DC Round-Up: BIZARRO YEAR NONE #1 is a bit of a misfire

This week: Bizarro Year None #1 feels like a rare total misfire from current day DC. Plus, Batman stays good, Absolute Superman keeps getting better, and more!

Bizarro Year None #1

Writers: Kevin Smith and Eric Carrasco
Artist: Nick Pitarra
Colorist: Michael Garland
Letterer: Dave Sharpe

In this weekly DC Comics column, we’ve been high on the publisher of late. Four of us take turns writing these reviews, and I can’t remember the last time one of us went majority critical for the main piece. Part of that is maybe that we pick our own main reviews, and it’s more fun to build up than to tear down. So, we tend to just ignore what we don’t like.

Unfortunately, however, I’m breaking our streak this week with Bizarro Year None #1, a comic that felt to me both meandering and dated. It also felt like the no-brainer main review for the week, being a new series launch with some big names attached.

Before I elaborate on my criticisms, let me say that there are plenty of things to like about this comic, and while it wasn’t my thing, I certainly wouldn’t begrudge anyone who enjoyed it. Nick Pitarra, colored here by Michael Garland, delivers great work, particularly in a series of dense-but-easy-to-read two-page spreads (see the image below!) as well as on the super fun splash of the giant robotic tin solider with its bayonet wedged through the skyscraper head quarters of the Daily Planet (see the other image below!). That bayonet is visual dynamite, and Pitarra/Garland nail it as the scenes progress, too.

I also appreciated that co-writers Kevin Smith and Eric Carrasco didn’t lean hard into opposite Bizarro speak. They seem to deliberately write around it in the service of readability, and that’s a great call. I hope we keep doing that. The novelty of opposite Bizarro speak (to the extent that novelty even exists) wears off after like two panels before it starts to bog down whatever book uses it. Anyway!

My notes: this is a comic that centers the Daily Planet, with Jimmy Olsen and Perry White essentially being the main characters, at least in this first issue. It’s a comic that skews humorous too, and, as such, it courts an unfavorable comparison to Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, the instant-classic from Matt Fraction and Steve Lieber. There’s some humor in this book and some attempt to update the Jimmy-Perry dynamics from 1900s newspapering to 2000s newspapering (to the extent 2000s newspapering even exists). But the problem is that all of this has been done essentially to perfection already by Pal.

Now, to be fair, the last issue of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen was published in July 2020, which is about five and a half years ago (how is that five and a half years ago!?), but that book is so fondly remembered that the creators have brought it back a couple times, including for a gorgeous new deluxe hardcover in 2025 and most recently for last week’s Superman/Spider-Man crossover comic. Pal is to many readers (myself included) the definitive funny take on Daily Planet and the wider Superman mythos. So, Bizarro Year None choosing to operate in the same world with humor as its tone puts the book at an immediate disadvantage.

Superhero comics have long been a bad canvas to say anything at all about the increasingly complex state of the mass media. The fact that so many of these characters were reporters at their creation is increasingly inconvenient in that way. Pal transcended that by leaning into Jimmy Olsen as an anachronistic absurdity, finding humor in that. The humor in this book is way more scattered. For example, there’s a dick joke on page 8 or so. Another joke is about the origin of Jimmy’s bowtie.

And while I don’t think Bizarro Year None really wans to say anything about the state of the media today, it does spend basically half of its page count at the paper. This really slowed the comic down for me, feeling almost entirely like set up what for getting Jimmy and Perry out of the real world and into Bizarro World. 

My hope is that things will pick up now that we’re here, with the title’s namesake driving things. But the first issue and its heavy Daily Planet focus was a miss for me, a meandering start to a series that feels just a little too dated.

VERDICT: SKIP

The Round-Up

• Phew, now on to the stuff I dug this week! There was a lot of it. Absolute Superman was a standout, I thought, a run that has now settled into its own status quo and started to do some really interesting things with its character dynamics. I’m especially interested in Ras Al Ghul and the impact that Superman had on him. Tough to tell after the events here, but I’m hoping we haven’t seen the end of that plot thread. Meanwhile, this issue also serves as a debut for another Absolute Universe character, which you can probably guess from this cover. Absolute Superman #18 was written by Jason Aaron, illustrated by Rafa Sandoval, colored by Ulises Arreola, and lettered by Becca Carey.
• Meanwhile, I’m absolutely loving the mainline Batman comic, which gets a great guest artist turn this week from Ryan Sook, one of my favorite artists. I really like how the mainline Bat titles seem to be working together (more on that in the next item), especially on the Poison Ivy as mayor storyline. Overall though, I think writer Matt Fraction is just doing a great job with his work in Gotham City, giving us interesting conflicts for Batman as well as a world that feels full and lived in. Rounding out the creative team on this one is colorist Tomeu Morey and letterer Clayton Cowles.
• Finally, Poison Ivy #43 was yet another excellent chapter in this long-form story. I love this run, which has been patient and varied. It’s kind of a companion piece at the moment to the Batman main book, with the ongoing mayor storyline, but in this issue, we start to see what the stakes may be for Ivy as well. I won’t spoil it, but this issue has a great cliffhanger. This one comes to us courtesy of writer G. Willow Wilson, artist Jaime Infante, colorist Arif Prianto, and letterer Hassan-Otsmane-Elhaou. 

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