Whenever you need to refresh a Superman title, the best way to do it is to have Superman possessed by a benevolent creature. In Superman #30, “A Moment Longer Part 2: Hopes and Fears,” Superman is still under the control of Parallax, with Sinestro hoping to wrest Parallax away from the Kryptonian’s body. Keith Champagne sits in as writer again on Superman, with art from Ed Benes, Tyler Kirkham and Philip Tan.
Here’s the official synopsis from DC Comics:
“A MINUTE LONGER” part two! This looks like a job for…Sinestro?! Thrust into the anti-matter universe of Qward, Superman’s only hope is the former greatest of the Green Lanterns.
“A Moment Longer” couldn’t have started at a better moment for Superman after the silly and slow “Road Trip” storyline. Perhaps Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason just needed a breather, and Champagne has provided the title with its best issues in a few months. Superman as an angry Yellow Lantern is a cool idea, even if Superman has already been possessed or controlled by just about every other evil entity in the DC universe. It gives any artist a chance to show a Superman using his powers uncontrollably, as the trio of artists get to do here.
The centerpiece of the issue is Sinestro’s look at Superman’s greatest fears. None of these fears are truly surprising, but the way they’re presented is quite effective as scenes flash before our eyes. Tomasi and Gleason have spent over 20 issues circling Superman’s greatest fears, but here they are crammed into just a couple of pages. Sometimes a single image can tell as much as a whole book. It was also a good idea to have Sinestro and Parallax, two characters we don’t normally associate with Superman, involved in the story.
Three artists – Benes, Kirkham and Tan – on a single issue might sound like a bad idea, but their work doesn’t diverge too far from one another enough to make the switches from page to page jarring. It’s clear that the view into Superman’s fears is meant to be different, since these are visions that aren’t supposed to be reality. However, as a big fan of one artist working on one story arc, this still drives me a little crazy. If you include Doug Mahnke’s work on the first part of “A Minute Longer,” we’re talking about a 44-page, two-part story with four different artists on it.
Without spoiling the end here, it is disappointing that “A Moment Longer” doesn’t last more than two moments (or two issues, to be exact). The story leads into a cliffhanger for a Hal Jordan & The Green Lantern Corps story, where we will learn what the Lanterns plan to do with Parallax. If you don’t read Hal Jordan though, you’ll wonder what the point was of these past two issues.
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