Superman gets open heart surgery ... because comics!

Batman/Superman: World's Finest #2 art (Image credit: DC)

Sometimes you want to see superheroes face off toe-to-toe with their classic arch supervillains in a battle of wits and wills.

Sometimes you want to see superheroes team up to overcome near-insurmountable odds against cosmic gods and menaces.

Batman/Superman: World's Finest #2 (Image credit: DC)

And sometimes to want to see Robotman and Negative Man assist in open-heart surgery on Superman.

If you fall into the latter category of comic book reader, writer Mark Waid and artist Dan Mora got ya covered.

That's the opening scene of April 19's Batman/Superman: World's Finest #2, the second chapter in the new ongoing series set in the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight's past when Dick Grayson was still rockin' short-shorts as Robin the Boy Wonder.

Doom Patrol's Chief Dr. Niles Caulder does the surgery (he is a doctor after all), Robotman provides the light and spreads Superman's rib cage, and Negative Man, well he does something with radiation to purify Supe's blood.

How and why Superman got this way...? Well, that happened in last month's debut Batman/Superman: World's Finest #1. Suffice it to say he got poisoned by Metallo.

So without further ado, here are those opening pages. And if you're into a book with Batman, Superman, the original Robin, and Doom Patrol all rolled into one, Deadman shows up later in the issue too.

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Batman/Superman: World's Finest #2 has a cover by Mora (above), and variants by Tim Sale, Pete Woods, and Jorge Jimenez and you can check those out below:

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And speaking of Metallo, is he one of Superman's best supervillains? [wink]

I'm not just the Newsarama founder and editor-in-chief, I'm also a reader. And that reference is just a little bit older than the beginning of my Newsarama journey. I founded what would become the comic book news site in 1996, and except for a brief sojourn at Marvel Comics as its marketing and communications manager in 2003, I've been writing about new comic book titles, creative changes, and occasionally offering my perspective on important industry events and developments for the 25 years since. Despite many changes to Newsarama, my passion for the medium of comic books and the characters makes the last quarter-century (it's crazy to see that in writing) time spent doing what I love most.