Joshua Williamson’s Superman Vol. 5: Love and Mercy unfolded differently than I expected. Maybe that’s a good thing, a book that wasn’t about what I thought it was — a surprise, unpredictable. But at the same time it’s a weirdly “down” trade¹ — given what Superman dealt with last time around and what’s coming up next, I hadn’t imagined this one would be so markedly insular, a story that threatens lots of changes but eventually just puts all its toys back in the box where they came from. Is this all because of proximity to the movie?

Williamson’s on too much of a roll for me to be worried; no question the Superman title is central to DC All In’s forward action. But I’d feel more confident knowing there’s a plan in place — that the events of Love and Mercy will have further consequences and this wasn’t just biding time to link up with the Justice League/World’s Finest: We Are Yesterday crossover. Once, Williamson wrote the Shade into his Flash comic, with big implications, and then the Shade was never seen or mentioned again, my guess because the target kept moving on where Williamson’s Rebirth Flash lined up with the rest of the DCU. I’m just saying, I hope the events of Love and Mercy don’t go the way of the Shade.

[Review contains spoilers]

Love and Mercy contains Williamson’s Superman: Lex Luthor Special, with a smirking Lex asking “Miss me?” on the cover. I expected that we’d find that when Lex was cured of his amnesia following House of Brainiac (or revealed to have not been amnesic at all), he’d have some sort of villainous scheme to take out Superman, or at least Superwoman, the super-powered Lois Lane, destined to be fallout in some enemy’s scheme.

We do get a new perspective on the previous four volumes — that Lex Luthor purposefully let himself be defeated and locked up by Superman to influence Superman to take over “Supercorp”; that an intentional side effect was that Superman would defeat Lex’s old enemies; and that in convincing Superman to work with and trust Lex, then Lex would ultimately “win.” That’s machinations, but it’s far from “kill the Man of Steel once and for all.” Rather it's more in line with the Geoff Johns New 52-ish version of Luthor, which always felt off to me — the Luthor who not so much wanted to kill Superman as he wanted to be acknowledged as heroic and considered as great or greater a hero than Superman.

Rather, the antagonist of the piece is Mercy Graves, Lex and Superman’s assistant, who finds the reformed Lex not mercenary enough and therefore releases X-El, a decidedly “Bizarro” Luthor clone who will pick up where the evil Lex left off. And that’s the crux, really — Mercy hasn’t been teased as a bad guy, unless I soundly overlooked it, and neither has Williamson hinted at the existence of X-El, unless I soundly overlooked that, too. So kudos to Love and Mercy for being unpredictable — it was not about Lex as a villain, but Lex as an anti-hero — but at the same time the developments feel like what was needed for the moment, not something built organically within the story.

That’s underscored by the fact that Mercy gets away with her crimes without charges, remaining as head of LexCorp. Not that Love and Mercy is without consequence — Superman’s no longer running “Supercorp,” Lois burns out her Superwoman powers, Lex goes on walkabout, and Lena Luthor leaves for Sophie Campbell’s Supergirl title. But a lot of that is either repositioning side characters to still be side characters (Lena hadn’t had much impact, Lex was previously either imprisoned or mind-wiped) or, as with Lois, putting this title back where it was prior to Superman Vol. 4: Rise of the Superwoman. Neither was Lex amnesic nor did Lois have powers for more than basically one volume before both were reversed (and each even got specials!).

And so we come to the Shade of it all. In the five volumes that Superman headed Supercorp, he did some things, sure, and it factored into the plot, but Superman is no more changed at the moment by having been head of Supercorp than he is by his identity being previously public — and Supercorp is part of this same run. Maybe this will all tie together, that there will be some upcoming plot relevance to Superman having led Supercorp, to X-El, to Pharm and Graft and Mercy, to Superman’s Red K infection, to Lois having been Superwoman. But if not, I think that’s a ding on this run, a certain amount of interesting and even progressive storylines that might turn out to have just been filler between issues in service to DC All In.

Of course, I can’t deny those ties to DC All In are a lot of fun. More than any DC “era” I can think of, tying everything to a starting “event” of Darkseid attacking the Watchtower, replayed almost everywhere, is really working out for DC’s present creative teams. At the same time, Williamson’s comic book science is as suspect here as in Dark Crisis; not only can Mr. Terrific look at a tablet and know “a piece of our reality has been … hidden from us” (really?), but also there are “harsher elements” (of what?) that can apparently be “dangerous psychologically” to think about, which Terrific needs Luthor to look at instead of doing so himself. This trend of nonsense probably isn’t good for DC; see also Absolute Power’s ill-explained transfer of super-powers.

Page to page Superman Vol. 5: Love and Mercy is written fine by Joshua Williamson, mind you, and Eddy Barrows among others is always reliable on art. It’s just, again, this feels like a placeholder volume, but moreover a placeholder that reverts many of this run’s storylines without necessarily concluding them. Lois’s wishy-washy “I’m OK without being Superwoman” (but maybe she isn’t!) is predictably fraught, and optimally if Williamson revisits that, he can avoid the obvious pitfalls. Hopefully I’ll look back on this one and all my concerns will have ended up unfounded.

[Includes original and variant covers]