YMMV / Superman: Up in the Sky

• Anti-Climax Boss: The ultimate villain at the end of the search for Alice doesn't put up much of a fight when Superman finally finds him, and he doesn't even get a name. While the series ultimately isn't really about trying to defeat him, the fact the fight against him is juxtaposed against the Justice League facing an increasingly impossible war against his invading robot army on Earth still makes it a bit anticlimactic when Supes beats him up, and everything almost immediately afterwards is just resolution.
• Funny Moments: The fact that the most genuinely furious Superman ends up throughout the entire story is towards a galactic phone station that's making him wait a really long time.
  Alien: How'd that go?
  Superman: One more hour... I swear... Ma. Pa. Truth. Justice. The American way. I don't care. I'm going to go out that door. Take this whole damn planet. And throw it into the blackest hole.
  Alien: Yeah.
• Nightmare Fuel: The extended montage throughout chapter 5 of Supes imagining the horrible ways Lois Lane could die from his absence. Yes, it's all imaginary, and she turns out to be perfectly safe in the end, but the comic still gets very unsettling mileage of watching Lois be shot in the head by Lex Luthor, dying in a plane crash (with Jimmy Olsen obliviously telling her to not worry because Superman is on the way just before they make impact), getting sent a mail bomb from Toyman, etc. Special mention goes to an entire page that's just The Joker laughing maniacally over an off-panel Lois quietly begging for Clark to save her, with no elaboration of what horrible thing just happened to her.
• Unexpected Character: In a rather straightforward Superman tale where most connective mentions to the DCU are through the Justice League, you probably weren't expecting a whole chapter taking place in World War II featuring Sgt. Rock as co-lead, huh?
• Win Back the Crowd: This series was released during Tom King's highly polarizing run of Batman and the widely-panned Heroes in Crisis, going in with undeniable doubts as King no longer had the guaranteed critical goodwill he built up with his earlier works. Fortunately for all, Up in the Sky was released to near-universal acclaim by critics and fans alike as not just being one of King's best works, but best modern Superman comics, period. Considering that he ended up swapping characters with Brian Michael Bendis during his own divisive run of Superman, resulting in the similarly-praised Batman Universe, a common joke is that DC should have left the writers keep working on the other characters all this time.

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