Review by Aaron Cooper

Wait a minute, what’s going on here? I did not see this coming. Before the events of Infinite Crisis, I had been so busy being disappointed in the core titles of both Batman and Superman for so long now it never occurred to me that their team-up book just might be good enough to read and enjoy.

I’m glad DC Comics made me see the errors of my ways. I picked up the hardcover for Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, reprinting the first six issues of the regular series, strictly on a whim. It seemed nicely bound with a beautiful cover, and had several pages of extras for a fair price. I figured it couldn’t be any worse then some of the drudgery I obtain.

It turns out, it wasn’t drudgery. In fact, it was far better then I anticipated! I felt like I was reading a classic Silver Age comic from the fifties written for a new Millennium audience, and that is a good thing not many artistic teams can attain. Superman and Batman team up to stop a world threat and square off against common foes and face both personal and shared challenges.

Jeph Loeb has always impressed me as a writer. His work with Tim Sale on Batman: The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, and Superman For All Seasons is some of the best Batman and Superman done in years and his work with Jim Lee on Hush is already considered monumental. Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Loeb on his writing on Superman/Batman. Superman as a character has already had his fair share of interesting failures in his own titles, so here was yet another hurdle he would have to overcome.

Fortunately, he handles it very well. It’s obvious he has a great love for both characters and wants to write them with their own distinct personalities based on years of source material, so he takes that and runs with it. Both characters are written in such a way that they get along sometimes, disagree at others, but always have a mutual respect of two men that have fought for justice for many, many years.

If there is any issue I have with Loeb’s style in this book, is that he once again tries to cram too much past reference and too many side character appearances into the book and loses focus sometimes. He’s like an excitable person telling a story he loves, but starts talking too fast and tries to embellish it while losing a couple details trying to finish it.

To make up for this small hiccup, we get the beautiful art of Ed McGuinness, who handles whatever or whoever Jeph Loeb throws at him. This guy knows how to draw the world’s finest super-heroes and world’s worst super-villians. I haven’t seen Lex Luthor look this wicked in years, whether he is in his Italian business suit, or Lexcorp battle suit. He can even capture the look of the Batmobile from the sixties TV show. Awesome!

If you want to see two of the most iconic characters written and drawn well, and you want to capture that feel-good spirit of the Silver Age while still furthering these classic characters, then look no further then Superman/Batman: Public Enemies.

Author’s Note: I wrote the bulk of this review quite a while back, and as most DC fans know, there ended up being four complete volumes of the Jeph Loeb run on Superman/Batman. I also review volume 2: Supergirl on Raging Bullets, which I felt was even stronger than volume one here. I also want to recommend volume 3: Absolute Power and vol. 4: Vengeance, though not as strongly as the first two volumes. It’s interesting to see where Loeb takes his run, but it’s obvious that the some of the momentum is lost. Fortunately, both Public Enemies and Supergirl are strong stories, even in a post Infinite Crisis DC Universe, that they still warrant my highest recommendation!