A little bit later today, we’ll be taking a look at all eleven of the as-yet-released Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice prequel and tie-in comics. The books, included as freebies with the purchase of consumer products like Doritos and Dr. Pepper, are actually fairly solid reading material, mostly from fan-favorite comic book writer Christos Gage and 52 artist Joe Bennett.
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General Mills, though, have released four one-shot comic stories, included as minicomics inside boxes of Cheerios, and those feature a variety of creative teams working in the world of the upcoming blockbuster. Names like Marguerite Bennett, Marcus To, and Joshua Williamson are familiar to comics fans, and while they’re more loosely tied to the movie than the Dr. Pepper and Doritos comics, that allows the writers — including Gage — to have a little more creative leeway with the characters and play with the iconography a bit more.
And the result is that, even though it’s a half-sized comic that’s included free with part of your balanced breakfast, Jeff Parker and RB Silva’s installment of the series is a truly fantastic Superman comic that would have fit in perfectly with DC’s Adventures of Superman anthology series and that any Superman fan should try to get their hands on.
You can see our review, drawn from the larger body of Batman V Superman reviews to be published later today, below:
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice #1 – Playground Heroes
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by RB Silva, Jose Marzan, Jr., and Andrew Dalhouse
Lettering by Deron Bennett
This comic was one of four included in boxes of General Mills Cheerios cereal.
First off, if anybody thought they were going to get an all-ages-friendly Superman story by Jeff Parker, and that it wasn’t going to be wonderful, they’re crazy.
Parker, whose credits include a story in DC’s recent anthology series The Adventures of Superman, as well as Batman ’66 and a fantastic Flash Gordon book for Dynamite with artist Doc Shaner, is probably one of the best writers working in mainstream comics today on an issue-by-issue basis. His work tends to be lighter in tone, something that doesn’t really fit in the angsty, event-driven world of the Big Two, which means he’s swimming against the current all the time.
No Aquaman-related pun intended.
Silva’s work is a great fit here. The animation-style art he does fits well with a story in which the “bad guys” are aliens who look kind of like one-eyed rabbits, and most of the protagonists are children. He has great storytelling and great body language and motion that keeps the book from feeling too static, even though by its nature the action has to be toned down a bit. It’s not like there can be world-shaking violence in a literal room full of school children.
And, yeah, the children. The General Mills comics follow children from a (the same?) school in Metropolis as they relate their impressions of Batman and Superman. This first issue is structured around a child’s essay, in which he details visiting S.T.A.R. Labs (yes, that S.T.A.R. Labs) and being attacked by aliens, only to have Superman arrive and rescue the kids.
…None of whom noticed* that the Daily Planet reporter they were following to the lab was gone the whole time Superman was there, but still.
*As pointed out in the comments below, Jacob — the main character of the story — did notice that Clark was missing but nobody, Jacob included, made the connection that Clark could be Superman.
If I had to get nitpicky about anything — and I will, if only so every word I say about the book isn’t so glowing that nobody takes me seriously — it would be the S-shield. The Kryptonian House of Arms is really wonky throughtout Silva’s art, and while it’s totally on-model with the way Eduardo Pansica draws it in another of the General Mills comics, it’s way off from both the movies and any other comic book iteration, so it tends to draw focus. And it’s a minor thing, but as a longtime Superman fan, I’m having a hard enough time adjusting to the Man of Steel iteration of his logo, let alone a highly-stylized version of the Man of Steel version.
The aliens, too, have a kind of delightfully Bronze Age thing going on, where the name of their race reflects their power set and it’s a little on-the-nose, but it didn’t bother me. I also really liked that in the aliens’ language/culture, Krypton had a different name. Because how the hell are they supposed to know it was called Krypton if they never met anybody from there?
To say too much more about the story would spoil its core, but I’ll say this: As absurd as it sounds to say it about a minicomic tipped into a box of cereal, this is one of my favorite stand-alone Superman comics.
Like, ever.
Parker really gets Superman, what makes him special, and what makes him different from other heroes. That’s something that’s pretty evident throughout, but which crystallizes in the last few pages.
Many of my all-time favorite Superman stories are the ones that show how he interacts with the community, and many of those tend to be one-off, since it’s not like answering fan mail is going to take Superman very long or present much of a physical challenge. “Playground Heroes,” though, stands shoulder to shoulder with Dan Jurgens’s “Metropolis Mailbag” and Joe Kelly’s “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Truth, Justice and the American Way” as one of the smartest, most heartfelt and unapologetically Superman Superman stories I’ve ever read.
And, like “Mailbag,” it does so without leveling a city block or even really presenting a supervillain who is any kind of serious threat to the Man of Steel.
The thing about “Playground Heroes” is that it doesn’t feel epic. It doesn’t feel like it needs to take place in the run-up to Batman V Superman. But what it does feel like is Superman.
