In the New 52, some events in previous continuity happened,
and some events didn’t. Bane broke Batman’s back, and Hal Jordan became
Parallax, but Doomsday never killed Superman. The end of Grant Morrison’s Action run showed a Lois and a Jimmy who
remembered Doomsday having killed Superman, but that wasn’t the New 52’s Lois
and Jimmy, so this story is breaking new ground.
Superman: Doomed
is a crossover event with its first three chapters all going on sale the same
day, so readers need to be careful to follow the reading order to avoid
spoilers, which this review contains in abundance.
In 1992, Doomsday was introduced for the very purpose of
killing Superman. His abilities were revealed as the story progressed, but his
origin was left as a mystery, with such details as his state of confinement
left unexplained. They were probably better left a mystery. Subsequent stories resorted
to hackneyed reveals and a painfully illogical “power” (that no one can defeat
him twice) borrowed from the 1970s origin of the Calculator. Everything that
made Doomsday intriguing and mysterious was stripped away in story after story,
until nothing remained of the character but a way for writers to introduce, cheaply,
a moment where the reader thinks, “This is bad.”
Superman: Doomed
removes, at least initially, most of the characteristics of the 1992 story
except for the creature’s appearance. We begin, in 2014, by knowing that Doomsday
had a past on Krypton, although this past comes to us through an intriguingly doubtful
story-within-a-story told to Kara by Zor-El in Batman/Superman #3.1. In a major alteration of the character, this
Doomsday feeds off the lifeforce of nearby beings, more akin to the Parasite, and
left the entire population of Smallville in a coma and killed many other people
elsewhere. Also unlike the original, this Doomsday is able to teleport, and
specifically avoids fighting Superman. Again unlike the original, this Doomsday
is beaten physically without too much trouble, being ripped in half by Superman
at the end of a battle which goes from place to place before concluding in
Smallville. As the most significant alteration from the original character,
this Doomsday is a sort of infection which is now inside Superman, and he must
summon the willpower to fight the infection or he will have, in effect, lost
the battle by becoming the next incarnation of the very villain he physically
beat.
In what we’ve seen so far, the story has a few flaws. The
art surrounding the battle in Superman:
Doomed #1 was unusually chaotic and confusing. It was difficult to tell
whether punches were being landed, dodged, or thrown the other way. When the
battle moved to a new place via teleportation or conventional movement, the
motion and the motives were largely left uncommunicated except by narration
boxes. Superman decides to take the battle away from humanity, but this only
seems to apply to one brief portion of the battle, a few punches taking place
on a nicely-rendered landscape of Venus. Before and after this, the battle
takes place on Earth, with no explanation for why Superman abandoned his
strategy to fight far away from potential victims.
An important characteristic in Superman’s moral make-up is
his reluctance to kill, and when the story brings this up, it does so briefly.
Superman implicitly decides that killing Doomsday is worth it, but then
relishes it when Wonder Woman asks him to bring her Doomsday’s head. If the
story is to redeem its potential, it needs to revisit this decision in more
detail, as the decision itself was dispensed with rapidly as it occurred.
At this point, the story is one of internal struggle against
what is in effect demonic possession, Superman’s inner nature battling a
contagion, a dynamic which has been used many since 1960s stories that used red
kryptonite to advance that plot. More recently, 52 Aftermath: The Four Horsemen showed Superman resisting the slowly-growing
influence of a similar evil demigod while his allies tried to help him. Superman: Doomed will be a
thorough disappointment if it aspires only to repeat that plot but with more PR
this time. It may likewise repeat the “Bad Superman” of Superman III, the “Doomsday always comes back stronger” from the
creature’s first go-around, and we’re left to see going into chapter four if
the story has something new to add.
A different plot which is getting more attention is the
tension between Lois Lane and Wonder Woman as rivals for Superman’s love
interest. Decades of tradition placing Lois Lane (almost always) in that role
have been on hold in the New 52, with Wonder Woman owning Superman’s heart for
over two years now (versus about two issues in post-COIE continuity). If the
Superman-Wonder Woman relationship is meant to tear away easily, leading to a
triumphant renewal of the Superman-Lois relationship, then this event might be
the place where it happens. On the other hand, the things Superman and Wonder
Woman have in common as warriors should apply more in this story than most others,
and we’ve already seen how Wonder Woman is more at place than Lois in most
aspects of the story, although Lois has the byline for the articles that start
each issue.
The story has asserted that Superman, as Doomsday’s target
of choice, is the strongest being on Earth, with nary a word of contradiction
regarding Shazam, Supergirl, or Martian Manhunter. We know from solicits that Superman will lose the battle against the Doomsday infection before he ultimately wins it. We will see as the story
unfolds if it can win the battle against duplicating older stories with no real purpose or originality.
