I’ll be blunt — given what a mess otherwise-celebrated writer Gene Luen Yang made of things during his run on the “main” Superman title recently, I was initially in the “think I’ll pass on that” camp when I heard that his next project for DC would involve chronicling the exploits of the Man of Steel’s new Chinese counterpart/knock-off. The idea of a teenager given super-powers in a clandestine government-funded experiment sounded kind of played-out, as well, and the more I heard about it, the more I thought the book sounded like a loser.

But then a few preview pages began to leak online, and I had to admit that Viktor Bogdanovic’s art looked pretty good. The small sampling of the script we were able to glean from said pages read reasonably well. And hey, who knows? Maybe heavy-handed editorial dictates — always a strong possibility whenever supposedly-“reformed” serial sexual harasser/assaulter…