There’s been something about the timing of All-Star Superman. It was strangely fitting that #10, with its portrayal of the creation of Superman in a world in which he didn’t exist (interpret it literally as “our” world if you want, but let’s not get into the metaphysics of it all right now), should have come out in the same week as the Siegel ruling. And now, barely a month after a clueless studio exec said that the next Superman movie would “try to go dark”, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely wrap up their magnum opus with an issue that shows a deep-rooted understanding of exactly what Superman means (clue : it’s not “going dark”).

I’m well aware that quoting wholesale a passage from the issue isn’t really the best thing to do in a review – firstly, it’s a reproduction of copyrighted content, and secondly, it spoils it for those who’ve yet to read – but the following speech, delivered by Jor-El (yes. Jor El. Don’t ask, just read it), is the pure encapsulation of Morrison’s vision, and the series as a whole, and as such I can’t help but share it :

Your work is done. You have shown them the face of the man of tomorrow. You have given them an ideal to aspire to, embodied their highest aspirations. They will race, and stumble, and fall and crawl… and curse… and finally… they will join you in the sun, Kal-El.

There’s plenty more I want to say about this issue, but it’s going to have to wait until I can do some kind of retrospective – because anything I say is going to have to delve into pretty major spoilers for the way the whole thing wraps up. And I can’t even really say anything new about the quality of the series, either. What, you really think they’re suddenly going to have dropped the ball at this point? But I can say that almost everything is wrapped up in a satisfactory way (although not always in the manner you’d expect, and a lot is done through subtle hinting rather than directly showing you – but then, right from the moment in issue #1 where Clark rescued a man’s life by “accidentally” knocking him over, the blend of subtlety and bombast has been one of the series’ defining attributes). There’s a touch of strangeness about a couple of the finale’s elements, and the specific note upon which the closing pages dwell is not the sort of image you’d expect either. On the other hand, there is absolutely no fake-out – Morrison somehow manages to deliver the ending that he’s been promising from day one and yet still turn it into a story about hope, and belief in the future.

And it doesn’t scrimp on the action – nor shy away from the big punch-up promised at the end of #11 – or the tender moments, or the iconic imagery, or the beauty of Quitely’s draftsmanship, or the mind-screwery (or the “Did he really just do that?” moments – in this case, I’m pretty sure he’s making a direct reference to one of the most infamously-awful aspects of JJ Abrams’ aborted movie script, and making the idea work in the process). Let’s not go over the top, though, mind. It’s not the best issue of the series (those are #6, #10 and #11), and in telling “the last Superman story”, it’s placing itself directly up against Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? – and, although they do different things (Morrison’s is bravura, experimental, unique; Moore’s is quintessential, timeless, iconic), All Star falls just short of “greatest Superman story ever” in such a straight comparison.

But that’s hardly an insult. The simple fact remains that we have been treated to a genuine, bona fide masterpiece. These are the men who brought us Flex Mentallo and We3, and yet they’ve still managed to make this the absolute high-point of their respective careers. And now that it’s a complete whole, I can finally even go so far as to call it the absolute high-point of twenty-first century comics so far. You can never really say, of course, whether people will still be talking about a particular book in twenty, thirty or even fifty years’ time. But in the case of All-Star, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that they will. The only question is – how will either of them follow it?