Super-title collections during Dawn of DC have been unusual. Action Comics Vol. 2, I hadn’t realized until I picked it up, collected just backup stories and specials; I’m more pleased that DC collected these than had they not, but it made for a long wait for forward movement between the first volume and the third.

I was surprised again starting Superman Vol. 3: The Dark Path, what had once been called Superman: Justice Reborn and said to collect Joshua Williamson’s issues #16–21, spanning the Absolute Power crossover tie-in and into DC All in. Instead, Dark Path collects only three issues, Williamson’s Absolute Power tie-ins #16–18, and then, surely confusingly, Williamson’s two-part Knight Terrors: Superman that fell chronologically between Williamson’s first and second Superman trades.

I fear the back of this book is going to give itself a hernia with all the heavy lifting it’s doing, starting with the breathless announcement that “Superman’s road to Absolute Power is fraught with terrors — Knight Terrors!” But not only is Knight Terrors collected second here, but also this book’s Absolute Power story makes no mention of Knight Terrors at all, putting to lie the promise that Dark Path will show “the Man of Steel reeling in the throes of Insomnia and how his ordeals will put him on a collision course with Amanda Waller.”

I know what this is, of course. Some other issues were needed to pad out this volume and the Knight Terrors: Superman issues were convenient in that they’re written by Williamson and weren’t otherwise collected outside of Knight Terrors: Knightmare League. But I think about the new-to-comics readers I encounter on Reddit who are utterly befuddled by, for instance, four different Superman #1s in about the past decade, and I wonder what they might make of this book. If you don’t know better, it’s utterly opaque why Superman is fighting Insomnia after the events of Absolute Power here, not to mention that the final pages of this book direct the reader to Superman: House of Brainiac, creating an ouroboros that the uninitiated reader might need guidance to escape. Comics shouldn’t be this hard.

Williamson’s Absolute Power tie-in here is fine as it goes, more of the fun, cameo-rich Super-storytelling I’ve appreciated over the last few books. It was also a kick to see Williamson takes this opportunity to follow up on Dark Crisis, his own line-wide crossover that preceded Power. My sense though is what we’re really seeing in the tie-in is a backdoor pilot for artist Jamal Campbell’s DC All In Zatanna miniseries; I hate to give them ideas but we could really bring this thing full circle by seeing Superman #16–18 collected a second time alongside Campbell’s mini.

[Review contains spoilers]

We rarely see Superman and Zatanna team-ups, the latter more often paired with Batman or Wonder Woman, but Williamson gets their dichotomy immediately: Superman is vulnerable to magic and therefore mistrustful of it, whereas magic is Zatanna’s livelihood, her super-powers, essentially her life. Of course we have here two of DC’s most unceasingly nice superheroes, so there’s none of the animosity Superman has when teamed up with John Constantine, for instance; rather, each stews along in their dilemmas until they finally resolve it with a heart-to-heart that sees Superman loose some of his previous concerns.

Likely this doesn’t need three issues, but Williamson populates it gamely — the plight of a Metropolis crew including Jimmy Olsen, Silver Banshee, and Lena Luthor; and a dalliance with Neron, which indeed Williamson’s Superman handles cleverly. (Blaze is clearly in the background and this felt like a real missed opportunity.) As I mentioned in my review of Absolute Power, I found that climactic miniseries surprisingly small, with barely time to dig into the plight of any of the heroes, letting alone to accentuate their angst; not that Williamson gets into much of that, but I appreciated the scene of Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, and Red Tornado arguing, to the extent that lends itself to the “crossover crowd scene aesthetic.”

Another of Absolute Power’s struggles has been a general inability to fill in the details, from the nature of the Amazo robots to why exactly the heroes get cut off from the Multiverse in the end. Williamson gives it a good shot, however, taking Superman and Zatanna to the multiversal House of Heroes, where they counter Dr. Light Kimiyo Hoshi, last seen in Williamson’s Dark Crisis. They’re attacked by the amalgam being Konfusion, who Williamson suggests has been infecting the multiversal Bleed or some such (not that Absolute Power proper pays this any mind). Not coincidentally, Konfusion was last seen in Williamson’s Absolute Power teaser at the end of Dark Crisis before presumably being dropped because he didn’t fit Mark Waid’s plans (see also “The Light”); it’s wonderful that Williamson manages to make something of the character here in the conclusion.

Since it was here, I gave the Knight Terrors: Superman two-parter another look. Classic Triangle Titles artist Jon Bogdanove provides a variant cover, which is somewhat removed in the Knightmare League collection but right in place here, and it further accentuates the great job by artist Tom Reilly, Williamson’s GI Joe collaborator, whose work is highly reminiscent of Bogdanove’s. (Both surely riffing on Shuster, but seriously, go compare the Knight Terrors issues to Superman: The Man of Steel #80.)

It feels, as with many of the Knight Terrors tie-ins, that Williamson has more pages than story (see a whole page devoted to Superman’s rocket leaving Krypton, again); it’s fun to see the Aqua-family during Knight Terrors, though I think Williamson gets much of their current status incorrect; and the House of Brainiac teaser, while gripping at the time, doesn’t ultimately jibe with the event (Brainiac isn’t in Superman’s head as this story suggests). But that Reilly art might be worth the price of admission.

Not a bad Absolute Power tie-in here in Superman Vol. 3: The Dark Path — the three-parter with Superman’s key writer and artist is better comparatively than the same in the contemporaneous Batman and Wonder Woman books. But collections and the ways they turn out are weird sometimes, and this is one of the weird ones.

[Includes original and variant covers, Metropolis map]