Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Candid Kandor: Thoughts on "New Krypton"

Sorry I haven’t been blogging very much lately. The library has been busy, and there hasn’t been much time with the whole “writing for fun thing.” But that’s just an excuse. And I promised long ago that I would stop making excuses. The truth is I’ve been playing way too much Star Trek Online and working on Pretty Little Recaps in my off-work time.

One thing I have been doing is reading up on The Man of Steel for a major annotated library blog I’d like to do at one point, so I have been reading comics on a regular basis again (or as regular as I get).

Over the past few weeks, I finished the New Krypton series. I didn’t realize Superman stories could engage me so much, or that this one would in particular, but I actually really liked it. The premise is this- Brainiac, who has appeared in the Superman cannon many times and in many forms (many of his non-Lex Luthor villains have this problem: they don’t just stick to the one thing) returns to Earth and starts some trouble. Superman stands up to him, but finds a much more physically opposing Brainiac than he’s used to. This happens in Superman: Brainiac. You find out Brainiac essentially never leaves his ship (or the information he’s obsessed with collecting), he sends out “probes” to collect it and bring it back to him - hence the many different Brainiacs that Superman has fought over the years.

But the real deal comes to Earth to f#$@ up humanity. And Superman has a tough time defeating him. But defeat him he does, and in the process, he reclaims the bottle city of Kandor. The shrunken capital city of his dead world.