Brainiac 2.5 crashes to Earth and begins to feed off the energy of Metropolis, upgrading to Brainiac 13, which Superman must defeat in order to save the city and the world, while also figuring out what Lex Luthor is up to.
3rd times the charm on telling the last story of Superman in the millenium! The last volume had 2 issues saying they were doing that, but this final, real one truly was the best!
The art of this volume is so much star talent that was just the work of dreams back to back with McGuinness, Immonen, and Mahnke!!!
This book takes Superman's two most iconic villains and really sets up their stakes and characters beautifully!
A truly memorable take on the classic Superman adventures!
While the City of Tomorrow era of Superman isn't my favorite, I do enjoy this particular story. The visualization of the fears of a Y2K apocalypse is creatively handled even if the reveal that it was Brainiac brings it back to familiar territory. I also really like the decision to render Brainiac 13 with digital art to make him stand apart from the drawn stuff. Theres a character decision at the end I'm not wild about.
Other than Ed McGuiness's debut as a Superman penciler there isn't much that's remarkable or even interesting to be found in this collection. It's a reminder how listless and uninspired the Superman books of the early 2000s often were.
Jeph Loeb’s run on Superman continues with an interesting set on life in Metropolis as a reflection on Lex Luthor’s ancestry as developers, civil rights leaders and so forth paint a family legacy that Lex is proud of. But what is the significance?
As this moves on the year 2000 is on the horizon and what can only be seen as culture eliciting its on fears of what the Y2K disaster could become, this Superman comic magnifies it with his cybernetic foe Brainiac.
Its not a bad story, pretty straightforward, until it involves Brainiac evolving from a system into a virus. All the while everything from the Metal Men to a member of the Justice League has come to assist Superman.
It resolves rather strangely but it manages to make a satisfactory story. C