Just as Superman's books managed to recover, for the most part, after Doomed crossover we got Truth, which wasn't really a crossover, but more like a new status quo for the following year. Regardless it did change things and led to some sad endings. And well, it is not a popular "era" at all, but maybe something decent was published during it? Lets find out.
So lets start with the bad. Doing 4 monthlies with a radical change to the status quo - Clark depowered and without secret identity, is hard. You know what is even harder? When clearly creative teams (and probably editors) weren't on the same page and unsure how to approach things. It is not like different books matched very well each other back in the day and today it often feels like, for example, Batman and Detective are happening in different universes entirely. But I'd guess that when you do a new status quo it becomes a bit more noticeable and people in general were ready to nitpick everything DC did at the time.
Then there is Superman/Wonder Woman by Tomasi, I already wrote about it being mostly bad in another blog post and Dark Truth storyline isn't any better. It is very edgy (like digging out the corpses of Clark's parents) for no real storyline reasons and provides rather weak excuse for the breakup that kinda happens and kinda doesn't, but everyone acts like it did. It is bad, okay?
On the other hand I think that everything Yang did is mostly okay? If you want to understand this status quo at all then you certainly should pick up Before Truth collection. In a better world this short storyline would have been published before Action, Batman/Superman and Superman/WW started doing their Truth stories. This collection also includes one-shot written and drawn by Romita, it isn't great, but it is not terrible either.
Then there is another short arc by Yang/Porter where Superman does WWE wrestling with old gods in Superman #45-47. It is often mentioned as the highlight of this era and I think it is certainly the best story arc that we got from this mess. It is not as good as Yang's later Superman works (Clan and New Super-Man), but it is pretty good. So anyway, if you want anything from this era then Superman #40-47 is the best option.
So what about Pak's work? Action is weird, at the time it got lots of attention for Supes punching a cop who then turned out to be a shadow monster that lots of people saw as DC backtracking from a bold statement. Personally I'm not sure if they backtracked or if it was just poorly plotted out story arc. Fill-in artists often hint at late rewrites, but the entire thing just wasn't very consistent or clear even if we ignore cop punching. There are some good moments here and there, but I'd honestly skip Action due to problems with consistency and I feel this series clashed the most with what Yang was doing in Superman.
At the same time DC was doing funny things with Batman as well, Gordon became a mecha-Bat, while Bruce was doing something. Surprisingly I found first half of it (Batman/Superman #21-24) rather fun. Yes, there is a fakeout with Lex that doesn't really do much for anything, but other than that it is interesting to see these two very different characters trying to work together on a case. Second half of it brings in various Batfamily members and I wasn't a really a fan of those interactions. Plus they fight Savage who is the villain in Savage Dawn crossover that followed Truth and I feel like it waters him down a bit.
I re-read much of the New 52 Superman while writing these blog posts and one surprising thing for me was that I found Batman/Superman ongoing a better read than I remembered. In fact, I'd even go a bit further and claim that it is better than Pak/Kuder Action which is often mentioned as only good Superman stuff after Morrison left. But anyway, if you want to read something from Truth then Superman #40-47 and Batman/Superman #21-24 is okay. Everything else? I'd skip it.
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