Doomed #1

Time once again for "How can Superman be beaten? Sheer force, that's how!" Theater! Again!

Look, DC Comics. We all know Superman is the strongest and the most invulnerablest and the mightiest and the unkillablest super hero ever invented. Stop trying to make challenges to Superman about how hard something can hit him. Because if something can hurt Superman, that something is too unbelievable to exist even in comic books! You have to challenge Superman in other ways! Give him a really difficult Sudoku to finish before the sun explodes! Trap him inside the nastiest truck stop restroom you can imagine because a new brand of urinal cake has been made with kryptonite! Have Lois Lane tell Clark Kent to fuck off with his titty smothering gaze! I don't care what you do! Just do something other than Superman getting popped in the face and saying, "That actually hurt!" Or if you are going to have Superman feeling pain from punches and whatnot, please stop introducing him with idiotic phrases like he has been in the heart of suns and shit. If he can survive those kinds of pressures, nothing short of a collapsed star thrown at his head is going to faze him.

Oh! Maybe Doomsday is made out of collapsed star matter! No wait. If that were true, he'd collapse the Earth just by standing on it. I think. Somebody ask Neil deGrasse Tyson what would happen in that case! Or get out your Ouija Board and ask Carl Sagan.

The issue begins with Superman saving some pilots as they realize carpet bombing Doomsday was a bad idea.

Oh! His gravity pulled the planes apart, right? I bet Doomsday is made out collapsed red sun matter!

Superman heads back to the Fortress of Solitude to hide from Doomsday. While there, he's visited by "Doctor" Shay Veritas the Omniologist. She isn't supposed to be able to leave The Block due to some mix up with a black hole or some other stupid alternate dimensional stupid nonsensical stupidity but here she is anyway! The comic mentions she's "risked her life" to have left The Block. I'm fairly certain she shouldn't be able to leave The Block but you know comic books! Change past stories to suit present stories! Fuck consistency while paying lip service to continuity. Not that I care! I just hate "Doctor" Veritas for some reason I can't quite remember and just wish she'd stay in her hole in the center of the planet.

Oh no! Doomsday is even more powerful than ever!

As you can see from the panel above and my reaction to it, the tension has just been ratcheted up significantly. Doomsday was capable of killing Superman in his previous incarnation; now he's capable of super killing Superman! What is Superman going to do if he can't just punch danger into submission?! Will he have to use his...brain?!

No, I bet he still just finds a way to punch Doomsday into submission.

Learning that Doomsday has just killed thousands of people by just being near them, and knowing Doomsday is teleporting all over the world via the Phantom Zone, Superman's main concern is whether or not he can kill Doomsday without feeling guilty. Oh, boo the fucking hoo. Superman might have to kill to save people. What a moral dilemma! What a quandary he's found himself in! How will he be able to live with himself if he saves Earth by killing one creature?!

I bet we never find out because I bet Superman finds a way to not kill Doomsday. But even when Superman shoves some menace into The Phantom Zone, he's still playing God, isn't he? So who cares if he kills something or he just imprisons it for eternity somewhere where the creature barely exists? You eat burgers, right Supes? Just pretend Doomsday is a fucking cow and get on with it.

Mmmm! Double bacon Doomsday burger with cheese! I'm spraying the toilet bowl just thinking about it!

Meanwhile, I'd forgotten that Smallville had been quarantined because everybody caught a serious case of coma. So the guard isn't letting Lana Lang in. But he does allow Lois Lane through! He probably didn't want her reporting on the huge boner he popped when she drove up to speak with him. Lana hitches a ride on Lois's jeep and they ride in together.

It took me about three tries to read that last panel correctly. I kept thinking, "Why is Lois telling Lana to shut up?!"

Remember when Lana Lang was a mind zombie living inside of Superman's head? That was a story in The New 52 that we'll thankfully never have a resolution for because Superman is getting a better writer soon! And by "better," I mean anybody else on Earth (and possibly off Earth). I can't quite remember who the last writer was due to my Fleshpoint Accident, but I do remember that he or she was awful!

Meanwhile, Clark Kent has gone to the person he can most trust to lead him in the right direction considering the whole "Do I kill Doomsday?" question: J. Jonah Jameson! I mean, Perry White!

Look, I don't really know why Clark asks Perry about this. I guess Perry has become his substitute Pa Kent. Or maybe Ma Kent. One of those.

Superman should have asked Batman for advice since Batman has a no kill policy as well. And Batman would have explained exactly what Superman should do. He'd tell Superman to mortally wound Doomsday and then tie Doomsday to a fire hydrant, call an ambulance, and alert the police. If Doomsday dies, it's not Superman's fault! It's the fault of the medics and the police who didn't arrive at the scene in time or have the expertise to save him! Clean hands!

Back in Smallville, Lois is going around pretending to listen to people as she asks them questions but she's probably just reading everybody's minds and making them forget she was even there. She has super powers! And her super powers are why everybody in Smallville is in a coma! She's going to deliver these bodies to Brainiac so that the people of Colu can have bodies and she's going to get the scoop of a lifetime! She's so hyper-intelligent! Twelfth Level Hyper-intelligent, even!

Doomsday next appears in Africa near where Steel and his daughter are currently located. Steel dons his armor because he probably needs to die so that his daughter will take up the armor and be better at being Steel than he was. I mean, he's not going to defeat Doomsday by himself, right?! I don't think he can even get close because of Doomsday's Null Field! That's right! Steel's daughter Natasha (which is Ah! Satan! backwards. Except with the exclamation points. If I had a daughter, I would name her !Natas!ha) identifies Doomsday's weird ability to kill things at a distance as a Null Field. I've been watching Cosmos every Sunday and I totally agree with her.

Or maybe the Null Field is something else and it's just poison leaking out of Doomsday's face that is killing everything that gets near it. I still have a few episodes of Cosmos left to watch, so I don't know everything about the world yet! Sometimes I get things wrong!

Oh yeah, also Wonder Woman appears! And Superman isn't far behind! And now they will punish it with the power of love!

Except it slips out through a portal and disappears. At least Superman knows he doesn't have to worry about killing it now. He can always lie to himself and pretend that Diana delivered the killing blow when they finally are forced to take Doomsday's life.

The Justice League have a meeting to figure out what to do. They just saved the planet (or will as soon as Forever Evil #7 is published) and now they have to worry about saving it again! Lex Luthor Skypes in with his plan: Superman should fucking get the fuck out, motherfucker. And Superman agrees, of course. The battle between Superman and Doomsday needs to take place far away from Earth or Earth is going to take another one right in the ass. And her ass is still sore from the Criminal Syndicate and the Anti-Monitor (or Darkseid (or whatever chased them to New Earth)) having their way with it. The rest of the Justice League are just going to continue doing clean up which shouldn't be too hard since they still have their Forever Evil Clean-up Chores List.

"DOn't get too excited"?! But a three-way is way more exciting than these two just rubbing buttholes. Is that how gay men have sex?!

Superman finds Doomsday when Doomsday next reappears and takes him to Venus where he melts him with his heat vision. I only know it's Venus because a title card said, "VENUS!" Otherwise, it didn't look like Venus at all. There were no jungles or gigantic man-eating plants or half-naked alien jungle women or anything. So I guess that's it? Problem solved! The end! The other three chapters must be Superman dealing with having murdered a monster and crying to his therapist. But first he has to head back to Smallville to tell Lana that everything is okay now.

Whoops!

This time, Superman has to rip Doomsday's arm off, Beowulf and Grendel style! Doomsday dissolves into a cloud of purple toxins and Superman falls to his knees and weeps like a child.

Doomed #1 One Shot Rating: This was entertaining enough for yet another Superman story where something super strong attacks him and he can barely find the strength and resources to defeat the enemy by punching it a lot. The real story should be in the three chapters that follow this story. I don't know if Doomsday will be back or if the purple shit Doomsday spread all over the place is going to turn people into Mini-Doomsdays or if Superman is going to just mope and kick cans because he's sad that he had to kill. I bet at least a few people get punched in the face though.