It’s a well-established narrative trope – heck, you could call it a cliché if you want – that as soon as someone goes on about how happy they are with everything, something’s about to happen to make it rather less so. So when we open James Robinson’s first Superman issue with a charming scene featuring Clark playing fetch in space with Krypto (while a bemused Hal Jordan looks on) and remarking on how great things are, I can’t help but get worried. Not for Lois – not even the events of Final Crisis #2 are enough to make me think anything bad’s ever going to happen to her – but for Krypto. Seriously, if something happens to that dog, I’m dropping the book like a stone.

Following that opening sequence – which in its few pages is enough to give us a sense of the way Robinson is approaching the character – we spend the remainder of the issue in a Superman-less Metropolis, and in one of many inevitable Starman comparisons, it’s clear straight away that he intends to use the city itself as a character rather than simply a backdrop for the artist - as a big monster rages through the streets to be taken on by the power-suited “Science Police”, it’s very much an “only in Metropolis” kind of story. For the main narrative, meanwhile, he falls back on another of his preferred devices – looking at the action through the eyes, and thoughts, of supporting characters. In this instance, it’s a member of the Science Police, and it’s good to see a certain amount of ambiguity as regards someone’s reaction to Superman - sometimes he hates him for making their job look trivial, sometimes he’s in awe of what the guy can do. It’s not black-and-white - it’s believable. It’s exactly the sort of vignette we used to see dotted throughout Starman (indeed, unlike with a lot of writers, I wouldn’t necessarily expect the character to show up again after this), and it demonstrates that one of the keystones of Robinson’s run will (hopefully) be character work - undeniably his biggest strength as a writer. And unlike his One Year Later Batman story, a longer run here will hopefully mean that that sort of thing gets time to breathe.

Renato Guedes has already made waves as an occasional Superman artist in the last couple of years, and it’s good to see him locked in to a proper run on the main title - as he’s one of the best out there at drawing the character at the moment. As I’ve said before, he reminds me of Jackson (Butch) Guice’s early/mid ’90s work, and his Superman has the requisite mixture of power and grace. He’s also no slouch when it comes to the action sequences, and there’s a pleasing amount of precision to his linework and Wilson Magalhaes’ inks - although some of the rippling muscle shots of Atlas leave a bit to be desired.

It’s a promising start, anyway. It doesn’t do anything mindblowing, doesn’t promise much in the way of great shakeups - but it shows a measured pace in building things up, and the tone is absolutely spot on. Robinson is clearly, just for the moment, setting himself up to bed in for the long haul - and as long as he doesn’t do anything to that dog, I’m happy to join him.

DC appear to have been taking a looser approach to continuity of late. Perhaps it’s an acknowledgement that a succession of Crises have failed to sort things out once and for all, or simply that DC’s “shared universe” has always been somewhat less grounded in reality than Marvel’s, but I’ve noticed a growing attitude of “if the stories are good, precise continuity linkups don’t really matter a great deal”. And such an approach, whereby each new creator gets to do their own interpretation, rather than rigidly following everything that’s gone before, is holding an increasing appeal as far as I’m concerned. No, it’s not the way comics have worked in the past – but the DC universe, in all its forms, is pretty bloody old now. Some of these characters have existed for a very long time now, and Crisis or no Crisis, it’s increasingly difficult to reconcile character histories when they’re spread over such a long period of time. What I think we’re seeing, therefore, is a shift to more mythological status for the really big characters – rather than a fixed story, instead it’s the rough elements that are fixed in place. It’s an approach that certainly worked with All-Star Superman – and I’m seeing the influence of that title quite strongly on the “proper universe” Superman books of late.

The latest issue of Action Comics – which actually appears to be the first salvo in the Robinson/Johns run on both main titles – is certainly a case in point. Take, for example, the presentation of Jonathan and Martha Kent. Has anyone ever been able to nail down these two characters for any length of time? Their latest incarnation, courtesy of Superman Birthright, was as a slightly older version of their Smallville equivalents. But here, in much the same way as Jor-El was given a movie-esque overhaul at the beginning of Johns’ latest run, they’re tweaked yet again – still similar to the Birthright versions, but older (and with some clear foreshadowing that Jonathan won’t be around for much longer). And you know, I’m not sure it really matters. You can raise all sorts of questions about how each successive decade of continuity is supposed to tie into the previous one – but much as I’ve got a soft spot for the science-driven Superman stories of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, for example, they’re not hugely relevant to the current character, and I don’t see that it’s beneficial to anyone for readers to have to rely on vast amounts of prior knowledge in order to pick up on a run. As long as the creator’s own run is a self-contained, decent story that doesn’t contradict itself, that should be the key.

Of course, even as you’re shifting familiar elements around, it’s possible to overdo the references to the past. Johns builds up a new core Daily Planet staff here, and while it’s the source of some decent light material, I’m not sure it hugely works. Taking his cues perhaps a little too strongly from All-Star, we get the return of Steve Lombard (still as one-note a character as he was in the ‘70s – I can’t help but feel he’s only there as a recognisable link to All-Star, heat-vision-related prank and all) and Cat Grant, along with ‘90s supporting character Ron Troupe. It’s a collision of eras that doesn’t really come off, not least because much of Cat’s character is based around an event (the death of her son) that happened way before any of the Birthright or Infinite Crisis reality-shifting was done – a hangover from the past, in other words. And while we’re at it, since when did Clark become the bumbling, blue-suited buffoon again? One of the strengths of his recent portrayals was as a strong individual in his own right, the Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter.

Still, if there’s one praiseworthy element of this version of Clark, it’s in Gary Frank’s visual portrayal. I don’t know if it’s his decision or Johns’ to have Clark and Lois drawn to look almost exactly like Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder… but damn, it works, even as you’re left feeling like it shouldn’t. Over-reliance on shoehorning in movie lore was the undoing of the infamous Last Son arc, but Frank’s work is so good that it’s hard to dislike. And a visual interpretation is just that – there’s no real need to read too much into how the character’s being presented. It makes for an instantly iconic and “classic” looking Superman, and that’s fine by me.

Hmm, I’ve managed to get this far on a discussion about continuity without actually talking about the plot of the issue. Ah, well. Suffice to say, it’s a new Brainiac story, and one that looks set to finally address the background story of the Bottle City of Kandor in modern continuity (as opposed to simply plonking it in the middle of the Fortress one day, which is the way it’s been done up to this point). And it’s quite well-played, actually. Johns is at his best when he strips stories down to a simple, effective level – because, as a continuity nut himself, he’s well-versed enough in DC history to know which elements work best – and of particular note is the opening sequence on Krypton, showing the theft of Kandor as a more horrific event than it’s ever really been portrayed before (including some interesting material with Zod, the villain given a bit more dimension than in his last appearance). Meanwhile, as with the surprising Toyman story last month, Johns looks to be drawing all the disparate versions of Brainiac into a coherent, singular one, so it’ll be intriguing to see where he takes it. Again, though, it’s in unleashing the shiny terror of Brainy’s intricate machinery that Frank excels – he really is turning in some of the best work I’ve seen on a DCU Superman title for a while. With Renato Guedes down for James Robinson’s Superman run, it’s a very encouraging time artistically for comics’ most iconic figure.

I’d hesitate to call this a truly great comic, but it’s well crafted and constructed, and generally shows the more appealing side of Johns’ writing. If this is the style in which the Super-books are aiming to spend the foreseeable future, then I’ll happily get on board with it - this is Superman, after all, and I’d rather have entertaining stories that follow continuity loosely than dull ones overly concerned with fanboy-pleasing minutiae.

After the success of the really-rather-good 52, and the failure of the catastrophically-bad Countdown, it’s fair to say the jury’s still out on DC’s grand “weekly comic” experiment. So the question is, can Trinity push the balance back towards the favourable side?

The omens are good, in that lessons have clearly been learned from what did and didn’t work in those prior series. For the first time, Trinity doesn’t tie into (whether launching off the back of, or leading up to) a big “event” series – although, that said, it’s a little jarring that it’s come out so soon after the first part of Final Crisis, as you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a standalone story, not designed to slot specifically alongside current events. Indeed, the fact that it’s simply a standalone long-form story makes you wonder just whether the weekly format is necessary – it’s not taking place in “real time” a la 52, and it’s not building up to an event as Countdown attempted to, so will it really be able to sustain interest for 52 weeks?

Still, if there’s another positive omen, it’s in the identity of the creative team. Mark Bagley is given a deservedly high-profile launchpad for his DC career, while Kurt Busiek – rarely the most spectacular writer in comics, but certainly among the most reliable - gets to make up for having missed out on being part of the 52 team by taking the reins here. And they make a fairly solid start, it has to be said. If the main weakness of the book so far is a story that doesn’t yet seem to be doing very much, nor inspiring a huge amount of interest, then its main strength is at least in the telling. One of the benefits of having such an experienced hand as Busiek on board is that there’s no messing about with the characterisation – the opening scene of our three heroes’ secret identities meeting for coffee gets them all spot on, with Busiek keen to play up various contrasts (from the way they order food to their varied interpretations of the same dream). There’s nice attention to detail, too, in the caption boxes that follow the thought patterns of all three as they go their separate ways (and the nice artistic touch of the slightly-altered logos on all three making up the first letter, which winds up looking far neater than the similar but simplistic approach taken in Superman/Batman).

It’s still disconcerting to see a Marvel legend such as Bagley drawing such iconic DC characters, and I suspect it will remain so for a little while to come. Despite such preconceptions, though, his work is exactly as you’d expect - decent, clear storytelling, with an energy and dynamism that makes the occasional bit of odd face-shapery forgiveable. His versions of Wonder Woman and Batman are the stronger points, while Superman perhaps needs some work before he becomes an iconic-looking figure. But the consistency of artist will, I’m sure, be one of the book’s strongest assets as the weeks roll on, and on this evidence Bags looks to have been a good choice.

If the book falls down anywhere, it’s in the backup story. I can see the practical reasoning behind splitting the book like this (Bagley’s a quick and consistent artist, as shown by his astonishingly long and always-on-time Ultimate Spidey run, but could he cope with 22 pages a week for a whole year?), but these pages are certainly the weaker, quite aside from the fact that they cause the main feature to truncate and arguably lessen its breathing space. The approach of focusing on the villains provides a good flip-side, and there’s arguably more plot here than in the main story; but with Fabien Nicieza’s slightly overwrought scripting, it gets a bit too bogged down in flowery mysticism, although a neat “alternate Gotham” sequence featuring Green Arrow and Speedy (and, er, “the Arrow-signal”) holds intruging promise. In addition, Scott McDaniel’s loose and cartoony art style fails to hold up all that well against Bagley’s work.

Nevertheless, it’s overall a solid enough start that I’m willing to take the bait. After completing 52, I’d agonised over whether to start buying Countdown, but my snap judgement of “leave well alone” after reading the first issue turned out to be the right one; I’m going to stick my neck out here, though, and whack this one on the pull list. Let’s see how it gets on.

I can’t remember a week of comics as good as this in a very long time. In a way, it’s a reflection of just how badly things tend to be scheduled – and certainly, for a writer of a site where we can only review four new books a week, it’s frustrating to have to miss out so much stuff, when there are other weeks in which we’ll barely have anything of interest to say. Nevertheless, the disappointment of Final Crisis aside, we’ve had customarily superb issues of Astonishing X-Men, Ultimate Spider-Man and Batman, the possible sleeper-hit of 1985, and somewhat surprisingly, two books by Geoff Johns (Action Comics and Green Lantern) that were both perhaps the strongest issues of his recent runs. But of course, at the head of all of this – in much the same way as it stands at the head of pretty much the entire mainstream comics field – is All-Star Superman.

One issue to go! How will we cope in its absence? I’m genuinely not sure. Sure, the scheduling has been erratic (although, hey, it’s actually managed to overtake All-Star Batman now, by virtue of actually successfully hitting a bimonthly release for the first time), but by gum, it’s a comic that lights up any week in which it deigns to appear. It goes without saying by now that Morrison and Quitely have crafted one of the finest Superman stories of all time – an absolute masterclass of comics creation on every conceivable level. In fact, is there really anything left to say about it?

Well, it is worth noting that perhaps the weaker issues of the series have been the ones that revolved a bit more around action, rather than emotion or metaphysics. Not that the action hasn’t been well-done – it’s just that the more memorable moments of the series (the one with Clark’s dad, the two “replacement” Kryptonians, and of course the incredible issue #10) have tended to be when it’s reflected on the deeper meaning of Superman and his existence. What’s surprising about #11, then, is that in setting up the big-bucks series finale (short version – Lex Luthor has powers for twenty-four hours) it provides perhaps the most thrilling “action” issue the series has seen to date - and it’s one that takes its place alongside the “reflective” issues.

Not that it doesn’t get reflective, of course – there’s an absolutely wonderful moment where a valuable whole panel is used to show the sole remaining Superman Robot left to guard the fortress alone in the dark – but really, this is about giving us a proper, explosive grand finale. The confrontation proper doesn’t yet begin – Luthor lurks menacingly in the background after brutally escaping his own execution, leaving his brilliantly malevolent niece (another dusted-off Silver Age obscurity) to steal the show, while Superman is kept busy having a punch-up with a sentient red sun – but everything is set up for what will basically be “the General Zod fight from Superman II done better”. At the same time as it’s being darkly ominous (the wonderful cover image of a headline “SUPERMAN DEAD” with a byline “by Clark Kent” - so simple and classic that I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before - does actually appear in the issue proper), it’s playful and thrilling in turn.

But while Morrison is clearly just having fun throwing ideas at the page and watching them come beautifully together (not to mention throwing in such gems as having Jimmy say “quite frankly”), Frank Quitely is – on an entirely serious level – once again showing everyone just how it’s done. I know I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but I’ll keep repeating it until the idiots who bleat things like “his people are pudgy and ugly” shut the hell up : he is the singular greatest artistic talent currently working in the industry. His senses of storytelling and composition alone deserve to elevate him up among the all-time greats (the pair of panels in which Superman is shown about to deliver the final blow to Solaris, followed by a city-wide shot of a red explosion, feel like Scott McCloud could use them in an essay about using the gutter properly), but with his startling level of detail and precision (and again, inker/colourist Jamie Grant deserves almost as much credit here), I simply can’t see how anybody could ever complain about his aesthetics. He can do large-scale as well as someone like Cassaday, and if there’s a criticism, it’s that on occasion he’s a bit too over-reliant on those trademark wide shots – with small characters picked out amid a huge empty background – when sometimes, as brilliant as his use of space is, a close-up would add a bit more humanity.

Such details feel like nitpicking, though, because it feels faintly ridiculous telling the creators of All-Star Superman what to do. I’d go so far as to say that this is the first time, in my experience of regularly buying comics (as opposed to just reading whatever fell my way, which was how I did things up until I went to Uni), that I’ve known what it must have felt like as Watchmen or Sandman drew to a close. And if that sounds like hyperbole, and if you’re amazed that such things could be said about a Superman comic, of all things – well, that’s just a reflection of what Grant and Frank have done with this magnificent series. It’ll be a very, very long time before we see its like again.

The weekly news-commentary piece returns after a 2-week, Bristol-motivated absence to discuss the industry’s latest developments, with a look at James Robinson and Geoff Johns’ Superman, Jim Mahfood’s latest announcement, some stuff about the book we all love to hate, Ultimates, and links to a couple of columns about the tenuous relationship between comics and Hollywood.

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Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

As regular readers of Comics Daily will know, while I’m not much of a fan of John Byrne as a person, I can’t deny that in my eyes, he’s up there with Curt Swan as one of the most definitive Superman artists of all time. This has plenty to do with some of my most formative comics reading being of his late ’80s run, when he relaunched the character in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths and had a successful run along with Jerry Ordway and various others that took the character towards the end of the decade.

The writing on these books was solid, rather than spectacular, but he did lay some important groundwork and told a handful of quite memorable tales, one of which is this story, Lost Love, that I remember reading as a kid and which I found a copy of at Bristol last weekend. Looking back over it now, however, perhaps the biggest surprise is just how much it sticks to the original version of the story of which it’s a retelling - that of Lori Lemaris, the mermaid who was Superman’s other great LL-related love.

The original story was by Batman co-creator Bill Finger and legendary artist Wayne Boring, and published in 1959 - and unlike the revamps of various characters such as Mr Mxyxptlk and Metallo that Byrne was busy carrying out in those early issues, this one shows remarkably little deviation from the template. The way in which a college-age Clark and Lori meet - with Lori in a runaway wheelchair - is replicated, complete with almost identical dialogue. Similarly, we get a scene where Lori “talks” to an octopus, again with just a few words changed in the dialogue, and the story rolls on with Clark proposing to (and being turned down by) Lori, and wondering just why she has to be home by eight each night before discovering the water tank in her trailer home. Byrne also homages one of the more memorable of Boring’s panels, as Clark and Lori share a goodbye kiss.

This is all well and good, of course - it’s a classic and well-remembered story, and Byrne’s updating is an effective homage. Where the issue suffers, however, is in his attempt to expand the story beyond the natural end-point of the original. He first adds some material - still part of the “flashback” story that Clark is telling - involving Aquaman and an insane sailor called Schmidt; but while it feels like material that has been told before (from the way it skims over and just picks up the pertinent points), I’m not sure it can have been - after all, the series had only been running for a year at this point, and I’m not sure when all this stuff is supposed to have happened. Worse is the fake-out that Byrne pulls by having Lori stabbed by Schmidt - we’ve already learned that she is either missing or dead from the context of the framing sequence, but this supposedly horrific stabbing shortly leads to a full recovery.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the issue, though, is the changes Byrne makes to Lori’s own character. In the original story, shortly after Clark discovers that she’s a mermaid there’s a great sequence where the pair of them each use their unique abilities to stop a flood disaster - here, though, she simply gets nekkid in the water and they kiss some. After this, she’s given little control over her own destiny - after being stabbed, she falls in love with the doctor that saved her, and rather than making the heartbreaking decision not to be with Clark because of the oceanic distance between them, she simply decides that he probably never loved her in the first place. It rather reduces her to being defined by the men in her life (and by her ability to look good with no clothes on), and it’s disappointing; nor is the lack of proactive behaviour really balanced out by a quick reference to her having “died defending the city she’d searched so long to find” (not least because, well… we got shown the bit where she was stabbed and survived, but we’re not told the story of her death?)

There are still neat touches, particularly when the issue is referencing the original, and the reveal at the end of the nature of the “greatest poet in the world” is nice (although, you know, poets write poems, not songs). And of course, the art throughout is customarily superb - even more so than with his X-Men run, I’d define this as the absolute top of Byrne’s game, perhaps due to his occasionally loose style being reined in by Karl Kesel’s tight inks. But it’s far from the best of those late ’80s stories, and while it does serve the purpose of bringing an important part of Superman history into the post-Crisis continuity, most of what makes it truly memorable can be found just by reading the original.