In this review of Superman #24, Lois Lane embarks on her first Justice League mission as Superwoman while Superman makes a startling discovery.
Superman #24
Writer: Joshua Williamson
Artists: Eddy Barrows and Eber Ferreira
Colorist: Alejandro Sánchez
Main Cover: Dan Mora
Variant Cover Artists: David Nakayama, Rafael Grassetti, Fernando Pasarin, Guillem March, Leonardo Romero
Release Date: March 26, 2024
This review contains spoilers.
The Story
Superman #24 opens with Clark and Lois suiting up and responding to an urgent message from Mercy Graves at LexCorp. They walk in on Mercy and Lex kissing before Lena Luthor shows Superman some new R&D technology developed from Superman’s own battle techniques. They are weapons which Mercy now wants to sell to the public. Suddenly, Superman gets a distress call from Mr. Terrific who tells him about an alien invasion in Markovia, the Justice League is responding and they need his help. Superman sends Superwoman (Lois) and asks Mercy to show him everything she has.
Mercy demonstrates phantom zone technology that they’ve repurposed to keep people in suspended animation while being transported to the hospital. Superman remains conflicted on selling technology that could potentially be used for harm. Their conversation is interrupted by Chief Neo Kekoa who placed Lex Luthor under arrest due to the fact that his memory is starting to return. Superman reveals that he was the one who turned Lex in.
Superwoman along with Hawkgirl, The Creeper, Vixen, Mr. Terrific, and both Blue Beetles battle an armed subaqueous alien army known as the Khunds. Superwoman and The Creeper split from the group to try and locate the Khunds leader. In the process they discover that the Khunds are using the very weapons that LexCorp has been secretly producing.
As Superman #24 ends, Clark confronts Mercy about selling weapons to their enemies and she reveals a Kryptonite heart in her chest. She stole the heart from Metallo along with his hard drive and she has also used her technology to build a super-powered clone of Lex Luthor wearing Superman’s iconic black suit.
Analysis
Superman #24 sees quite a few of the ongoing storylines dropped or sidelined in favor of a fairly straightforward twist showing what we’ve all suspected has been going on behind closed doors at Lex-Corp. I applaud writer Joshua Williamson for slowing down a little bit to give us a dual storyline with a fun Justice League action piece and a fun reveal. I like the configuration of the Justice League we get here, highlighting lesser known members, especially The Creeper who gets a small spotlight.
The brief glimpses we get in the League felt more in the spirit of the iconic 2004 cartoon than Mark Waid’s current eponymous run. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of Lois’ integration into the ranks and how she fits into the wider world of DC super-heroics since she’s historically been largely confined to the world of journalism.
Eddy Barrows and Eber Ferreira take over from Dan Mora on art duties, and that’s a win in my book. The Justice League’s battle with the Khunds just looks great with torrential rain overlaying every panel. The environmental elements give the issue’s action a certain consequential weight. The panel layouts are constantly varied to the point where no two pages look the same, and we even get a couple awesome full-page splashes like the aforementioned Lex-Mercy kiss and the final page reveal.
Alejandro Sánchez’s colors feel perfectly suited for Barrow’s and Ferreira’s detailed and angular style. The pages all look terrific on the whole. If I were to nitpick, some of the meticulous shading, especially on the cheekbones (for example Superman’s on page 3) give the faces occasionally distorted features. But these instances are few and far between.
As for the main twist of Superman #24, I’m of two minds about it. On the one hand my comic-loving lizard brain loves the audacity of giving Mercy Metallo’s Kryptonite heart and having her secretly make a superhuman Lex Luthor clone. But on the other hand, how incompetent is Superman? This is a man with superpowers and x-ray vision who entrusts a company built in his name and image to his biggest enemies, doesn’t bother to look at the finances to see that massive spending is being allocated for a secret R&D department? He doesn’t realize that the CEO has been building death machines and cloning his arch nemesis using his own superpowered DNA? I know the man’s busy, but come on!
Final Thoughts
Superman #24 is a much better issue than last months, but it does ask you to suspend your disbelief quite a bit for the purposes of a classic comic-book-style reveal.
