s new partner David Sikela, aka Boy Thunder, last survivor of an alternate reality, is in fact (or will be) Kingdom Come’s Magog. Knowing just that piece of information going in, I expected this was another instance of Magog returning to the past and/or disguising himself to take revenge on the heroes for real or imagined slights (see Earth-Prime and Superman/Wonder Woman Vol. 3: Casualties of War).

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Instead, it does appear everything the young David undergoes here is authentic (such, again, that you could nearly separate Visitor from the surprise entirely). Waid takes the unusual narrative step of revealing David’s identity without fanfare or lead-up; he’s David on one page and, startlingly suddenly, Magog (in the future) on the next. I initially wondered if we were then meant to understand that all of the “Strange Visitor” story was taking place in the Kingdom Come reality — that we, the reader, were the “person out of time” — but by the final issue I (think I) understand that David has passed from whatever other reality to ours and then to Kingdom Come.

Even as someone who enjoyed the Magog series (maybe one of the few!) and Magog’s mainstream DCU portrayals, I’m unconvinced all the fleshing out of Magog has been a benefit. There is Gog from The Kingdom and Gog from Justice Society of America: Thy Kingdom Come, and then also the Gog from Superman: In the Name of Gog, such that what seemed a relatively uncomplicated origin in Kingdom Come becomes more complicated than it needs.

But looking in to all this, I see that the original Magog never had an origin in terms of “this is how he got his powers,” etc. I’m still not sure we really need this, but comics abhors a vacuum and I can see where Waid is filling in a gap for the one, true Magog that’s never been filled before. And who else to tell that story other than Kingdom Come’s Waid? It’s a boon I guess that Waid seems to be tying this all into the Gog of Geoff Johns' Justice Society — a cohesive theory of Magog, as it were — though I don’t think I’d have minded Waid leaving all the other mythology behind, either.

Ahead of the revelation, the high concept of Strange Visitor is that Superman gets a sidekick, when historically “Supers” have been absent from the Teen Titans set. As such, much of this book turns on the perspective of Robin Dick Grayson, the world’s most famous sidekick, starting with the time-lost Robin solving a circus mystery and on from there. We see, concurrent with the aesthetics of Waid and Mora’s title, Robin and the Teen Titans treated as equals to the older heroes, and a lot of “influence by nudging” — Robin asks Superman in sotto voce not to lecture David in front of his Titans friends, Batman will assign Robin to one mission only for Robin, without conflict, to suggest he’d be better off on another.

Arguably David doesn’t get the fairest shake here — crash-landing on an alien-ish planet, pressed almost immediately into superhero service, and then threatened with having his powers removed when he can’t control his temper. That Superman doesn’t go through with it is perhaps meant to be an acknowledgment of the unfairness, but overall it seemed Waid didn’t have quite the number of pages he needed if he didn’t want Boy Thunder’s arc not to feel rushed. Superman has historically never had a Teen Titans-esque sidekick despite Supergirl’s existence, Supergirl quips about David that Superman “could always put him in an orphanage,” and Superman and David never quite seems to mesh — there’s an undercurrent here, which I’d be interested to see Waid revisit, that despite their reputations as the sunnier and darker superheroes, Batman has what it takes to raise a partner in a way that Superman is for some reason deficient.

DC’s various modern Superman/Batman titles have often featured the heroes' dual narrations (starting with Jeph Loeb’s and then other writers riffing from there). Its absence from this book feels notable, another way Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Vol. 2: Strange Visitor emphasizes DC’s big two as characters in partnership, rarely in conflict. It’s wholly possible Mark Waid is taking this too far (though too late now, as it becomes the aesthetic of the whole Dawn of DC/DC All In publishing line), but again, it’s better than some of the egregious and/or manufactured angst we’ve seen other times.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25