Summary: <br> At long last, one of the big questions of DC Rebirth is answered as the identity of Mr. Ozis revealed.<br> Transcript:<br> Graham: It’s time to learn who the man behind the curtain is. Join us as we take a look at Superman Action Comics: the Oz Effect, straight ahead.<br> <br> [Intro Music]<br> Announcer: Welcome to the Classy Comics podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise Idaho, here is your host Adam Graham. <br> Graham: Well throughout D.C. Rebirth and I think in Superman and also in Action Comics, the question of who Mr. Oz is, this mysterious mover behind the scenes, has been front and center and this volume of Action Comics answers that question. It collects Action Comics Number 985 to 992. It begins with a two-parter written by Rob Williams called Only Humans. Essentially, Machinist is using mind control to take people over and to make them do evil. When Superman disables this mind control, he finds Lex core Microchips are behind it and he confronts Lex, angry and thinking that Lex has returned to evil. Lex insists that he doesn’t do it and he makes a very persuasive argument because if he’d had done it, it would have worked. So, Luthor puts on his pseudo Superman battle suit and goes out and joins Superman to help him fight the Machinist. And essential the Machinist is able to take Luthor’s suit and activate it and turn it against Superman. And this is a good story for the Superman/Lex relationship and Lex does end up finding a way out, and we’re going to get into spoilers for the story in a second. The way that Luthor is able to do that is by overloading the power when the suit goes after Superman and Superman is then able to defeat the Machinist. However, at the end of the story, it’s revealed that Mr. Oz is behind the alterations in Lex’s microchips setting the stage for the Oz effect and essentially in the Oz effect, the world is growing crazy. There’s so much going on that is so bad that Superman can’t keep up with it.<br> The story opens with Superman saving the day and saving some medical supplies but there is so much that’s going on all at once. You have a guy with a red, white and blue bandana about to kill immigrants while others plan to steal medicine to buy guns and there’s an oil spill out to happen because the boat’s pilot is drinking figuring, hey we’re out this far working for Lex Luthor, we ought to have some fun. A black rhino’s about to be killed, there’s child labor in a foreign country, a prison break, an idiot is starting a fire thinking it’s justified because it’s in the neighborhood of one percenters and Superman does what he can. He prevents the guy with a bandana from killing the immigrants but he arrives too late to prevent the oil spill and he finds the black rhino killed and ends up in the midst of a civil war where the military are planning on destroying a village full of innocent people and saying to leave absolutely nothing to make sure they got the guerrillas and Superman just pops out of nowhere, from their perspective, and screams, “your own people, what’s wrong with you” and he is just furious at what’s going on and this is all to Mr. Oz’s plan as he appears with the purpose of convincing Superman that it is time to leave humanity, that they are not worth saving and here I really have to get into spoilers for this story and this is a big point but it’s in the first issue of the plot arc.<br> The identity of Mr. Oz is revealed to be, and this is the spoiler warning, it’s revealed to be Jor-El, who after Krypton was destroyed was transported to Earth. This is by a force that is rewriting and messing with the D.C. Universe and he arrived in the midst of a struggle that convinced him that humanity was dirt and this was totally a mistake to send humans there and while Oz has created an army of terrorists that are trying to do all s...
