Superman #4

History

The 2023 Superman series was announced at New York Comic Con in October 2022 and launched in February 2023 as DC's cornerstone 'Dawn of DC' title, with editor Paul Kaminski hand-selecting Jamal Campbell — previously the artist and co-creator of Naomi — as the only artist suited for the job, and pairing him with Joshua Williamson, who had just finished writing Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths for DC. Williamson has described his story plan as the product of a late-night notebook session in which he mapped out a long-term vision for the Superman mythology, explicitly drawing inspiration from the 'Triangle Era' of 1990s Superman, when multiple Superman titles ran in close coordination. The series picked up directly from the status-quo reset established in Action Comics #1050 — with Clark's secret identity restored by Lex Luthor against his will — and ran in creative tandem with Phillip Kennedy Johnson's Action Comics and Tom Taylor's Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent. Issue #4, released May 16, 2023, features interior art split between Campbell and Nick Dragotta, with Frank Martin on colors for the Dragotta-drawn flashback sequence and Ariana Maher on letters.

Trivia · 7 facts

• Written by Joshua Williamson; primary interior art by Jamal Campbell; flashback sequences penciled and inked by Nick Dragotta; colors by Jamal Campbell (present-day) and Frank Martin (flashback); letters by Ariana Maher; edited by Paul Kaminski. Cover A by Jamal Campbell.
• Released May 16, 2023 (cover-dated July 2023) as the fourth issue of the 2023 ongoing Superman series (DC's sixth volume of the title), published during DC's 'Dawn of DC' initiative.
• Introduces the Kryptonite Klaw as an active plot device: Dr. Pharm's weapon uses synthetic Kryptonite variants to forcibly alter the DNA and powers of Metropolis's supervillains, establishing the series' primary threat mechanism for multiple story arcs.
• Silver Banshee (Siobhan McDougal) is recruited by force into the villains' schemes and is Kryptonite-augmented, serving as the issue's primary physical threat against Superman; the issue reveals she is romantically involved with Jimmy Olsen, a new character development in this run.
• The dual-artist structure — Campbell on present-day sequences and Dragotta on the Lex Luthor flashback — was a deliberate creative device to visually distinguish past from present, with Frank Martin's colors further differentiating the two timelines.
• Collected in Superman (2023) Vol. 1: Supercorp (DC Comics trade paperback), which gathers issues #1–5 and the 2023 Annual.
• Key Collector Comics lists this issue as a Non-Key in terms of strict first-appearance hierarchy, but Dr. Pharm and Graft — who debut in this series' earlier issues and receive their fullest characterization here — are confirmed as new ongoing antagonists who return prominently throughout the run, including a late-series re-emergence during the Red Kryptonite arc.

Full credits

Variants (7)