Joshua Williamson uses the 52-day jump after Absolute Power to good effect, kicking off Superman Vol. 4: Rise of the Superwoman well into the middle of things and only circling back for secret origins later on.

The end of Superman Vol. 3: The Dark Path did say “To be continued in … Superwoman Special,” so the fact that this book didn’t start with that issue threw me. I wasn’t sure initially whether this was a case of DC collections not collecting the issues in order, making confusing something that wasn’t supposed to be, but indeed that much is by design. I’d as soon have seen the special placed around it’s publication date, however — ahead of issue #21 — than DC shunting it to the end of the book. It’s relatively minor, but the Superwoman Special teases something that recurs in Superman #23, which the collection ultimately has backward.

Exterior details aside, Williamson sure packs a lot in here, from the titular Superwoman to the enemy she and Superman face, to the enemy that comes to try to kill that enemy, plus the enemy trying to influence the proceedings — all of whom will be familiar to Super-fans. There is at the core a fairly old and well worn conflict for Superman and his allies here, but between shocking returns, shocking revelations, even shocking deaths, Williamson keeps the excitement up, buffeted by Dan Mora’s art throughout the main story.

[Review contains spoilers]

The rampaging behemoth Doomsday is back, and also Doomsday is the Time Trapper, and also the Radiant being from the planet Calaton (last seen in Dan Jurgens' 1994 Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey) is hunting him, and that’s all quite aside from Lois Lane gaining powers and now operating as Superwoman — as I said, Williamson packs a lot in, plus various happenings among the supporting cast. In a way Williamson’s Superman is a good balance between the six-issue written-for-the-trade format and something more ensemble like the Super-titles used to be; we know that aside from Clark and Lois' main action, there’s things happening with Lex, with Perry, with Jimmy and Siobhan, and so on.

A relatively swift but telling example comes toward the beginning, when Supercorp releases Parasite Rudy Jones against Doomsday and, with no small amount of gore, Doomsday kills him! Parasite has rarely been the most prominent Superman villain, but Williamson has raised his profile more than once, first in depicting a terrifying Parasite horde with Jamal Campbell in Superman Vol. 1: Supercorp and then in recasting the Parasite as a quirky Supercorp employee. That in 20 issues Williamson was able to promote Parasite, of all characters, to the point where his death truly is startling and effective demonstrates the strength of what Williamson’s built here overall.

I tend to think there’s not a lot for writers to do with Doomsday, and Williamson’s use boils down to what we’ve seen before. It’s clearly an attractive dilemma for a Superman story; the arguments for killing Doomsday (or at least permanently incapacitating him) are so clear — he is unlikely to ever be reasoned with, he can easily cause mass destruction, etc. — and the rebuttal is thin yet immutable, that Superman doesn’t kill.

I did appreciate the fine point Williamson puts on it, with the Calatian Radiant asking whether the cost of the next life Doomsday takes is worth Doomsday’s own — and then that life nearly turns out to be Jimmy Olsen’s! But similarly, a la Hunter/Prey, we know this ends only one of two ways — Superman defeats Doomsday without killing or someone takes the choice out of Superman’s hands — and I don’t think Williamson quite found a way around that, Time Trapper Doomsday notwithstanding.¹

We may begin to see motifs of Williamson’s Superman run come out, however, as I felt there was similarity between Superman’s plight with Doomsday and his encounter with Sammy Stryker in Superman Vol. 2: The Chained. There, Superman let Stryker out of his prison (perhaps intentionally not unlike Doomsday’s original prison) but then had to deal with the consequences of Stryker’s violence; though Superman didn’t release Doomsday, he’s still trying to stop Doomsday while protecting the monster from others' more extreme approaches. This feels uniquely Superman-esque, not the kind of position we see Batman or Wonder Woman in, and I’ll be interested to see if there’s other examples as Williamson continues.

I didn’t have strong feelings about a super-powered Lois Lane; this question for me is less what it is and more where it goes. Taken as a referendum on the Superman mythos — Clark has powers and son Jon has powers, so why shouldn’t Lois have powers, too? — I guess that’s fine. At the same time, we’re caught at the intersection of “Lois is a symbol for how a regular person can fight for justice” and “Lois having powers helps battle the ‘the boys are the superheroes, the girls are the civilians’ trope,” and I’m not sure which I favor more.

What we know, however, is that Clark has his powers “forever,” as long as Superman comics see publication, and Lois only has her powers so long as whichever creative team wants her to. Unless DC’s powers-that-be are truly making a commitment to Lois and Clark as a super-powered couple², at some point Williamson or someone else will take her powers away. Then, it’ll either be “Lois decided she’s fine as she was without powers” or “Lois pines her lost powers,” and either way we’re in a storyline concerned with what Lois isn’t as compared to Clark — see also Lois at some point stepping down as Daily Planet editor when Perry inevitably returns. This was messy when Jeremy Adams’s Flash run had Wally West impregnate Linda with speedster powers; it’s a great dynamic for this title, but I can’t imagine it won’t eventually end up somewhere messy, too.

After a variety of artists gave Superman Vol. 2: The Chained an uneven look, I appreciated that Dan Mora draws all the main parts of Rise of the Superwoman. There are some flashbacks to “Death of Superman” where Mora does a fantastic Jon Bogdanove impression and those took me back. In some of the action sequences things did get a little cluttered, and too one of the guest artists in the Superwoman Special draws the characters with vacant stares, but overall a marked improvement from the end of Chained. It is worrisome that Superman doesn’t seem to have a set art team coming up, given what a big time this is about to be.

Still and all, Joshua Williamson goes deep into Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey in Superman Vol. 4: Rise of the Superwoman, really nothing I was expecting, and ends with a tie to the overarching DC All In storyline, which pretty well seems exactly where Superman should be. Eager for the next.

[Includes original covers, 25+ variant covers]