Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent #1 delivers exactly what is contained in its solicit and nothing more. A handful of story beats introduce characters as they neatly summarize exposition from past stories before providing their own motivations or mysteries for the series ahead. Splash panels are paired with reheated dialogue and familiar tropes that suggest readers should be excited when there are few, if any novel ideas presented to them. Instead, the first issue in this miniseries offers exactly what was already explained in a single paragraph several months ago and nothing more in an issue of superhero comics that is best described as dull.
Just take a look:
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“Another Superman has fallen. Across the Multiverse, Kal-Els are being murdered. Val-Zod, the Superman of Earth-2, believes only one man can help stop the killing—Kal-El’s son, Jon Kent! Jon will have to step across dimensions and face the killer of the Kal- Els, the monstrous Ultraman, the man who kidnapped and tortured him for years. And Val-Zod is not acting alone in trying to save the Supermen. Who is the mysterious woman alongside him? And what is her shocking connection to the Super-Family?”
That’s all there is to this issue.
Each of those sentences is stretched across several pages. Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent opens with the painful final moments of Ultraman murdering a Superman as promised with no grounding in either character to make the action resonate. It’s simply one of a multiverse of infinite Supermans being murdered in order to create a problem for the Supermen who really matter: Kal-El and his son, Jon. This is highlighted in lines like a final “L… Lois,” which turns out to be the shared sentiment of any dying Superman. It raises the question as to why this one, or any one besides the figure readers already know will not die, ought to matter to readers.
The only unmentioned sequence from the solicit involves Jon on a walk with his boyfriend Jay in panels so chaste they could still be read in Florida classrooms. Although there’s the slightest amount of tension in their relationship, the overwhelmingly quality of both characters can simply be described as nice – a nearly flavorless form of vanilla characterization that questions why anyone would need to read about what happens next. It’s not simply an absence of conflict but of personality.
This lack of excitement extends to falling satellites and appearances from more multiversal forms of Superman, all of which are more focused on narrative captions than anything approaching exciting storytelling. Clayton Henry’s pages capably detail the progression of events, but none of them provoke a sense of conflict or tension. The threats to earth are only clear when paired with internal narration explaining why the green, glowing objects being smashed in the sky might matter and how many remain until they can be quickly forgotten having served a singular purpose. Henry’s figures are colored in an awkward fashion with gradients that often draw attention to themselves with strange shadows forming in the many large panels. There’s never an outright problem, but the overall effect is underwhelming.
Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent
#1 is ultimately a comic that does not require reading. Fans concerned about events in the Superman line of comics can be sure they know all they need from the solicit, as the story inside this issue remains cold, uninflected, and generally uninteresting. It provides capable illustrations and slight expansions for a series of story beats already neatly summarized in fewer than 100 words. Perhaps future issues will provide a narrative to provoke interest and engage its audience, but that is entirely absent here.
Published by DC Comics
On March 7, 2023
Written by Tom Taylor
Art by Clayton Henry
Colors by Jordie Bellaire
Letters by Wes Abbott
Cover by Clayton Henry and Marcelo Maiolo
