DC has hit a groundbreaking milestone with their line of ‘superfamily’ titles within the company and it’s no surprise that the father of that line, Action Comics, written by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Dan Jurgens, and Dorado Quick, would end its first big arc under the new family initiative with a bang. However, while the mainline story written by Johnson continues the powerful traditions of Superman and the House of El, Dorado Quick and Dan Jurgens find themselves in a complicated position with their stories.
With the future of DC coming in at full speed with Titans and Knight Terrors, and the current inner workings of Mark Waid’s vast and expansive mind, we can see where Action Comics as a title stands and how it will affect the current Dawn of DC slate from one ending arc alone. Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Rafa Sandoval’s story “Ex Machina” with Metallo and Cyborg Superman comes to a chilling close as we see PKJ and Sandoval show the audience the David Cronenberg inspiration hidden within the art and tone of this story. We see a technological horror as the family struggles to protect Metropolis, the Super-Twins, and the fractured family of The Corbens.
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Johnson’s most significant strength throughout Action Comics has been how he tackles the concept of family. The House of El project reflects a beautiful evolution of the characters and how all of the characters in the family exist to balance off each other’s trauma and growth on a cosmic scale that has the benefit of being bounced off of by Williamson’s Superman, a series that calls back to the Triangle era of Superman and his cast of friends and foes.
With the consistent usage of ’90s-era Superman, we can see how PKJ’s scripting and all-around storytelling factor into the much wider and tragic picture of “Ex Machina” as an arc. Each side presented in the story is that of trauma and their own forms of accepting grief; whether it’s through the tragedy of The Corbens or the vengeance Cyborg Superman carries, it isn’t hard to see that the story is in its own right a place of mourning for everyone involved. Sandoval’s art provides a chilling and action-packed touch to these moments of grievance.
On the other end of the coin, Dan Jurgens and Lee Weeks continue their adventures with the Kent family, and as strong as Jurgens is, “Home Again, Part Five” is a slow and admittedly hard-to-digest part of this week’s Action Comics. Lee Weeks knocks it out of the park with his beautifully done scenes of action and drama, however, it’s clear to see that Weeks carries a lot of this storyline. I do believe Dan Jurgens is a legend in the field, his Superman stories evolved the medium and he remains an underdog of Post-Crisis Superman but to say that ‘Home Again’ is his strongest work is an understatement to what Jurgens can write. I can only hope it picks up in the next installment.
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Finally, Dorado Quick and Yasmín Flores Montañez’s “Steel: Engineer of Tomorrow, Part Three” is a story I wanted to enjoy but couldn’t get there. While the last chapter was enjoyable and an improvement on the first story, it is clear to see that Quick’s script is admittedly dry and lacks some substance needed to get readers interested in the new Steelworks title by Michael Dorn and Sami Basri. The saving grace these stories have is Montañez’s beautiful and all-around pleasant-to-see art in each chapter. I hope to see her working on more Superman-related titles in the future.
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