I was so very skeptical of all the good word of mouth on this book. When it came out, I hadn’t heard of Tom Taylor, but I knew I was sick to death of evil Superman stories and didn’t believe a video game adaptation could be as good as friends were telling me.

Then I read it and fell in love with Taylor’s storytelling and how much he gets these characters. Green Arrow and Harley Quinn were the early standouts, but Taylor got these characters so well, making them witty and interesting and telling a story of a different kind of super apocalypse, a different kind of evil Superman who you can kinda agree with in a way that makes you uncomfortable.

The art is uneven, going from great to merely ok, and it’s a shame that Taylor doesn’t finish out year three (or the other two years, not collected here) but you can easily see where the genius that is DCeased and his Nightwing and Son of Kal-El runs have come from in this early work.