In Last Week’s Comics, Angry Gamers Nearly Killed Superman

Modern DC Comics give us such memorable moments as an evil Superman snorting Kryptonite or Batman and Catwoman having sex. The publisher’s New 52 line has also just brought us a three-part story in which the super-villain Mongul has attempted to dominate the Earth by harnessing the rage of gamers. What a plan!

The storyline has been running in the Batman/Superman comic written by the imaginative Greg Pak, who has been doing some good work on Superman-starring Action Comics. His Batman/Superman stuff has been weird, though his supervillain-enlists-gamers storyline at least reads like it’s written by someone who actually gets games. Characters make proper jokes about skipping cutscenes and boss battles. This doesn’t stop the story for being awfully silly and a hilarious bit of brow-furrowing about just how angry gamers can be.

Here’s a three-page sequence from last month’s middle part of the story, which explains how the dastardly Mongul is using a special computer program to get gamers to take control of Batman to beat the hell out of Superman (click the top left corner of each image to expand it):

Sorry, gamers, but you lose. You can’t kill Superman. What you can get, though, is a neat idea from Pak in last week’s issue #7 about a multiplayer game in which every player tries to make a move against the artificial intelligence — and the computer selects the most effective one. Clever concept. I’d like to play a game like that.

You can find Batman/Superman #5-7 at your local comics shop or download them from Comixology, which offers up comics from nearly every major publisher and many indies for reading on web browsers, phones and tablets.