Superman/Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, Vol. 1
Grade 6 Up—This is one of the publisher's many recent anthologies that attempts to bridge the time line from the cheerful Golden Age versions of their characters to their contemporary incarnations. The difficulty with this, as the introduction straightforwardly acknowledges, is that DC's superhero characters have all been reset and recontextualized for a contemporary audience. So while this book begins with the first official meeting of Batman and Superman, another story of their first encounter, this one post-reboot, appears halfway through the volume. This is a jarring shift in both established history and tone, as the previous half of the volume consists of tales of chummy collaboration between the two heroes. The post-reboot stories begin as solemn and pensive, but the volume closes with a welcome madcap adventure, a deliberately antic retelling of the story that opens the volume. The book is hard to classify in terms of its intended audience. On the one hand, it contains valuable historical comics that would otherwise be unavailable to today's readers, but on the other, the substance and tone of the earlier stories are so radically different from modern comics that they emphasize their datedness. However, the final story in the volume works so much better when one can also see its historical context. There's an interesting jumble of talent here, but perhaps the scope covered prevents these stories from feeling as great as the publisher claims they are.—Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, NHCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.