It’s funny how after countless reboots, cross-overs and continuum changes, that DC’s Super Heroes are somehow still as convoluted and broadly inaccessible as they have always been. Future State: Superman collects a number of the Superman themed stories from DC’s Future State cross-over event.
Following on from the incredibly messy (and almost unreadable) Dark Knights, Death Metal series, Future State explores the future of various DC worlds. As the name suggests, Future State: Superman draws heavily from the Superman mythos. So we get the idea of Superman bottling a city to keep it safe re-heated and re-imagined. We get the idea of a Superman as the architect of a super-human legacy revisited. Warworld gets some remixing and of course they are new takes on both Braniac and Lex Luthor which aren’t that new and are certainly not that interesting.
Though this is a single graphic novel, it’s not one coherent story; nothing really pulls the individual storylines together beyond the idea that these are all Superman stories. And they don’t really do a very good job at that. Good Superman stories are about doing good things whilst understanding that power corrupts. Mostly these Superman stories are either about over-coming something more powerful than Superman or a riff on an existing bit of Superman lore. For example, there’s an entire bit where the Midnighter (a alternate universe Batman) shows up and fights the corrupted version of Apollo (an alternate universe Superman and Midnighter’s ex-husband). The story itself goes nowhere, does nothing and it’s dull because it goes on for way too long.
Given the staggering amount of talent involved, including writers such as Brian Michael Bendis and artists like Riley Rossmo, we were hoping this would be an epic examination of what makes Superman tick, to rival the likes of All-Star Superman. Alas it’s just average comic book fare that borders on phoning it in. Not a single gem amidst the dross.
