2 out of 5

You know how Grant Morrison spent the first part of their career fending off Alan Moore comparisons, only to kind of seem like they were baiting it sometimes?

Well, I don’t think anyone’s raging on the internet over this, but from the start of writer W. Maxwell Prince’s career, I’ve been experiencing a similar narrative. The difference is that Prince isn’t the attempt punk rock supervillain Morrison was, and more clearly / openly admires Grant – meaning I don’t think he’d take a comparison like “you remind me of Grant Morrison” as a slight. That said, the “narrative” to which I refer is one in which Prince is constantly acknowledging the influence, while also internally (and then for a reader, externally) battling with how to differentiate himself. And that makes his stories fall into a weird pit of tribute and avoidance, probably also mixed with a same playing into / avoiding a tag of being the 4th-wall-breaking writer, and yes I’m completely making all of this up… except for how it’s sometimes spoken aloud in Prince’s comic pages, particularly Ice Cream Man.

I don’t quite know what DC’s Black Label is about, since it implies a “mature” line but is maybe just another Elseworlds, but regardless: I was overjoyed to see Prince and his regular art buddy Martin Morazzo – who, sigh, gets a Frank Quitely comparison in reviews, including my own, quite often – not only on a DC book, hittin’ the big time, but on a Superman book, hittin’ the really big time. Awesome! However, man, right from the first cover, I was wondering if this was going to be Prince’s version of both All-Star Superman and Morrison’s general “all continuities are one” approach, and… yup.

I’m still truly happy Prince and Morazzo got to take their swing here, and hope it unlocks more for them, together or separately. Specific to Prince, part of my adoration of his writing is that he takes big swings, well knowing others have taken swings before him, and tries to navigate through that eagerness and baggage while also delivering a well-structured story. Sometimes I think the attempt ultimately fails – as my rating reflects it does here – but there’s an honesty in the way he goes about things that never makes me regret reading these fails, or even look forward to rereading them.

The Kryptonite Spectrum, is, as mentioned, Prince’s stewed together mix of Morrison-isms and translated through Superman – meaning inevitably pulling from All-Star – but more true to MWP’s own proclivities, I think it’s an attempt to process the 2025 political climate via the power of creativity (i.e. Can I write my way out this?), and also without directly alienating anyone on any side of the spectrum, using the punnyness of that verb effectively in a story about an alien who feels more at home on his adopted planet. It is “All-Star” in tone, taking a back-to-basics approach with its characters, with its basics a swill of Silver Age goofiness, and gives us a pretty concise calamity to overcome each issue thanks to a handy-dandy framing device: four new Kryptonites discovered, which Supes requests for Batman to carefully test upon him.

Also: Batman is in this. A lot.

This is kind of one of the books main sins: Superman, while central to the story, also feels incidental. There’s definitely something to that, but it also partially feels like the age-old struggles for Supes writers: Kal-El can be presented as so innocent as to be aloof, making all of the book’s actions kinda happen to him. Batman, instead, gets a lot of focus as the guy commentating on the side – what these Kryptonites do; how to deal with them – while we cut to Lex Luthor machinating on the sidelines every few pages.

This structure is smart, though it creates a problem Prince has to deal with: of sticking to the structure. This gets him into trouble in ICM as well, where the outline for an issue overtakes the ability to make its contents effective; in Spectrum, we see the middle of the series falter with Kryptonite effects that are made less interesting because of Prince’s overarching concept of – overly simplifying – the power of language and ideas. That concept hits well when Prince is using it to wholly bend space and time – the introductory issue; a 5th dimension issue – but he struggles to make the inbetween bits relevant in comparison. As standalones, they are fun; in context, the stakes are inconsistent.

The imbalance of focus in its characters, the structure-over-story problem – these make the text a compelling miss; a good idea that Prince can’t quite carry home, and I’d imagine in part because there’s also the incredible weight of writing a major league character (even if it’s Elseworlds), and playing in one of your writerly hero’s sandbox – stuff that also gets metatextually inserted, further unsteadying the landing.

Pushing things a bit further into a negative, alas, is Morazzo. I just… don’t think he works for superheroes. In the same way Prince stretches to make his style wrap around an icon, Morazzo has to do the same: the slim-lined, open spaces of Ice Cream Man theoretically translate to a widescreen style of comic booking, and when he gets to go buckwild with page design (especially in the above-mentioned issues), it works really well. Elsewhere, though, it reminds me of when Steve Dillon shifted onto X-Men – Dillon’s style was perfect for Preacher; and his X-Men ended up looking like Preacher characters play-acting. Same thing here: while Morazzo’s default “aloof” persona fits the goofier moments in this book, it never serves Batman or Lois Lane very well, Luthor never appears truly menacing, and big scale action scenes are lacking in cinema – they mimic widescreen action, and don’t capture it. There’s also an unfortunate villain, which I have to attribute to Prince as well – the opportunity to create something new is very, very limited by tributing to the past, so we wind up with something that looks pretty exactly like what we’ve seen before. It’s underwhelming.

Morazzo is excellent on Ice Cream Man, and shines at points in this book; but at the time of this writing, I just don’t think he was the right artist for this one, or perhaps it would’ve been interesting to see different artists take on the different Kryptonites, etc.

The reviews I’ve read on this have been positive. I know Prince will keep writing comics, and I will continue to be there. So even if I feel like Superman, Elseworlds or not, was maybe beyond the call for these creators at this point in time, it was a great experiment to sit through, and I’d love to be able to compare it to some future, more effective effort.