"Superman: Unchained #1" Review

This comic was $5.  Five dollars.  Five hundred pennies.  Half of ten dollars.  It is worth roughly $2.25, on a very good day.

I'm realizing how spoiled I've gotten by reading $1 online comics from folks like MonkeyBrain.

Jim Lee likes to draw Superman sort of hunched over.  I don't really know why.  He also likes to draw his head sort of unusually small.  Also, as Co-Publisher of DC Comics he can apparently greenlight the single dumbest, least narratively driven, least impressive, most expensive fold out insert in a comic.  Ever.

I really needed a huge image of space debris to tell the story.  Thanks.

Jim Lee's Superman pioneers the crouching brokeback pose (for men)

oh, good.  A glue stain.

and its glued to cardboard so I'm missing some of the text.  Awesome.

vas iz dis?  Not even a house ad on the cardboard?

Back when he became Co-Publisher of DC Jim Lee was talking about how "collectable" comics are and how he could never go digital.  My guess is he's also trying to find neat things paper can do that your iPad or Google tablet can't (such as get bigger than a comics page).  But...  this is kind of dumb.  And, apparently, expensive.

It's essentially a 24 page comic for $5.  Man.

I wanted to like this comic, because I heard writer Scott Snyder say some really nice, on-the-nose things about Superman, and I figured I'd give this comic a shot.  At $5.00, it provided me with roughly four minutes of reading, including puzzling over the foldout and rubbing glue off the foldout pages.  I felt like I'd read approximately 4 pages of Silver Age comic, including the back-up "feature".  I have no idea what is happening with Clark, Jimmy, Lois and Perry White, but it sure feels like Scott Snyder and DC Comics think its okay to co-opt the horrors of the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan to recreate Nuclear Man from Superman IV: The Quest for Peace* for a half-assed comic that looks a little like every forgettable Superman storyline from the past fifteen years at first blush.

Its not awful, its just that there's nothing to this comic but the first four minutes of a movie, and it cost me $5.

And that's the last time I spend that much of a single issue.

I'm just glad my extra dollar went to pay Lee's page rate and the cost of shipping the stupid white board insert in the comic necessary to glue in Lee's awful foldout.

I know Jim Lee is supposed to be the nicest guy in comics, but sometimes I wonder if he's also just sort of living in Jim Lee land.



*And, yes, I think Jordan Gibson said it first on twitter, but, man... truth is truth.