Review by Frank Plowright

In 1986 DC decided their selection of multiple different Earths with different versions of the same character was a concept beyond the capacity of most readers to understand. They closed everything down with Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Pesky creators kept picking at loose threads, though, and assorted bolted on revisions were called for, and eventually the characters who’d saved the multiverse at the cost of their own isolation were returned. The resulting Infinite Crisis was by fans for fans, and without the contemporary context it becomes more undreadable with every passing year. So how do stories solely about Superman’s participation in events hold up? Well for starters, for the most part, it can be understood.

Marv Wolfman imprisoned four characters in 1986 and he returns to them twenty years later, none of them satisfied with their lives of observation rather than participation. We join them with Lois Lane dying, Superboy on the verge of insanity and Alex Luthor wondering if everything has been a big mistake. Wolfman initially conveys the emotional turmoil very well, but it becomes overwrought when dragged over fifty pages. Dan Jurgens (sample art) provides suitably dynamic layouts for a number of finishers.

Geoff Johns writes a brief interlude of Lois Lane and an older Superman restored to their world, but Jerry Ordway’s fixed grin on Lois is really off-putting on otherwise attractive pages.

Joe Kelly then takes us on a journey through the lives of the older Superman and Lois. They bicker, and the point made is of simpler times not needing complicated heroes. The opening sequence of an episodic tale is charming for the assortment of different artistic approaches. Tim Sale presents ‘photographs’ of the young Clark Kent before he left Smallville, Howard Chaykin revels in illustrating his version of an early Superman story in which a wife-beater is dealt with and Renato Guedes gives the appropriate gravitas to man’s inhumanity.

An ever changing roster of artists continues to illustrate a further two chapters, but these lack the charm of the opener as an older and younger Superman each tap into the other’s history. Exactly how is never explained, at least not here, which makes it seem a plotting convenience. It’s also overlaid with pre-emptive sense of failure, and leads up to one hell of anticlimax as the older Superman just flies away. Readers of this volume wanting answers must read the final chapter of Infinite Crisis, which is unsatisfactory despite it being the best of that graphic novel.