Action Comics #857

Writers: Geoff Johns, Richard Donner

Artist: Eric Powell

DC Comics

It's finally over!

Geoff Johns and Richard Donner tried to go all Sleepy Hollow on Bizarro World's ass for the last three issues, but the end result was a load of Frankenweeners. Bizarro Speak isn't such a hard language to master, only a bit annoying, but this pair managed to break the basic rules at every turn and achieve total incoherence, managing to make even Bizarro boring.

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

Bizarro and the other inhabitants of the Bizarro world used an odd but predictable form of English. The most notable characteristics were:

• The lack of nominative case when using pronouns; Bizarro replaces pronouns that should be nominative with their analogues in the accusative case. Bizarro might introduce himself by saying "Me am Bizarro" instead of "I am Bizarro," for example.
• The lack of proper verb conjugation; Bizarro only uses the first person conjugation for any verb. For example, the verb "is" is always conjugated as "am", leading to sentences like "This am great".
• Speaking the opposite of what is really meant in a situation. Thus, "This am great" would mean that the thing isn't great at all. The exception would be "Me am Bizarro", which would actually mean what was said. Bizarro-English words are thus antonyms of the corresponding English words.

See? Fun! This issue on the other hand:

Eric Powell's art still shines through, constructing a Bizarro World with architecture and palette that would make Tim Burton drool. Pity about the script really, although the final installment did have such nice little moments like Superman Vision, Bizarro Vision and the Sinestro Corps ring recruiting the Bizarro Yellow Lantern! The finale was touching, but I'm crying over the lost fun potential.

Having this story run so close to the All-Star Superman take on Bizarro only makes Johns and Donner look bad.

Grade: 5/10