Bizarro

By Corson & Duarte
Publisher: DC
ISBN: 9781401259716

Gustavo Duarte is a very gifted cartoonist with the ability to tell a great story through pictures alone. He’s got a slick effortless style with a brilliant ability to capture and interpret body language, and he’s also rather good at grotesques, so it’s little wonder that DC snapped him up for this tongue-in-cheek road-trip between Bizarro and Jimmy Olsen, written by Heath Corson.

Brought about because Clark Kent learns that Lois Lane thinks Bizarro and Superman must be related, the plan is to persuade Bizarro to relocate to Bizarro America, or Canada. Incidentally, for those of you not aware of who Bizarro is, he’s a distorted mirror-image of Superman where everything is the opposite and often confused.

So on the face of it it looks like it’s going to be a good humoured jaunt across America to the Canadian border, and they’re soon meeting aliens, FBI agents, various DC heroes and pretty much everything you’d expect. And that’s where it falls down. It’s all everything you’d expect. Because the story’s played for laughs and isn’t to be taken seriously it’s without any dramatic aspect at all, and just ends up being a serious of cliches, genres and over the top moments bolted together. Stuff keeps happening without little rhyme nor reason save that Bizarro’s a wacky creation so let’s make the situation as wacky as possible. Sadly, you just end up not caring much.

Personally I think this book would have worked far better to have given the entire job to Duarte and let him write and illustrate it, and approach it wordlessly, like he’s proven he can do so well. His pantomime strips would have drawn you much deeper in as by their very nature you’re forced to get inside the head of the protagonists and interpret their reactions without clumsy word balloons and exposition, and maybe there would have been less mess along the way.

And if you liked that: Try Duarte’s Monsters & Other Stories