Superman: Lost

It’s just another evening for Lois and Clark when the latter’s beeper goes off and he goes to help out the Justice League deal with an interstellar object that has crashed in the ocean off of Luzon Island.  So far, so standard.  Except that when Lois wakes up that night upon her husband’s return, he’s… different.  That’s because while only several hours have passed for her, twenty-five years have gone by for him.  A quarter-century of experiences, adventures, and trials in deep space have left a quantifiable impact on the Man of Steel and he’s haunted by them all.  Can the Man of Steel get back to who he was before he left, or is this his new normal?

I was drawn to this miniseries from writer Christopher Priest and artist Carlo Pagulayan because it promised to do something different with the character that involved digging into the unspoken rules of superhero comics.  In this case, the rules involving how these characters need to be able to shrug off ostensibly traumatic events in order to get back to beating up the bad guys month after month.  It’s worth pointing out that a premise similar to this was treated almost as a throwaway gag in the first volume of “Invincible.”  Omni-Man may have been captured by aliens from another dimension, stripped of his powers, enslaved, and then led a revolution to overthrow them and get his powers back, but he was still back in time for dinner to talk about it like it was a slightly-more-challenging-than-usual day at work.

In the case of “Lost,” Priest and Pagulayan are trying to take the concept of trauma in superhero comics more seriously as they explore Superman’s difficulty in re-assimilating to regular life in the present day.  At the same time, via flashbacks, they’re exploring how the character’s sense of morality, purpose, and even his powers work for him when he’s so far removed from everything he’s ever known.  It’s interesting to see how these things play out as Priest finds some ways that do challenge the character and make for a quality read.  I’ll also admit that while I think it was indulgent of the writer to try and fit Luthor into the latter half of the story, he does write a good version of the character.

What keeps “Lost” from being a truly great Super-tale does feel hard to pin down.  Part of me feels like I should’ve kept my expectations further in check when it came to what I was expecting from a superhero story that dug into the genre’s unwritten rules.  That’s because it doesn’t offer anything new or surprising in that regard, and I have this nagging sensation that Priest wanted to write a story where Superman was isolated from everything-and-one he knew and dig into how the character dealt with that.  Exploring how the Man of Steel dealt with the trauma was just a bonus, but the way it’s dealt with at the end of the volume feels like something of a cop-out.

“Lost” at least boasts solid art from Pagulayan who does his best to do right by the story he’s supposed to be telling.  That’s because while his detailed art feels more suited to superhero action, he does make a decent effort when it comes to the quieter parts of the story where Superman is just talking to Lois or the other characters.  However, it’s the more sweeping sci-fi bits of the story that really stand out visually.  Pagulayan is asked to draw a lot here – from sentient sand golems, to schools of space dolphins, to interstellar ship-to-planet bombardments – and it’s that stuff which will really stick with you.

In the end, I don’t think “Lost” is a bad story.  I can respect that Priest and Pagulayan were trying to do something new with the character, but their approach wasn’t entirely successful.  It did give us a story with some memorable moments in the writing and the art, and I can certainly respect the swing that they took.  Which is probably the best way to recommend this, as a “Superman” story that stepped up to try something different, even if it didn’t quite connect.