Writer: Eric Carrasco and Kevin Smith
Artist: Nick Pitarra
DC Comics, July/August 2026
Under a thin veneer of humour, Bizarro Year None issues 1 and 2 is the vehicle for a very sinister take on one of Superman’s goofier adversaries. It was not what we were expecting at all.
Here is the promotional copy of issue 2:
Trapped on a backward planet of backward doppelgängers doing backward versions of everything they would normally do, the extremely frontward Jimmy Olsen and Perry White find themselves wondering: Will we ever get home again? At least their host—a backward version of Superman—seems to be accommodating of their stay. But if everything is backward on this planet, then what’s the opposite of accommodating? Uh-oh.
Superman himself does not appear in this title, other than in a sbrief scene where Superman flies through the heart of a giant robot soldier, deployed by another silly Superman villain, the Toyman. The soldier is a tricolour colossus trimmed in gold braid, wielding a bayoneted rifle, rendered with spectacular detail and vision by artist Nick Pitarra. The bayonet has plunged into the side of the Daily Planet building and entered the newsroom of the Daily Planet. It is razor sharp: long-lost Superman extra Steve Lombard nonchalantly pops a football on its tip. The appearance of the Toyman’s giant, silly threat to the city (and perhaps Lombard’s re-appearance) inditially indicated to us that this is a story in the eccentric, epic tradition of Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman and W. Maxwell Prince’s 2025 outing, The Kryptonite Spectrum (which we have previously reviewed: https://worldcomicbookreview.com/2025/10/12/superman-the-kryptonite-spectrum-book-1-review/ ).
But… is it?
Bizarro Year None centres around two of Superman’s other supporting characters, Jimmy Olsen and Perry White. White is the editor of the Daily Planet newspaper, and the employer of Lombard, Superman’s alter ego Clark Kent, and Superman’s love interest, Lois Lane. Olsen is a rookie journalist/photographer. The title is deliberately set early in Superman’s timeline: Superman himself has only been about for two years, we are told, and Olsen is trying his charming, slightly smarmy best to convince White to give him a permanent job at the Planet, using his photography of the giant robot as evidence of his skills.
Through a scientific misadventure involving a portal, the two find themselvess on Bizarro World, where everything is reversed,. Here, Olsen is the boss, while White must do his bidding.
Before we delve into the substantive plot, one of the most noticeable aspects to this story is how text-heavy the dialogue is throughout the course of the two issues. White and Olsen spend much of issue 1 engaging in generational gap jousting, with Olsen’s breezy, the universe-will-fall-in-my-lap sense of expectation irritating White’s sense of boomer work ethic. In issue 2, the chatter remains but the two have become desperate collaborators, endeavouring to understand what they have literally fallen into. White and Olsen do that through extended discussion, the sort of problem-solving as a joint exercise which we see in real-life brain-storming sessions but never see, to this extent, in a superhero comic.
If Messrs Carrasco and Smith are steering us to the trope where the young buck acquires the respect of the grizzled alpha, then so be it, but at least they are doing it in a very engaging way.
There are a lot of humorous distractions and artistic Easter eggs on Bizarro World. But the underpinning to the story is that Bizarro, a warped version of Superman who and for whom everything is in reverse, is like a shark beneath the waters. David Brooke at AiPT describes the story as having “bizarre charm” (https://aiptcomics.com/2026/06/24/bizarro-year-none-2-review/) which in our view completely misconceives the story. Thee is no “bizarre charm” when Bizarro throws his creation Bizarro Lois Lane to her death because she is an astute reporter asking hard questions, and not sufficiently compliant. So many times in both Superman comics and motion pictures we have seen Superman rise with Lois into the air, an elevation of romance. Never before have we seen Lois been thrown to her death, and it is shocking. We felt like we had stumbled into Caligula’s bedroom.
In issue 1, upon meeting White and Olsen as they arrive upon his world, Bizarro in describes himself as a “twelfth level intellect from a parallel reality known as FZZZZKTKRGQZ”. This is new to Superman continuity. Bizarro is typically depicted as an industrial mistake of cloning or chemistry, not an avatar of a superhuman consciousness of the same mould as Superman’s other adversary, Mr Mxyzptlk. At the end of issue 1, the writers include the following narrative in five text boxes as Bizarro walks past warped clay human forms, melted and beseeching, to spit off the edge of his planet:
“Since the dawn of consciousness, humans have asked the same age-old question… is there a god? We;ll on this particular strange world,… it turns out.. there Is a god. And he’s a real jerk.”
Bizarro is a mad god in his realm. He has the ability to create life, views the inhabitants of Bizarro World as his toys, and holds no genuine regard for their lives. White and Olsen must fit within the Bizarro template as best they can so as to avoid Bizarro’s scorn, while solving the underlying mystery of the place.
Beneath the sugar frosting, this is an engaging, chilling story. Issue three will be up for sale in a week or so, as at the date of this review. We cannot help but wonder when the shark will attack the protagonists.
