Reaction to War of the Supermen #1

Major spoilers ahoy!

Noooo! They killed Alura!

There was no body though – could she, by some implausible miracle, still be alive? I’m holding on to a thread of hope here, but it’s pretty thin. DC, don’t break my heart! To take Alura out of Kara’s life would be a huge loss of an awesome and interesting character who makes Supergirl’s story immeasurably richer. I’ll wait until we see for sure what happened to Alura before I start talking about that.

I can’t believe they exploded the entire planet of New Krypton. What a waste. Thousands of Kryptonians fridged just to provided the survivors with angst to go to war. It appears that the only survivors are the soldiers that were enroute to Earth. If the bomb housed inside Reactron was that powerful, how did Kara possibly survive simply by being behind a blast door a few feet from the initial blast?

All in all, pretty disappointed that DC went this route. Destroying is easy, carnage is easy. Tossing away years of potentially rich storylines for one big shocking moment that will be forgotten and swept aside (at least in Superman’s books) in a few months is easy. Keeping New Krypton around, working it into the DC universe and making it meaningful – that would have been something creative.

Oh, and Superman “saving” Brainiac from Zod’s execution at the last minute? Pissed me right off. I’m sick of so-called heroes constantly saving the worst of the worst so the writers can avoid killing off a villain they want to reuse in the future (I’m really tired of villains that have been rehashed for decades – I was pleased when Luthor got his neck snapped, and very disappointed when it turned out to be a trick yet again). Have him escape some other way, preferably through the actions of another villain, but don’t make it through the deliberate actions of Superman (or Brainiac 5 spiriting him away to the future). Doing so doesn’t make Superman appear heroic, it makes him appear inhuman. I just can’t have any respect for him as a character when he keeps doing absurd things like that.