Superman barely has time to adjust to his latest retcon before a team of malcontent supervillains form the new Superman Revenge Squad and declare war on him.
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Transcript:
Superman faces his revenge squad and we take a look at it in Superman Action Comics Volume Four: The New World.
The return of Superman has been one of the big pluses of the DC Rebirth Event. The DC Universe was rebooted in 2011, more than a quarter century after the last full Universal Rebirth in Crisis on Infinite Earths. In the 1990s Superman married Lois Lane but the younger Clark Kent under The New 52 Universe was a single man, allowing writers to explore the possibility of things such as a relationship with Wonder Woman. In The New 52 event ‘Convergence' it was revealed that the post-Crisis Superman had actually survived along with Lois, and that they had had a son. In the eight-part mini-series ‘Superman: Lois and Clark' written by Dan Jurgens it's revealed that they made it to The New 52 earth, but that Superman didn't want to tread on the territory of the Superman of that world. However, The New 52 Superman went out literally in a blaze of glory, which meant the world needed a Superman and he took over the job full time after spending years fighting in the background. And there were a great many plotlines around people getting used to this new Superman and how they reacted, and those were interesting stories, but that bit of backstory probably wasn't something that was ever going to last. And so in Superman Reborn many questions that have been hanging over particularly the Action Comics title were answered, and at the end of the event The New 52 Superman and Lois emerged and they merged with their post-Crisis counterparts, creating one unified timeline and thus the title of The New World. It reveals what that unified timeline was and provides a retelling of Superman's origin stories, something that they've never done in comics again. And of course we're going to soon get another retelling when Brian Michael Bendis writes his new Man of Steel series, though I'll talk about that after we finish talking about this one.
This book, ‘Superman Action Comics: The New World’ collects issues 977 to 984, and 977 and 978 begin with Superman somewhat unsure about what's happened to him, and so he goes back to The Fortress to get a unified view of his timeline and concludes everything is fine – not even remembering where the big difference occurred. It's a good enough retelling, it provides some interesting details. Instead of Superman operating at night undercover in a black costume to stay out of his younger self's way, we're told that he and Lois took a sabbatical from The Daily Planet – though given the number of years involved that's a pretty big sabbatical. [He/It?] does a good job of holding the timeline together that there are some problems, particularly when you consider The New 52 Superman's relationship with Wonder Woman, this was never going to be perfect. And then we get into the Superman revenge squad. This is a concept that dates back to the Silver Age but it's been nearly a decade since we've had any active teen. And this one is an impressive one with Blanque – a shape-shifting alien, Metallo, Eradicator, Mongol; and it's initially led by Hank Henshaw as the Cyborg Superman, not to be confused with the one that Supergirl defeated earlier in DC Rebirth. They decide they have to spring General Zod from the Phantom Zone when they're able to do that by breaking into Belle Reve, home of the Suicide Squad. And the story features a good confrontation between Superman and Amanda Waller. The Squad then falls more or less under the leadership of General Zod with Henshaw being usurped, and Zod has a single target in mind.