by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
Read by a full cast
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Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There is comic-book violence. It’s in the Graphic Novel section of the bookstore.

In this series of collected comics, Superman deals with the madness on the backwards Bizarro planet. There is a bottled city that proves you can never go home again. A living sun hell-bent on destroying humanity. A world without the Man of Steel. Twelve impossible labors and mere moments to save the Earth. (Yes, I copied the back copy, because honestly, I’m not sure what really happened.)

I’m going to get this out of the way first: graphic novels/comics really are a visual medium, and don’t work in audio. That said, it’s kind of a fascinating experience. The narrators not only read the dialogue, they describe what is going on in the picture. It makes me wonder if they’re reading the script the writers write before the artists take it on? Or if they wrote a whole new script for the audiobook? I don’t know. It was hard for me to imagine scenes (my brain doesn’t really work that way – when I think of the word apple, I don’t see a picture of an apple in my head), which is why I don’t think the audiobook worked for me.

That said, I liked the stories. I’m glad we listened to this before going to see the movie, because there were parallels from this collection and what James Gunn did. And I can see the value of having audio versions of graphic novels, even if they are not for me.