2 out of 5

I know we can’t generally expect much of these crossovers – sorry, creative teams – and I can only suppose they are a returned-to / recycled concept that appeals to whichever is the current generation of readers. (Meaning: once you’ve read one, stemming back decades now, you kinda get it.) Besides that, I’ve bought them for the same reason I’d guess others do, when a writer or artist you like participates, thus suggesting some tail-chasing where DC/Marvel puts a talent on the book knowing it’ll grab their fans, and we buy it, justifying the decision. Harumph.

It’s not that some fun stuff can’t happen here, which is when these books are at their best: if / when everyone on editing and on the art/writing side approaches it somewhat as a lark. If you’re trying to do anything weightier than that… I don’t know that I’ve seen it work yet. The problem then is if we can agree on what larks are, and though I appreciate the flexibility editorial showed in appending the main Supes / Spider-Man tale with variations on that theme – Superboy / Lois Lane / Jonathn Kent / Jimmy Olsen / Daily Planet matched with Spider-Man 2099 / Mary Jane / Uncle Ben / Peter Parker / Daily Bugle – the old writing hands gathered on the book are starting to show their age in forcing the humor to appropriate lark-ness, i.e. this fellow old-hand cringed a lot.

Mark Waid’s featured Truth, Justice and Great Responsibility does feature Mark’s ability to find fun ways to crack familiar tales by pairing Brainiac and Doc Ock to see the very air with a kind of digital kryptonite that thus effects Supes and human like Spider-Man equally. Clark and Peter are in Metropolis on a shared story and thus have the opportunity to team up. Beyond the premise, though, you can feel old man Waid in the background, wanting to prove he’s still hip on technology after eye-rolling at AI on the first page (hopefully, if you’re reading this review in a couple years, you’ll be wondering why he even needed to eye-roll at it), 4th-walling his dated reference to Woodward and Bernstein, and struggling – alongside artist Jorge Jimenez – to shorthand show the effects of the digital kryptonite, which, as always in comics, comes down to saying “0100100…” and so on.

This is totally an acceptable setup, it just feels a painful few steps behind the fast-moving modern day, and is unfortunately written in the Marvel quippy style that’s been criticized heavily in the mid-2020s but has been the goddamn way these books have sounded for like 30 years, in no small part thanks to writers like Waid. (Who are good at it, but Mark has ridden the “these are kind of dated dad-jokes” vibe that whole time, so it’s continued to age within those borders as well.) Jimenez’s art is pretty great, though – a splash page of Supes and Spidey flinging across the air is posed perfectly to capture the sense of motion and kind of trick you out of the illogic of the moment.

The remaining stories hit me in about the same way: good ideas; very cringey at points – I won’t call on anyone specifically – and then as they’re relegated to only a few pages each versus the feature story, it’s hard as heck to do anything meaningful. Which brings us back to embracing the lark: I will call out Sean Murphy’s Spider-Man 2099 timey-wimey dimensional tale as totally getting it, as Sean just kind of focuses on the dimensional conclusions and leaves out whatever fisticuffs are to ensue as something that occurs before and after his snapshot; similarly, Matt Fraction’s Jimmy Olsen and Carnage mash-up is pure elseworlds hijinx. I loved it. Maybe consider that both of these highlights are when the writer is the artist…?

One negative I will call out, though it’s not exactly about the content, is the Power Girl and Punisher story. Like: why? Okay, PG is tangential to Superman, and Punisher was originally a Spider-Man foe, but this story doesn’t call out those connections at all. So in a book where I at least felt like they found a good concept for filling out the content, this comes across as shoulder shrug filler, setting aside that Gail Simone’s actual story of an unintentional date between the two is amusingly clunky.