Superman, Volume 3: Multiplicity collects three different stories. The first is a crossover with Swamp Thing from the first
Superman Annual. Being a Swamp Thing story, this gets pretty tripy at times. It starts with the fields around Superman's farm dryin up. After some fruitless investigation, Swamp Thing shows up. He believes that Superman is causing a disturbance in The Green because their is some kind of anomaly between him and the earth. He offers to cleanse Superman but Clark is initially reluctant and the two (of course) end up fighting. In the end Superman sees reason and allows himself to be "bonded" with Swamp Thing, who fixes the anomaly through some scientific mumbo jumbo. The artwork by Jorge Jiménez, Alejandro Sanchez is really beautiful, though there is some inconsistent facial work. The story, unfortunately, isn't great. There is simply no reason for the fight between Superman and Swamp Thing, so the whole thing feels contrived and, in the end, anti-climatic.
The main story collected is
Multiplicity, sees Superman get mixed up with the Justice League Incarnate, a multiversal (is that a word?) version of the Justice League created by Grant Morison for his Multiversity miniseries. The story begins with Clark meeting Red Son Superman, who warns him that someone called Prophecy is coming before being attacked by an army of humanoids called the Gatherers. He then overhears that the Gatherers are planning to capture Kenan Kong, the Superman of China.
It turns out that Prophecy is trying to capture Supermen throughout the multiverse who are on his "Lyst." After defeating the Gatherers, Clark and Red Son Superman are met by the Justice League Incarnate who are also investigating Prophecy and the disappearance of the Supermen. Clark decides to team up with them to stop Prophecy. They travel to the various earth's to try and warn the Supermen there before they are captured but the Gatherers keep thwarting them so Superman comes up with a plan to take the fight to Prophecy. He allows himself to be captured so the League can track him to Prophecy's location.
This story is delightfully absurd. Superman uses music (yes music!) to lead the Justice League International to Prophecy and he and the other heroes get some really inspiring moments. I can't compare it to
Multiversity as I didn't read that book, but I am guessing that it is far less meta then Morrison's story. For me, this is a good thing. I don't want a lot of self aware weirdness invading my Superman book.
Multiplicity also includes some set up for later on as we learn that Prophecy was capturing the Superman in order to take their power for himself so that he can stop a greater looming threat that he knows is coming.
This arc was drawn by like six different artists including Ivan Reis (on #14), Clay Mann on (#15 and 16), Ryan Sook, Ed Benes, and Jorge Jiménez (all on #15) and Tony S. Daniel (on #16). Because of this the art is kind of all over the place but they sort of make it work by having different artist tackle different Earths in the multiverse. I still found the radically different art styles from page to page a bit distracting though.
The final story is a one-shot entitled "Dark Harvest" which sees Jon and his friend Kathy Branden search for her grandfather, who has gone after their prize cow Bessie who went missing in the woods. There, they run into some increasingly bizarre situations and are followed by a mysterious dark man, who at one point grows giant and tries to catch them. They are saved by Mr. Branden, who has found Bessie after a long search. He assumes that something in the swamps waters must have caused them to hallucinate.
The art by Sebastian Fiumara with colors by Rob Stewart is really quite strong and has a harsh, sketchy quality that really fits the tone of this story. They do some really cool things with perspective for the more trippy, hallucinatory scenes and the use of light and shadow is really effective. This story reads like something you'd release in October despite it's
April release date. It's sufficiently mysterious and creepy but there's
little in the way of character growth or real drama, which is
unfortunately true about all the stories in this volume.
I think DC's twice-a-monthly shipping schedule hurt a lot of there rebirth titles and it definitely shows here. We spend most of this volume dragging our feet and teasing the larger story without moving it forward. With that said I think that Tomasi and Gleason's characterization of Superman is still spot on. There's a moment in the Multplicity story where he tells Kenan Kong, "it’s in places like this that hope burns brightest.”
That's Superman. He also does a good job portraying the family dynamics between Clark, Lois and Jon, though there's sadly very little of it in this volume.
In the end this third volume of
Superman is a relative low point in Tomasi and Gleason's run. The overarching story is stalled and, unlike the last volume, the individual stories told here feel pretty inconsequential and dramatically inert. There are nice moments and the art is pretty solid overall but this volume is pretty skip-able when it's all said and done.
Score: 6/10
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