“Yesterday’s” Comic> Superman #91

He does this every time he watches Transmorphers.

Superman #91

DC Comics (July, 1994)

Narration gets us up-to-date, which is nice. Luthor and Cadmus had a war, and Metropolis lost. I don’t know the details, but that at least sets up where we are, as Luthor’s “scorched Earth” plan has been activated. Robots are the problem this time, leaving nothing for invaders after the Coast City destruction. Sounds like Luthor, who by the way is locked in his dying clone body. The Newstime building, one of the few buildings left standing, is housing refugees, but there’s a hospital camp and the robots are headed for it. Superman is able to stop the robots and leads the hospital survivors to the Newstime building to be taken care of. Had this alone been the story it would have been decent if you had been following the “Fall Of Metropolis” storyline.

However, there’s a subplot involving a man we learn later was part of the robot design team. This revelation adds nothing to this subplot. He’s a jerk who just wants to get his money out of the ruins of the bank he had a safe deposit box at. He ignores a bum trying to help a little girl even after the bum helped him and later Superman. Then he tries to buy his way into the Newstime building until Superman shows up with the refugees. We do get a note that he dragged himself out of poverty and doesn’t want to go back. He has a history and growing up in “Suicide Slum” must have been a bad experience, so at least he isn’t a total jerk without reason, but my problem is that then adding extra “revenge” by making him partly responsible for the robots who forced the injured to be move to the building was unnecessary, especially after you go through the trouble of giving him a logical reason for not wanting to return to the nightmare of his upbringing. Heck, the whole subplot could have been missing and had no effect on the main story. If they were going to have this I would have preferred a redemption story for the man instead of payback because I don’t care about this jerk one way or the other. He’s just a jerk so we have someone to hate while Luthor is trapped in his clone body not even able to close his eyes on his own.

Overall the issue wasn’t that interesting and unless Luthor’s scorched Earth plan is supposed to be a revelation in this arc there’s nothing important here. Skip it unless you want the full storyline.