Review by Win Wiacek
In recent years DC has taken great pains to rationalise the attendant continuities surrounding their characters’ forays into other media. It’s sound sense, both commercially and artistically, as no matter whether it’s a television series, big screen interpretation or the animated shows (generally the very best and most palatable material for died-in-the-wool fans) that bring new fans into the mix. When they finally check out the comics – which is surely the ultimate goal – inconsistencies and jarring differences can only lead to confusion, disappointment and a lost reader.
The Last Son blends portions of the Christopher Reeve Superman films into the then-current comics continuity, using the “ripple effect” of the reality-altering Infinite Crisis to explain the changes in the character’s back-story.
It also brought film director Richard Donner back to the characters he had turned into global sensations in Superman: the Movie and Superman II, substituting key elements of those epics for much of the increasingly tangled web that preceded it. It’s co-written by Donner’s old assistant and super-scripter Geoff Johns, with stylish and gritty illustration from Adam Kubert, while colourists Dave Stewart and Edgar Delgado make an incomparable contribution to the events.
In his Fortress of Solitude the Man of Tomorrow is chided and reminded by the computer-recorded consciousness of his father Jor-El that he is an alien surrounded by humans, but never one of them. As the troubled hero returns to Metropolis and his wife Lois, he detects a spaceship crashing to Earth. Catching the blazing capsule he discovers a young boy within, who appears to be from Krypton.
Claimed by the US government, the boy nearly disappears into the nebulous miasma of US covert agencies until Superman breaks him free and hides him with the only humans with any experience of raising super-kids: Jonathan and Martha Kent. With his own family as a support group the Man of Steel decides on a course of action that will keep the government involved-but-honest. However, when Lex Luthor sends the unstable juggernaut Bizarro to steal the child, he is forced to see only secrecy and anonymity can save the youngster from becoming somebody’s ultimate weapon.
Naming the mysterious child Christopher he and Lois adopt the boy, just as three Kryptonian villains break free of the Phantom Zone, based on the filmic General Zod, Ursa and Non as seen in the aforementioned movies. Confronting Superman they claim to know the boy’s secret, but they are angry, implacable and hungry for revenge.
The Last Son has slowly been accepted as a cornerstone of Superman’s latest mythology, and by reintroducing many beloved facets of older interpretations – albeit in the whimsy-lite, grim-and-gritty post-modern manner it’s almost re-validated charming memories of many older devotees. Spectacular and fabulously compelling, this heroic mystery epic is a brilliant book to introduce modern readers to the comics industry’s greatest invention, and has lots to offer any older fan who will accept yet another revamp.
When first collected in 2008 this was issued as The Last Son, expanded to The Last Son of Krypton for the 2013 paperback and the hardcover UK edition as part of the DC Comics Graphic Novel Collection, but the most recent edition reverts to the original title.
