DC Comics

Year of Superman Week 27: Countdown

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We’re getting down to it, friends. As I write this, on July 2nd, the new Superman movie is a mere nine days away, and in case you haven’t noticed over the last six months, I’m kind of excited about it. So how, in this Year of Superman blog, do I commemorate this upcoming momentous occasion? Here’s what I’ve done: I’ve made myself a list of the stories that James Gunn has confirmed were used as inspiration for the new film. I’ve added a few other stories that I personally think are especially significant to demonstrating what kind of man Clark Kent is. And I’ve got a couple of surprises. But from now until July 11th, there’s gonna be no filler. For the next nine days I’ll be reading and watching some of the most important building blocks in making the Man of Steel. 

Feel free to read along. 

And as always, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman Archive!

Wed., July 2

Graphic Novel: Superman For All Seasons (Collects issues #1-4)

Notes: In 1998, hot off the heels of their character-defining maxi-series Batman: The Long Halloween, writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale were given four prestige format issues to tell their quintessential Superman story. For All Seasons isn’t exactly an origin story, it’s not exactly the story of Superman coming to Metropolis, it’s not exactly anything but what it is: a glimpse of the Man of Steel. Rather than crafting an intricate mystery as they did with The Long Halloween or a high-octane thrill ride like Loeb would later do on the Superman/Batman ongoing, For All Seasons is like looking through a viewfinder at scenes of Superman, each of them capturing in a perfect crystalline moment just who Earth’s greatest hero actually is.

The first issue, “Spring,” focuses on young Clark Kent in Smallville. He’s different from his friends and he knows it, and we see a sort of struggle to maintain the balance between the idyllic small-town life he lives (Loeb even cribs a moment from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, just in case we didn’t get the message that Smallville is the perfect little town) and the amazing, world-changing things he can do. He overhears his parents discussing his powers, he confides them to Lana, and in the end, the small-town boy decides to go to Metropolis. One of the last pages in this first issue, in fact, has become an iconic Superman moment, just as much as Krypton exploding or Superman catching Lois Lane falling from a building. It’s one of the sweetest, most Superman things I’ve ever seen on a comic book page:

Issue two, “Summer,” is narrated by Lois Lane early in Superman’s career, and she asks the question that I think makes the character so compelling: “He can do anything he wants to, and he decides to do what? Be a hero? Why?” Whenever someone tells me that they think Superman is boring or unrealistic, my response boils down to this same question. What kind of person would actually choose to use this kind of power for good? It’s crazy. It’s absurd. It doesn’t make sense.

That is, until you meet Clark Kent. And when you see who he is, that’s when you get it. 

Superman saves Lois from a terrorist (in a glorious moment where Lois, rather than begging Superman to save her, instead asks him to make the obnoxious guy with a gun to her head SHUT UP because he’s getting on her nerves), but in so doing leaves Lex Luthor feeling somewhat impotent, something that Lex just can’t stomach. 

My favorite part of issue two, though, is a return to Smallville. Clark catches up with Pete Ross, is dismayed to learn that Lana Lang has left town, and spends time with his parents merely because he’s lonely. This is another reason I love Lois Lane’s character – the responsibility of being Superman seems so gargantuan…he needs – even deserves – to have someone who can help him shoulder it. We’re not there yet in this issue, but Lois’s infatuation with Superman is already clear.

Issue three is “Fall.” It begins with Lex Luthor being arrested for some unspecified crime (although if you want to try to put it in context, this issue slots neatly after issue #4 of John Byrne’s Man of Steel series). Luthor quickly uses his influence to free himself, but his ire has grown even more. The people of Metropolis – beginning with the staff of the Daily Planet – suddenly fall ill and collapse, the victims of some mysterious viral agent. Although Superman is certain Luthor is responsible, he turns to him and asks him to use his resources to help. Fortunately, Lex already has a solution – he’s taken Jenny Vaughn, a woman Superman saved in issue two, and used her biochemical expertise to create an antidote. All Superman has to do is take her into the skies to seed the clouds above the city. She does so, and the people of Metropolis begin to wake up. But Jenny suddenly collapses and dies in Superman’s arms – overexposure to the very disease she had cured. Clark, broken, returns to his parents in Smallville, uncertain if he’ll ever come back.

“Winter” ends the series beautifully. Still in Smallville, in hiding, Clark reconnects with Lana Lang. Lana and his parents can see the pain he’s carrying with him, but rather than feed it, they remind him of who he is, what kind of a man they’ve known all his life. And when a flood threatens Smallville, Clark finds himself ready to put his uniform back on again. 

There are so many amazing things about this series. It shows very clearly that the soul of Superman is not the city of Metropolis, but Smallville, Kansas. It’s where he begins, it’s where he returns in every issue. It is his home, it is the place that grounds him. When Superman needs help, he returns to the farm where he grew up and the people who know him better than anyone. Luthor, meanwhile, is never technically “defeated.” His scheme is built on his ego, his compulsion to hurt Superman, and he does it far more effectively than he ever could with Kryptonite or a red sun projector – he strikes not at his Kryptonian power but at his all-too-human heart. But in the end, Superman triumphs simply by returning to Metropolis, by deciding to move on. The best way for Superman to defeat Lex Luthor is by continuing to be Superman.

There are a lot of great Superman stories. I’ve read many of them this year, and I’ve got several more of the best lined up for the next nine days. But if you’re looking for the simplest, truest, purest expression of who Superman is at his core, I think Superman For All Seasons may just be the greatest of them all. 

Comics: Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. Kong 2 #2

Thur., July 3

Graphic Novel: All-Star Superman (Collects issues #1-12)

Notes: Next up on my tour of Superman’s greatest hits is this magnificent series from 2005 to 2008. DC announced their “All-Star” line as a chance for some of comics’ greatest creators to tell stories unhindered by continuity, their ideal versions of the character. To this day I don’t know what happened, really, but only two comics ever materialized from this effort, this one and All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder by Frank Miller and Jim Lee, and that series was never even finished.

But Morrison and Quitely finished their story, and in the years since it has become acclaimed as one of the greatest Superman stories of all time. In a nutshell: while saving a scientific expedition in distress on the surface of the sun, Superman’s cells become overcharged with energy. Although he suddenly finds himself more powerful than ever, it is only a temporary boost – his cells are dying, and all the science in the world can’t save him. Knowing that his days are numbered, Superman sets out on an Odyssey to save the world as much as he possibly can before time runs out. A time-traveler tells him of 12 impossible tasks he will accomplish before his death, and he sets out to do them – while all the while being watched by a Lex Luthor who is sitting on Death Row.

What Morrison and Quitely do with this book is nothing short of miraculous. Morrison mines Superman’s entire history to pull out characters and pieces to play with: a rivalry with Samson and Hercules for the hand of Lois Lane, the mysterious “Unknown Superman” of the future, and even characters from one of Morrison’s own epics, the DC One Million crossover. Over the course of twelve issues, Superman spends time with several people of great significance to him, with spotlight stories on Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Jonathan Kent, Bizarro, and Lex Luthor himself.

But the amazing thing is that none of these characters are exactly what this series is about. There are a great many good stories about what Superman means to other people. For All Seasons, for instance, had chapters narrated by Jonathan Kent, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, and Lana Lang. We’ve seen how everyone feels about him, from Perry White to Batman to some random kid he pulled out of a school bus that was going over a bridge. But All-Star Superman is really about what SUPERMAN thinks it means to be Superman. And what that means is a relentless, unstoppable thirst to be better. Even when faced with his own certain death, Superman’s every breath is dedicated to making the world a better place, to bringing happiness to his friends, to saving as many people as he possibly can. There’s a famous single-page vignette – you likely have seen it online even if you haven’t read the comic book – of Superman talking someone out of jumping from a ledge. It’s a single page, removing it from the graphic novel would not impact the story in any way, but it is the perfect, crystalline embodiment of who Superman is.

At the end of the story (and here’s a spoiler, in case you haven’t read it), Luthor finds a way to temporarily give himself Superman’s powers. And Superman finds a way to weaponize that, manipulating Luthor’s enhanced senses to force him to perceive the fabric of the universe the way Superman does. Suddenly forced to change his perspective, Luthor has an absolute breakdown as he sees the connectedness of all things in a way that he’s never considered, making the most egotistical man on the planet realize the depths and futility of his own selfishness. 

Despite such a dark premise, this story (like Superman himself) never falls to despair. It is quietly uplifting, awe-inspiring, and full of hope. It shows us how Superman sees himself, and how he wishes for the rest of us to see him as well. And if the movie is half as capable of depicting that feeling as the graphic novel, it will be magnificent. 

Fri., July 4

Comic: Action Comics #775

Notes: It’s the Fourth of July and, of course, for those of us in the United States it’s our Independence Day. I’ll be spending most of the day at a family barbecue – it’s always been my favorite day of the summer, after all. But that doesn’t mean I can skip my Year of Superman obligations, and I can’t think of a better story to read today than Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke’s classic “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?”

In this legendary tale, Superman is stunned by a new team of heroes who prove to be anything but. Calling themselves “The Elite,” this new squad bursts onto the scene and dispatches those they see as villains quickly, violently, and terminally. Superman is horrified when public opinion starts to tilt in favor of the Elite and their leader, the telekinetic menace called Manchester Black. Children want to be the Elite, saying that Superman is played out, others wish that the Elite would take steps like killing the Joker…and all the while, Clark finds the changing tide shocking and disturbing. 

After Black calls him out, Superman agrees to face the Elite in battle. They take the fight to the surface of Jupiter’s moon, Io, where the Elite proceeds to pound Superman seemingly into oblivion. With nothing left but his cape, they think victory is in their grasp – until they hear Superman’s voice coldly “thanking” them for showing him the way. In seconds, Superman seems to kill all of Black’s associates one by one, and when an enraged and hysterical Black tries to force a final confrontation, Superman uses his heat vision to cut out the part of his brain that gives Black his powers without the man even feeling it. Weeping in despair, Black says that Superman has proven them right, that he’s no better than they are.

Except that he is. Because he’s Superman. The Elite are alive – beaten, incapacitated, but none permanently injured. Even Black’s powers will return after he heals from the concussion Superman gave him. But Superman had to show WHY he never takes the steps the Elite have taken – that it would be too easy, too ugly, too terrifying to give in to the temptation to kill, and once that step is taken, there is no going back.

Black has spent the issue telling Superman that he’s naive, that his perspective on the world is just a dream, a worthless ideal that holds the world back from progress. On the last page, Superman gives his perfect rebuttal to that stance:

“Dreams save us,” he tells Black. “Dreams transform us. And on my soul, I swear…until my dream of a world where dignity, honor, and justice becomes the reality we all share, I’ll never stop fighting. Ever.”

How good is this comic? How many other single-issue comic book stories have been adapted into a feature-length film? And even fewer have done it well. This is the one-book response to everybody who claims that Superman should be dark, should use his powers to shape the world as he sees fit, should take care of his adversaries permanently. This is not the world that Superman sees, and thank God that it’s not. In the few pages where Superman cuts loose and makes it clear that he COULD kill the Elite with minimal effort, he becomes absolutely terrifying. So at the end, when he reverts back to type and you realize it’s all been a ruse, the relief is tangible. 

Kelly reportedly wrote this story as a response to the popularity of Wildstorm Comics’ The Authority, in which thinly-veiled expies of the Justice League decide to use their power in just this way, taking on threats to the world in a violent and permanent manner. (There is an irony to the fact that the Authority is now part of the DC Universe and that one of its members, the Engineer, is going to be among the antagonists of the new movie I’ll be sitting down to watch with my family exactly one week from today.) Those stories are fine for the likes of the Authority because – although obviously created to imitate the Justice League – they are NOT the Justice League. Apollo is their version of Superman, but he’s NOT Superman. These are stories that work as a deconstruction of our heroes, but don’t work as stories of the heroes themselves. In less than 40 pages, Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke show us that the ideals that Superman stands for not only aren’t out of date, they’re more important than ever before.

What’s so funny about truth, justice, and the American way?

Nothing at all. 

Sat., July 5

Movie: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Notes: Some of you are scratching your heads right now. Some of you have no idea why I would choose To Kill a Mockingbird as an entry in the Year of Superman, especially in THIS week, which is about the stories that most make Superman who he is. But there’s actually a very simple explanation, friends: To Kill a Mockingbird is Clark Kent’s favorite movie. In fact, it was even the key phrase that Superman used when he returned from the dead to convince Lois Lane that he was the genuine article and not yet another imposter.

In and of itself, though, that wouldn’t be enough for me to include the movie. If Clark’s favorite movie was something like Caddyshack, Godzilla, or Dude, Where’s My Car?, it wouldn’t make the cut. But I believe very staunchly that the things a person loves can tell us an awful lot about a person, and in this case, that’s particularly profound. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is a big fan of what he calls “really old” movies like Aliens and Empire Strikes Back. In his case, they chose those movies for two reasons: to make a joke about what people of different generations consider “old” and to demonstrate that this Peter Parker is a geek like us. And it works for that character. But in the case of Superman, when Dan Jurgens declared To Kill a Mockingbird to be Clark’s favorite movie (or whoever – I assume that it was Dan Jurgens because he wrote the comics where I first saw it referenced), he could have picked anything. He chose a movie with a compelling and powerful message about justice, and when the film ends, it’s easy to see Atticus Finch as a cinematic mentor for Clark Kent.

In case you’ve never watched it (or, even better, read the book), To Kill a Mockingbird is the tale of a family in Alabama during the height of the Great Depression. Gregory Peck plays Atticus Finch, an attorney appointed by the court to defend a black man named Tom Robinson who has been accused of beating and raping a white woman. Although Tom maintains his innocence, in this time and this place, the mere fact of the color of the accused and the accuser is enough to make most people in town declare his guilt without even the benefit of a trial. But despite the town turning against him, Atticus stands firm in his conviction to do the right thing and defend the innocent – no matter the personal cost that he will have to pay.

Come on, people, do I have to spell it out for you? That’s who Superman is every day. Defender of the defenseless, protector of the innocent, willing to give even his own life for somebody else, and refusing to back down in the face of what he knows is right, no matter what anybody else says. 

The Tom Robinson plot is the main story, but there are also several subplots and side moments that you can easily view as contributing to the development of Clark Kent’s moral core. One of the biggest is Boo Radley, son of Atticus’s neighbor. Atticus’s children Jem and Scout (the latter of whom narrates the story) are afraid of the mysterious Boo, who never leaves the house, leading to a lesson about making assumptions about people. Another scene features Scout learning to understand how to treat the less fortunate during an awkward dinner. A few minutes later, Atticus is forced – despite having no desire to do so – to put down a rabid dog to protect his family, shocking his son Jem when he realizes his dad is a crack shot. 

The lessons permeate the story itself, too. One night, Atticus gets wind that a mob is planning to storm the jail and lynch Tom, so he sits outside the jail to wait for them. Jem, Scout, and their friend Dill sneak out of the house and arrive just as the mob is about to turn on Atticus, and although he tells them to go back home, the children refuse. Instead, as Scout asks the men in the mob – neighbors she’s known her entire life – how they’re doing, the men are shamed into retreating. It’s a beautiful moment of heroism for the little girl, and you see how Atticus has shaped his children in a time where society was working against him. 

The funny thing to me is that Superman was created in 1938. To Kill a Mockingbird came out in 1962, a full 24 years later, and the novel it was based on was released only two years earlier than that. It’s more than likely that Harper Lee (born in 1926) had read Superman comics when she was young before writing the book. In comic book time, it doesn’t matter. Even in 1992, when Jurgens first mentioned that it was Clark’s favorite movie, it would have been 30 years old and easily could have been a movie that Clark watched when it was released during his childhood. Today (and I’m just realizing that more time has passed since that comic was published than had elapsed between that comic and the movie’s release – somehow this stings more than Tom Holland calling Alien “really old”) it would be a movie he saw on cable. A few years from now he’ll mention having caught it as a kid on Netflix. But it doesn’t really matter how old the movie is or what era little Clark first would have watched it in – the meaning is timeless and has never lost its relevance. It is the perfect choice for a film that shaped a Superman. 

In 2003, the American Film Institute conducted a survey of its members where they voted for the 100 greatest heroes and villains in cinematic history. Christopher Reeve’s Superman made the heroes list at #26. Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch? He was number ONE. 

And I doubt that Clark Kent would have any issue with that. 

Comics: Secret Six Vol. 5  #4 (Super-Son), Justice League: The Atom Project #6 (Cameo)

Sun., July 6

Graphic Novel: Superman: Up in the Sky (Collects issues #1-6)

Notes: Tom King and Andy Kubert’s Up in the Sky was not – to my knowledge – specifically listed amongst James Gunn’s inspirations for the new movie. However, King is working with Gunn – he’s one of the executive producers for the Lanterns series that’s in the works and, of course, his Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is the inspiration for HER upcoming movie – so it’s reasonable to assume that Gunn has read this book. And if he hasn’t, he should, because it’s one of those stories that cuts right to the heart of who Superman is.

Batman summons Superman to Gotham where he’s told of the murder of a pair of foster parents by what seems to be an alien presence, and the abduction of one of their children. The girl is named Alice, he learns, and she loves Superman. Everyone is put on alert – even the entire Green Lantern Corps is looking for Alice, but as Hal Jordan tells Superman, “it’s a big universe.” Although he is reluctant to leave Earth, worried that something will require him in his absence, Superman cannot allow this child to remain lost, waiting for him to save her, and know he’s done nothing. He takes off into space, determined to find her. 

This story was originally serialized in 12 parts, in the Superman Giant series that was released through Walmart several years ago. It was repackaged as a six-issue series through comic shops, and now the graphic novel format we enjoy today. In these 12 parts, we watch Superman go to the end of the universe to find Alice. Each chapter, although part of the quest, is relatively self-contained. Superman goes into a boxing match with an alien stronger than him, but who can give him a clue to Alice’s location. A time anomaly tosses him to meet Sgt. Rock in World War II. Another anomaly splits Superman and Clark Kent into two people on a frozen alien planet. So forth. One chapter is even a story from Alice’s perspective, as she narrates the story of the one Superman/Flash race that Superman legitimately won. Remember waaaay back in Superman Vs. the Flash week, when I mentioned there was one other race I skipped? This is the one. And the reason Superman wins that race is…well, it’s not because he’s faster than the Flash. It’s because someone needed him.

That’s what this story, this entire, amazing, incredible epic, boils down to. Everything Superman does – everything he EVER does – is because somebody needs him. Lost in time? He’s got to get back to save Alice. Stuck in a stupid, alien bureaucracy for hours trying to get a call back home to hear Lois’s voice? A brief pit stop, because Alice needs him. Making a deal with Darkseid to violate one of his own sacred vows? He has no choice – Alice is still out there. Even in the chapter where Superman and Clark are two different people, it seems at first that we’re going to get the standard dichotomy of the human Clark and the cold, stoic Superman, which we’ve seen so many times. But as the story goes on, we realize that – although Clark is, of course, the soul of Superman – even without Clark there he’s STILL Superman and, illogical as it may be, he cannot fly away when somebody needs him. And Alice needs him.

The final chapter of this story is one of the most emotional, beautiful pieces of Superman storytelling you’ll ever read. We see him backtrack, revisiting some of the dangers he faced along the way, and we get added context to certain things. Most importantly, we see how Alice sees Superman, and we see why her faith in him – her belief that he would save her – never wavered, no matter how foolish or hopeless his quest might have seemed. I can’t imagine anyone who loves Superman being capable of reading this book without feeling a stirring in their chest. Despite its galactic scale, this is one of the most deeply personal Superman stories I’ve ever read, a story about a man who is incapable of giving up when someone else needs help. It’s about a man for whom saving just one child matters just as much as saving the entire universe.

It’s about Superman in his truest, purest form. It’s about Superman. 

Mon. July 7

Graphic Novel: Luthor (originally published as Lex Luthor: Man of Steel #1-5).

Notes: This isn’t the first time Brian Azzarello’s name has come up in the Year of Superman, but you may recall I didn’t particularly care for his collaboration with Jim Lee on For Tomorrow. However, his and Lee Bermejo’s Lex Luthor: Man of Steel miniseries from 2005 was a different matter entirely. In this story, we see a Lex Luthor who is motivated not purely by arrogance or a thirst for power, but also by fear. Luthor is afraid that Superman – an alien – will undermine humanity, and decides to fight back by creating his own superhero, a woman he dubs “Hope.” In his game of chess against Superman, though, is Hope a pawn, or a queen?

They say that, in real life, nobody thinks of themself as a villain. After all, a villain is a bad guy, and if you think something is genuinely bad, you don’t do it. So the villains in the real world have justifications, moral and ethical gymnastics that they use to convince themselves that what they’re doing isn’t bad – “I deserve what I’m taking,” “the world isn’t fair, so I don’t need to play fair,” “I have to get him before he can get me,” and maybe most sadly, “God told me to do it.” That’s why it never quite made sense that, in the early days of the X-Men, Magneto called his group the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. In Luthor’s case, he has convinced himself that Superman is a genuine threat against humankind, therefore anything he does – including murder – is justified in that his end goal is to save the world. Azzarello isn’t the first person to posit this characterization of Luthor, but he certainly is among the best to put it on the page.

The story is told exclusively through Luthor’s point of view. Although Superman is a constant presence in the tale, his appearances are brief and sparse, and he never speaks on-panel. (His one spoken line, a slap to the face of Luthor’s moralizing, comes at the very end, and is delivered from off-panel.) Instead, we have Lee Bermejo painting a Superman the way that Luthor sees him – cold, distant, with an anger in his eyes that an objective look at the Man of Steel would never show. In the end, we have a Luthor whose distrust and hatred of Superman is so great that he’s willing to cut out his own heart (metaphorically speaking) in the hopes of gaining the upper hand. It’s a harsh portrayal of the character and, although he is still brilliant and terrifying, you can’t help but feel pity for him.

Supposedly, this version of Lex Luthor was drawn on for Nicholas Hoult’s portrayal of the character in the movie, and I honestly can’t think of a better story to use to shape a Luthor that’s both chilling and entertaining. In the end, he’s the most dangerous kind of villain of all: the one convinced he’s right.

The story has been presented a few times: both under its original title of Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, and in a collected edition called simply Luthor, making it a sort of companion piece to Azzarello and Bermejo’s highly-acclaimed Joker original graphic novel that gives a similar portrayal to the Clown Prince of Crime. Both books are worth reading. But let’s be honest – you only need to read this one before Friday. 

Special Presentation: Superman World Premiere

Notes: I’m breaking a lot of new ground here in the Year of Superman. Tonight I’m watching something I’ve never watched before: the livestream of a movie premiere. DC is streaming the world premiere of Superman on all the socials, so I’ve got it fired up on YouTube. I have also turned off the comments on YouTube, because good lord, people on the internet are morons. 

The stream starts with clips from the various fan events that they’ve been holding over the last few weeks. I’ve already seen most of the footage on social media, but Eddie hasn’t, and he (being a child who loves logos) got particularly excited when he saw a group of fans standing in the shape of the Superman S-shield. Even now, after months of hyping it up, I’m get a little nervous about taking Eddie to see what is technically going to be his first “grown-up” movie in theaters (defined as “not a cartoon”). But his anticipation has been growing. He talks about going to the movie several times a day. And as the livestream begins, he plops down in front of the TV and watches in glee as we see clips of the fans in cosplay, the drone shows, the decorations, and the crowds that have come to celebrate the Man of Steel. He actually doesn’t turn away and go back to playing games on his tablet until we return to the two guys who are hosting the show as they try to vamp until someone shows up on the carpet. I can’t really blame him. 

I can’t pretend the premiere event was particularly revelatory. Most of it was brief interviews with the cast who all said pretty much the same thing: “The movie is great, the cast is great, James Gunn is great, you’re all going to love it.” Gunn himself, I think, had the quote of the evening when he urged people to see the movie on the “biggest screen possible” so that they can catch all of the “Crazy-Clark-Kaiju-robot-flying-dog action you can get.” I mean, I was planning to do that anyway, but if I hadn’t been that would convince anyone.

I don’t begrudge them for sounding like hype men, of course – this is simply what you say and do during a red carpet event. Despite that, though, despite the repetitive nature of the conversation and the clips that we’ve already seen from the trailers 1000 times, I still had fun watching this. I guess I’m just that psyched – every little scrap of content pertaining to this movie is enough to energize me at this point. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Tues., July 8

Graphic Novel: Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (Collects Superman #423 and Action Comics #583).

Notes: Let’s talk again about the John Byrne Man of Steel reboot. You’ve heard of it, right? Well, with the knowledge that the Superman books were about to be restarted and given a clean slate, it was decided to end the current run with one last “Imaginary Story,” the Silver Age term for comics that were out of continuity. Written by Alan Moore with art by perhaps the most iconic Superman artist of the age, Curt Swan, this two-part story is the culmination of everything Superman was in the Silver and Bronze ages of comics. It begins in the future of 1997, where a retired Lois Elliott (née Lane) is being interviewed by a reporter for the Daily Planet about her experiences in the last days of Superman’s life. Lois recounts how, a decade prior, Superman’s enemies suddenly returned, much more violent and brutal than before. Bizarro goes on a killing spree before taking his own life with Blue Kryptonite, then the Toyman and Prankster torture and murdere Pete Ross, getting from him the secret of Superman’s dual identity. They are captured by Superman, but not before revealing that he is really Clark Kent to the entire world. Scared for the rest of his friends, Superman gathers those closest to him and takes them to the Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic, unaware that Brainiac has taken the body of Lex Luthor as his own, and is marching towards the Fortress with deadly purpose.

I have a complicated relationship with the work of Alan Moore. Without question, he’s responsible for some of the greatest comic books in the history of the medium: Watchmen, Swamp Thing, this one…all masterpieces. But in recent years I feel like he’s sort of started to buy into his own hype and taken on a sort of self-absorbed attitude, showing public disdain for comics in general. And when the creator of Lost Girls has the audacity to complain about other people touching his characters, it kind of drains my respect.

But separating the art from the artist here: this book is a phenomenal capstone for the nearly 50 years of Superman continuity that existed at that point. Moore uses an intriguing blend of Silver and Bronze age elements. From the latter, Clark Kent is a TV reporter whose identity is exposed on-the air thanks to the Prankster and Toyman. Supergirl is dead in this timeline, following Crisis on Infinite Earths, so for her cameo she visits with the time-travelling Legion of Super-Heroes. Even Kristin Wells, the mostly forgotten Superwoman of the 80s, makes a brief appearance in this story. But a lot of the bits and pieces come from the Silver Age – Lana and Jimmy both evoke some of the sillier stories in which they got super powers, this time weaponizing them on Superman’s behalf. The Legion we see is drawn to resemble the earliest days of the characters – young, with their original uniforms – but they also quite clearly know that they’re in a time period in which their teammate Supergirl is already dead and in which Superman’s days are numbered. 

There’s a lot of tying off the old loose ends that Superman accumulated over the years, especially in terms of the Superman/Lois/Lana love triangle. For years, it appeared in the comics as though Superman was unable to decide which of the women he loved the most. In this issue, Moore deftly reveals that he’s known the obvious choice along, but has a suitably self-torturing reason for never acting upon it. It’s the kind of motivation that fits in perfectly with a Silver Age mindset, but it works well in the context of this “final” story, helping to bring closure to elements that had been around for decades. 

That said, there’s plenty of Alan Moore’s signature deconstruction going on in this story. The reveal of the true villain of the piece is exactly the sort of thing he’s known for – taking an element that may have seemed silly or childish when originally conceived, but finding a way to make it terrifying. Other moments are simply heartbreaking – Superman trying to avoid letting the time-travelling Supergirl know that she’s dead in this time period, for example. Then there are the three friends of Superman who try to step up and fight alongside him, each of them showing a core of courage and love that makes you want to weep. As Lana Lang tells Jimmy Olsen at one point, “We’re only second-stringers, Jimmy, but we’ll show ’em. Nobody loved him better than us.” You even feel pity for Lex Luthor in this one, as his body is manipulated by Brainiac. The implications of that, the idea of having someone else invade your physical form, using your muscles, controlling your vocal chords as you are forced to watch and do nothing…not even Lex Luthor deserves that.

Having Curt Swan illustrate this story was a perfect choice for two reasons. First, it was just a fitting tribute for one of the greatest and most influential Superman artists of all time. Second, his pencils evoke a simpler, brighter time period, which makes for a harsh juxtaposition with the extremely dark story.

But dark as it is, the story ends – as befits Superman – with a symbol of hope. Not an S-Shield this time, but rather, a wink. The story has aged somewhat. A lot of the things that Moore draws upon have been evolved or removed to the point that someone who is only familiar with the post-Crisis incarnations of Superman would feel very confused, if not terminally shut out of understanding what’s happening. But if you have a love for the Superman who existed before John Byrne’s era, this story feels like the perfect ending, the ultimate culmination of that Superman. It’s a grand farewell to this version of the character. There will never truly be a “last” Superman story – the character will live on no matter what. As an attempt to end the legend, this is a good one.

But I still think there’s one better. 

I’ll get to that today, as you read this…but I guess you’ll get my thoughts on it next week. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. You can join in the Kryptonian Konversation every day in the Year of Superman Facebook Group!

Year of Superman Week 26: Playing Catchup, Random Choices, and a Tribute to Jim Shooter

blakemp Year of Superman , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Back home from our trip, it’s time to play catch up. I hit the local comic shop on Wednesday to grab a few weeks’ worth of comics, and I’m going to start week 26 by going over the Superman-related titles in the mix. Let’s see what we’ve got!

And as always, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman Archive!

Wed., June 25

Comics: Action Comics #1087, Supergirl Vol. 8 #2, Superman Vol. 6 #27, Superman Unlimited #2

Notes: The Mark Waid era of Action begins! I’ve been excited for this one ever since they announced he was taking over this title with a feature on Superboy. Ever since 1986, DC has gone back and forth several times over whether Clark Kent ever had a career as Superboy in-continuity. It looks like this series is going to finally settle the question once and for all…or at least until some new editor comes in and decides to change it again. But until then, I’m psyched to enjoy the ride.

Let’s hear it for the Kid of Steel!

Action Comics #1087 has Clark Kent – as an adult – reminiscing about an “Expo of Tomorrow” he attended with his parents when he was 15 years old, and how an encounter with a villain on that day would shape the rest of his life. Have we seen the story of Superman’s public debut before? Yes, dozens of times. Does that make me any less thrilled with the comic I just read? Not in the slightest.

Like I said, we’ve seen the story of SuperMAN’s debut over and over again. This is different. This is SuperBOY – a Superboy whose powers are new to him, who has never been in a fight before, and who’s wearing red converse sneakers instead of boots. He’s determined to do good, but at this embryonic stage he’s still trying to learn how. Fortunately, he’s got Jonathan and Martha Kent in his corner. Jonathan has taught him about the lost heroes of the Golden Age, drilled him relentlessly on their feats and adventures, so he could get a feeling for the heroic ideal. And when the time comes to prove himself…well, it doesn’t go as smoothly as it might go today, but it’s an authentic, entertaining, and uplifting story. Waid – who is also currently restructuring the timeline of the DC Universe in another miniseries I’ll get to shortly – is the perfect person to reintroduce the adventures of Superman when he was a boy. 

So embarrassing when someone shows up wearing your outfit.

Sophie Campbell’s Supergirl #2 picks up where the first issue left off – there’s a second Supergirl in Midvale who seems to have captured the hearts of the town. And I have to admit I was pretty tickled when I realized that the fake Supergirl was actually a new incarnation of Lesla-Lar, the Kryptonian doppelganger that we read about back in Supergirl Week. This time around, Lesla is a Kandorian with something of an obsession with Supergirl who convinces herself that she could do the job better than the genuine article. She finds a way out of Kandor, mesmerizes the Danvers, and transforms herself into a near-duplicate of Kara Zor-El (which is much better than her being just a random lookalike as in the Silver Age). Lesla also manages to tamper with Kara’s costume, causing her to turn to a friend for help: Lena Luthor.

I’m already loving this version of Supergirl. There’s a sweetness to the book, a sense of humor that more recent versions of Supergirl haven’t had. Campbell is also already doing the legwork of building up Kara’s supporting cast, and Lena makes for a fantastic addition. The two of them acknowledge that things have gone kind of sideways between Superman and Lex, but they don’t let it affect them – and in a genre where stupid misunderstandings are used to cause conflict more often than a comic gets variant covers, that’s a wonderful change of pace. Campbell’s Supergirl is already one of my most-anticipated books from DC each month. 

Oh geez, he’s got that “I’m so disappointed” look on his face. I HATE that.

In Superman #27, Lois is still reeling from the loss of her Superwoman powers, while Superman is struggling with a sudden burst of Red Kryptonite energy. Meanwhile, Mercy and Lex have a heart-to-heart. This is kind of an odd issue – part two of “Superman Red” seems to be an epilogue of sorts. This issue, combined with the previous one, feels like it was intended to tie off some of the plotlines that have been running through this series since the first issue, clearing the table for next issue’s new storyline to dive headlong into the greater mystery of DC All In. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make the issue feel a little weak on its own. 

This is why you don’t go into bars in some of the seedier parts of Daxam.

Superman Unlimited #2 continues Dan Slott’s inaugural storyline. The enormous Kryptonite meteor that landed in the country of El Caldero has upended everything, making the tiny nation one of the most economically prosperous countries on Earth overnight. But black market Kryptonite is getting into the hands of villains everywhere, which I’m sure you can imagine causes some problems for the Man of Steel. Meanwhile, Lois is launching the new global Daily Planet initiative, and only one man seems to remember the fact that Kryptonite is NOT only harmful to Kryptonians – unfortunately that one man is Jack Ryder.

Slott is having a lot of fun with the pieces here. He finds a new angle on Superman’s little-used solar flare power, and in so doing manages to escalate the stakes of the Kryptonite storyline just a little (which is about all you want in chapter two of a storyline). I’m also glad that he hasn’t ignored the fact that Kryptonite is, in fact, radioactive. I don’t know that it’s necessarily public knowledge that it once gave Lex Luthor cancer, but that’s certainly the sort of thing that would become scuttlebutt and whispered rumors and make its way to a conspiracy theorist podcast, which seems to be how they’re casting Jack Ryder now. It’s a good fit, and it gives a good reason for the Creeper to show up at a crucial moment in the story that turns out to make things even more complicated. 

The strange thing is that, although the consequences of this storyline are obviously global, Slott manages to give us a perspective that keeps things smaller. It’s mostly about Superman and how he deals with the problem, and while all the seeds are here to make this a story that can (and, logically, should) impact the entire DC Earth, he’s building to that instead of going to planet-wide societal upheaval right from the jump. There’s a build here that I appreciate, and it makes it even more exciting to anticipate the next issue.

Thur., June 26

Comics: Justice League Unlimited Vol. 2 #8, Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #40, New History of the DC Universe #1, DC X Sonic the Hedgehog #4

No, Superman IS on this cover. Look between Aquaman and Wonder Woman. No, lower. There ya go.

Notes: Continuing today with the recent releases, I’m kicking it off with Justice League Unlimited #8, the end of Mark Waid’s “We Are Yesterday” crossover. With Grodd having absorbed the Omega Energy of the late Darkseid and scattered the Justice League throughout time, Air Wave has done his best to compensate – bringing heroes from across the time stream to the present to aid them in their battle. 

I don’t want to talk too much about what happens here – I hate spoilers, after all – but if you’re the kind of person who likes crazy superhero battles, this will be eminently satisfying to you. It’s an exciting book with gorgeous artwork and a genuinely surprising ending. I’ve got no idea where Waid is going with this, although its significance to the overall story arc that seems to be “DC All In” is abundantly clear. If you’re following what’s going on in the DC Universe, you really can’t afford not to be reading this book. 

It’s like that time King Kong interrupted Johnny Carson.

Waid is also doing his thing in Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #40. With “We Are Yesterday” over, this book settles back into its usual groove of telling stories of the World’s Finest heroes in the past. In this particular issue, Perry White and James Gordon are guests on a podcast together when a kaiju attacks, so Batman jumps into a giant robot he’s had prepared for just such an occasion and joins Superman in taking it down. And once again, friends, I would like to point out that occasionally this whole Year of Superman blog allows me to type sentences like the preceding, and that makes it all worth it.

I’ve got to be a little forgiving for the setup of this issue. The podcast in question is – like Jack Ryder’s show in Superman Unlimited – of the shock host variety. Jim Gordon is ostensibly there to defend Gotham from the hosts’s recent attacks, while Perry is there to defend print journalism, but that doesn’t really explain why they’re on the SAME episode, except to provide a (paper-thin) excuse to have Lois, Clark, and Bruce all in the same building when the giant monster shows up. But it still makes more sense than 90 percent of Silver Age contrivances, and the rest of the issue is a load of fun, so I give it a pass. 

This one is for all you Arion: Lord of Atlantis fans out there.

My Mark Waid triple feature continues with the first issue of New History of the DC Universe, a comic that is, frankly, a long time in coming. With reboots both hard and soft having plagued DC Comics for decades, I welcome an attempt at creating a definitive timeline, establishing which heroes and stories are canon to the current incarnation of the DCU. Now the pitfall of such a project is that canon only remains canon until the next person down the line decides to change it, but for now at least, I think we can accept this book as being THE history, and there’s no better person to write it than Mark Waid. 

The series is framed as a history of the universe as compiled by Barry Allen, who has a better idea than most of just how time has been monkeyed with over the years. And while the connection to Superman actually doesn’t come in until literally the last panel of the last page, I felt like it deserved mention here in the blog, if for no other reason than how impressive it is that Waid  and co-researcher Dave Wielgosz (who provides a remarkably detailed index at the end of the book) have crafted a timeline that works. There’s nothing here that doesn’t make sense, and Waid even takes the opportunity to canonize several characters whose existence in the current DCU may have been suspect, such as the original Red Tornado, the Alpha Centurion, and – strangely enough – Robin Hood. Yeah, that one. Pretty much the only thing he DIDN’T mention is Hugo Danner from Gladiator, who I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was the father of the Young All-Stars member Iron Munro (although Munro and the All-Stars DID merit inclusion). 

Most shocking of all, however, is a panel that places into the timeline the arrival of a Terminian alien who crashes to Earth and is adopted by a human couple – on a plantation in the American south in the 1800s. This baby will grow up to be Milestone Comics’ Icon, a character I’m planning to cover in a later week where I discuss characters clearly intended to be the Superman of their respective universes. This is the first I’ve heard of any plans to put the Milestone characters back in the DC Universe proper, and I’m very interested to see if Static, Blood Syndicate and the others show up when we reach their respective point in the timeline in future issues. 

At any rate, this book is essentially required reading for any fan of the DC Universe, and I can’t recommend it enough. 

Now HERE’S a race I wanna see.

Last but not least, Ian Flynn wrote DC X Sonic the Hedgehog #4 (instead of Mark Waid), but he did a great job with it. Last issue focused on Team Sonic stuck on the DC Earth, while this issue gives us the reverse of that, with the Justice League trying to keep things from falling apart during Apokalips’ attack on Sonic’s world. There’s a particularly entertaining exchange between Superman and Dr. Robotnik that I really enjoyed. As I’ve said when I wrote about this book in the past, it’s nothing groundbreaking, but darned if it isn’t fun. 

Fri., June 27

Movie: Superman Returns (2006)

Notes: After a cinematic absence of many years, Warner Bros poached a filmmaker who had success making films with Marvel Comics characters and handed him the reigns of the Man of Steel in the hopes of evoking the feel of the Richard Donner era, bridging Superman back to greatness. There’s a sentence that’s as accurate today as it was in 2006, when Brian Singer directed Superman Returns. Unlike James Gunn’s Superman or Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, Returns was a direct sequel to the Christopher Reeve films, or at least the first two of them. The conceit here was that, some time shortly after the events of the second film, astronomers located the former location of Krypton amongst the stars, and Superman went into space in hopes of finding his heritage. He found, instead, only rubble, and returned to Earth five years later to a world that had changed greatly in his absence. 

This is one of those movies that was unfairly maligned in its day, although it’s also a movie that has grown dramatically in the estimation of the public since then. Brandon Routh did his best impression of Christopher Reeve, both as Superman and as Clark Kent, and created a character that both evoked and paid tribute to the hero so many of us had grown up with. And although Kevin Spacey has quite rightly been cancelled since the movie came out, it would be disingenuous not to admit that he did a magnificent job channeling Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor.

Why, then, did this movie not land? There are a few reasons. I think the premise from which it begins is flawed in and of itself. It’s hard to imagine Superman abandoning Earth for such a long time, even in the name of seeking out Krypton. As much as this planet and its people mean to him, there’s no logical way he’d head out that way without some sort of concrete reason to. Looking at rubble isn’t good enough, and there’s nothing in the movie to indicate he was given ANY hope of finding something more substantial. To be fair, though, it’s possible that a more reasonable explanation was part of the story at some point but got filtered out by Hollywood’s classic “too many cooks” problem.

There are bigger problems in credulity when it comes to maintaining Clark Kent’s secret identity. There have always been jokes about how the glasses function as a disguise, but it’s even harder to imagine nobody – not even Lois Lane – would EVER question the fact that Clark went away at the same time that Superman left Earth then returned to the Planet at the same time that Superman returned to the…well… planet, with a lowercase “p.” 

But the big elephant in the room is Jason White, Lois’s little boy whom everyone believes is the child of her fiancé, Richard White, even though it’s blindingly obvious to the viewer that he’s actually the son of Superman. I don’t object to Superman being a father – I think that’s pretty clear from the stuff I’ve written about Jon Kent in the comics – but I have to draw the line at the TIMING. If Jason is Clark’s son, he obviously had to be conceived before he left Earth, and yet nobody – not even Richard – seems to question Lois when she says he’s Richard’s kid. That would mean she would have to have been involved with him at the same time as she was with Superman (presumably their dalliance in Superman II). So why does everybody in this movie act as if Richard is hands-down Jason’s father? Even if Richard knows Jason’s not his, there’s a moment where he questions if Lois was ever in love with Superman, subtly implying he wants to know IF she ever hooked up with him. So who does HE think Jason’s father is? It just doesn’t piece together. 

Of course, that leads me to the biggest problem I have with this movie: Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane. I feel like I’ve made it profoundly clear how much I admire the character of Lois Lane when she’s written well – her intelligence, her integrity, her courage. Bosworth’s Lois doesn’t display ANY of that. There’s a softness to her that doesn’t belong to Lois Lane no matter how you slice it, and I never believe the chemistry between her and Routh.

All that said, the good in this movie outweighs the bad. Routh’s Clark Kent/Superman, Frank Langella’s Perry White, Sam Huntington’s Jimmy Olsen – all of them work. John Ottman’s score is a nice build on the classic John Williams themes. And there are some sequences in this movie that are legitimately stunning even 19 years later: the scene where Superman saves the plane (obviously inspired by John Byrne’s Man of Steel) is a total thrill ride throughout. Little moments, like when he gets shot in the eye and we see a close-up of the bullet crunching, or the scene where he holds up that famous green car from Action Comics #1 – all of that works for me, and works very, very well.

Wait, where’s the dude running away in a panic in the lower lefthand corner?

Despite its flaws, this movie and Brandon Routh deserved better than they got. A good sequel COULD have been made, even though Warner Bros. decided instead to go another way. I’m just glad that Routh got a shot at redemption during the Arrowverse’s Crisis on Infinite Earths event, where he showed off how good a Superman he was. 

Comics: Metamorpho: The Element Man #6 (Guest Appearance), Zatanna Vol. 3 #5 (Cameo)

Sat., June 28

Graphic Novels: Superman: Emperor Joker (Collects Superman Vol. 2 #160-161, Adventures of Superman #582-583, Superman: The Man of Steel #104-105, Action Comics #769-770, and Superman: Emperor Joker #1), Superman: The Last Son (Collects Action Comics #844-846, 851, Annual #11)

This is why I’d rather play Uno.

Notes: Although my Superman On-The-Go week is over, there were a few graphic novels I downloaded but didn’t get around to, so I thought I would dip into those today. First off was Emperor Joker, a two-month event from the four Superman titles in 2000. Superman wakes up in a world that has gone mad: he is imprisoned in Arkham, his powers diminished, and Bizarro is the leader of a JLA made up of amplified versions of villains. He can’t remember how the world got this way, nor does he remember what the world was like before, but it’s clear that something is wrong. Lois Lane is a corporate CEO, Superman is a fugitive on the run, and Mr. Mxyzptlyk is trying desperately to find him. 

I think it’s important to note that, although the storyline is known as “Emperor Joker” TODAY, that wasn’t the case when it first came out. The first four issues were published under the title “Superman: Arkham,” and the one-shot that comes in the middle (the fifth chapter of the story) was solicited as Superman: Emperor ?. This was back when things like the evil mastermind who has transformed the entire world were actually kept SECRET, instead of being published in Entertainment Weekly the day before the comic actually comes out. The reveal didn’t come until chapter four, when Mxyzptlk tells Superman that the world has been taken over by a godlike Joker. Turns out Mxy thought it would be fun to give the Joker a teeny bit of his own power – about 1 percent. But he didn’t reckon with the madman’s cunning, and Joker wound up taking 99 percent of Mxy’s fifth-dimensional abilities and reshaped the entire world in his own insane image. The real Justice Leaguers are pathetic creatures, hunted as villains, and only Mxy and Superman know what’s wrong. Superman manages to recruit this world’s versions of Superboy, Supergirl, and Steel to his cause, and they set out on a quest to find the one man who can defeat the Joker: Batman.

There’s good and bad in this story. It’s a nice change of pace, first of all, to put that much power in the Joker’s hands and have Superman have to deal with it. There’s also some meta-commentary in here about the power of faith and how it restores the changed heroes, as well as an interesting note about how the Joker’s obsession with Batman prevents him from eliminating his enemy entirely and, therefore, leaves the window open for his own defeat. 

But there are some moments of disconnect in here as well. This was in the waning days of the “Triangle Era,” and by this point all of the creators who had made that a golden age for Superman fans were gone. This isn’t to say that any of the creative teams of the time (Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness on Superman, J.M. DeMatteis and Mike S. Miller on Adventures, Mark Schulz and Doug Mahnke on Man of Steel, and Joe Kelly and Kano on Action) weren’t doing good work, but there was a disconnect and it showed. This was especially evident in the artwork: things like Lois’s hairstyle and Steel’s armor varied wildly from issue to issue. It would be easy to dismiss this as just part of the Joker’s madness manifesting itself visually, but if that’s the case, it should happen constantly and be noted in-story rather than just flip when a new penciller takes over the next chapter. 

It’s a good story, a story I remember enjoying when it was first published and I still enjoy now, but there are things that could have been better. 

“The Last Son” has a different meaning when it’s Superman than, say, the Duggars.

Next was Superman: The Last Son, a storyline from 2006. In this one, a spacecraft crashes in Metropolis and, inside, Superman finds a young boy who speaks Kryptonian. The child is initially sought out by the government (because duh), so Superman helps him escape into hiding and crafts a new identity for him – Christopher Kent, whom he tries to pass off as the child of a late cousin – and tries to convince Lois that they should adopt him. The point might become moot, however, when the child’s REAL parents arrive on Earth: General Zod and Ursa…and they want their son BACK.

Geoff Johns co-wrote this one with his former boss and mentor, a guy who’s somewhat familiar with Superman, director Richard Donner. This is probably most evident in the scenes where Superman consults the crystal with the memories of his late father, Jor-El. Artist Adam Kubert doesn’t go so far as to try to draw Jor-El to resemble Marlon Brando, but Johns and Donner absolutely write the character with Brando’s voice, with speech patterns and mannerisms that feel very on-mark for the version of Jor-El from the 1978 movie. 

This is one of those stories that I find most interesting in retrospect. It was a great story (if unforgivably delayed at the time), but there are a few things established here that are kind of hilarious in perspective of how the characters would change a decade later. When Clark tells Lois he wants to adopt the Kryptonian boy, she objects. He’s too busy being Superman, she says, whereas she’s too busy being a reporter. Neither of them, in her opinion, are meant to be parents. There are also moments where both Ursa and Jor-El insist that Lois, as a human, could not conceive a child with a Kryptonian. All of them, of course, would turn out to be wrong, as the Convergence event in 2015 gave us Jon Kent. (In fairness, Superman had no powers when Jon was conceived, so Lois’s pregnancy seemed relatively normal. But still.) 

This wasn’t the last story with Chris Kent – named, I should mention, in honor of the recently-departed Christopher Reeve. Like Jon, though, he’d turn up again later having aged and become a hero of his own. He’s back in the DCU these days, a kid again, but he now goes by his birth name of Lor-Zod and seems to be following his father in the family business (being evil), so it would seem that this story probably isn’t considered canon anymore. And that’s kind of too bad, because if you look at it from a certain angle you could see Lois’s experiences with Chris as changing her mind about motherhood, helping to shape her into the Supermom she would turn out to be. If nothing else, it’s cool to read a comic book that was shaped by Donner himself. 

Comics: Justice League of America #27, DC Vs. Vampires: World War V #9 (Supergirl, Steel appearances)

Sun., June 29

Comics: The Superman Monster #1

“Braaains…”
“That’s ZOMBIES, Klaus.”
“Oh — um — FIRE BAAAAAAD…”

Notes: On a rainy Sunday afternoon, I scroll through the DC Universe app looking for today’s Superman reading and – for no particular reason – I decide to click open The Superman Monster. This is an Elseworlds one-shot from 1999, written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning with art by Anthony Williams. As you may have guessed from the cover art or the title, this is a mashup of Superman with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This is a fun little combo for me – my favorite superhero and my favorite monster. Two great tastes that taste great together.

In 19th century Ingolstadt, we meet Vicktor Luthor, a man of science. Vicktor is engaged to the lovely Eloise Edge, but he carries a dark hunger within him, an urge – since the untimely passing of his parents – to find a way to conquer death. That path is opened up to him when he finds a mysterious metal shell in the woods, a craft from another world. Inside are the skeletal remains of its only passenger, along with a holographic message from someone called Jor-El, father of the vessel’s deceased inhabitant, carrying with it the knowledge of an alien world. Luthor uses the alien remains and alien knowledge to bring to life a creature – a being of immense power, but who quickly spins out of Luthor’s control.

I’m a teacher (I may have mentioned that once or twice), and my honors seniors study Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein every year, so I have more than a passing knowledge with the book, which is really quite different from the Boris Karloff movie that most people think of when they think of the Frankenstein Monster. I’m surprised, then, to see just how good an adaptation of the novel this comic book actually is. Oh, obviously it’s not an exact 1-to-1 adaptation. There are no aliens or holograms in Shelley’s novel, for instance. But the comic actually brings in a lot of the little moments from the book that adaptations often leave out. The kindly family in the woods that the creature tries to find shelter with become the kindly older couple the Kants, mourning the loss of their son Klaus, who take the creature in. (It’s a happier relationship here than in the novel, but the ending is no less tragic.) Eloise becomes a substitute for the Bride of Frankenstein, who is built but never brought to life in the book.  In truth, Shelley’s themes mesh together with the Superman legend surprisingly well.

Then there are the odd moments, things that feel like a DC editorial mandate. The hologram that Luthor finds, for instance, is Jor-El wearing the clothing of the John Byrne era. Sure, that was the style of Jor-El in the comics at the time, but this is an Elseworlds – we’ve changed the inhabitants of Metropolis to German villagers in the 19th century and Superman into a walking corpse, but redesigning Jor-El was verboten for some reason. While the artwork throughout it pretty strong, little things like that take me out of it just a little bit. You don’t see stuff like that these days – look at a modern story like Dark Knights of Steel and there’s no attempt to adhere to current designs, nor should there be. 

This is the kind of thing that really sets DC’s Elseworlds apart from Marvel’s What If? series, at least back then. Whereas the What If? stories traditionally used the main Marvel Universe as a starting point and then spun out an alternate history, Elseworlds could (and usually did) posit a story that never could have happened in the comics and followed them to a conclusion. These days, the two franchises have kind of moved closer together, where either can be used for either type of story, but for 1999 this was a quintessential Elseworlds yarn. It’s not so far off the mark that you can’t recognize Superman for what he is, but at the same time, it’s a take from a different angle, a fun sort of combination with a different story, not unlike Superman’s Metropolis, Batman: Nosferatu, or Green Lantern: 1,001 Emerald Nights. It’s too bad, with all the other Elseworlds characters that have cropped up in the Multiverse, that we haven’t seen the Superman Monster again. 

I own this book, so I’m sure I’ve read it before, but it’s been long enough that I forgot most of it. I’m glad I read it again, but if I’m being honest, I kind of wish that I’d held off until October and worked it into some Super Halloween reading. Ah well, I’m sure I’ll find other seasonally appropriate stories when the time comes. 

Mon. June 30

TV Special: Superman’s 50th Anniversary: A Celebration of the Man of Steel

And he doesn’t look a day over 87.

Notes: With the movie (THE movie) coming out next week, I’ve got a list of very specific things I’m going to hit in the week preceding it…but I’m a bit aimless as to how to finish up THIS week. Not quite feeling like hitting the DC app this morning, I decided to scroll through my list of things to watch, and more or less randomly decided to go to YouTube, where I’ve found the 1988 CBS television special Superman’s 50th Anniversary: A Celebration of the Man of Steel. Sorry to all the Kate and Allie and Designing Women fans – the special makes it clear at the beginning that those shows won’t be airing tonight, but they’ll be back next week.

This special, celebrating Superman’s 50th, starts with a narrator telling us Superman’s origin overlaid on footage from the original Superman movie serial from 1948 – until the planet explodes and we shift to the 1978 Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve movie. Apparently, in the universe of this special, Krypton is in black and white, whereas Earth is in color. Then we meet Dana Carvey, “Chief Historian of the Junior Supermen of America,” who promises to explore Superman’s history and interview some of the people who know him best: “The Metropolotians.”

Oh man – this whole special is gonna be a bit, isn’t it? 

In fact, it turns out to be far more schizophrenic than that. The special is a bit of a history, using clips from pretty much every incarnation of the character at this point (Kirk Alyn, George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and the Fleischer cartoons). And some of the narration is actually on-point – in a discussion of Superman’s powers, for instance, Dana Carvey mentions how Superman couldn’t actually fly in the early days, but instead jumped from place to place before he developed into – and I quote – “the Nijinsky of the air.”

We get interviews with people involved with Superman, like Christopher Reeve, but then it bounces to comedians in-character. Fred Willard, for instance, plays the Deputy Mayor of Metropolis desperately trying to emphasize that there are things in the city beyond JUST Superman – museums, for example. The Amazing Kreskin talks about how his powers are different than Superman’s. Hal Holbrook shows up in a (rather unimpressive) Superman costume preparing for his one-man show about Superman’s life, an apparent follow-up to his one-man show about Mark Twain. The golden moment here is Noel Neill appearing as Lois’s mother, Ella Lane, describing how she’s tried to talk her daughter out of chasing that Superman because he’s just never going to settle down. Then just seconds later, the goodwill is thrown out in a groan-inducing interview with Jan Hooks as a woman who claimed to have a fling with Superman and whose “hybrid” child is half-Superman. “He’s got X-Ray vision, but only in one eye, so he gets terrible headaches.”

I guess that’s supposed to be funny?

The special was produced by Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live, which is no doubt why so many SNL cast members past and present appear…but it doesn’t seem to know what it wants to BE. Is this a celebration of Superman or a parody? A sketch show or a documentary? It tries to be both, but it CAN’T.

There are some nice moments, though – a brief interview with Kirk Alyn where he talks about how much he loved playing Superman and how proud he was to be the FIRST Superman on screen. Jack Larson, the Jimmy Olsen from the George Reeves series, similarly gives a brief but sweet interview. John Byrne also gets an interview where he discusses how Siegel and Shuster pulled the character together and sold him to DC Comics – again, it’s a good moment, but far too short. 

There is, however, one moment that makes watching the entire special worthwhile for me: RALPH NADER. Remember back in “Super-Sponsor Week,” when I took to YouTube to find different Superman-related commercials, and I found a bit with Ralph Nader doing a sort of public service announcement warning people only to buy their Kryptonite from a legitimate dealer? I had no idea where that commercial came from or why it exists. So I hope you can imagine just how excited I was when it showed up as PART OF THIS SPECIAL. The mystery is solved. I can finally get a decent night’s sleep again. 

I’m not sure how I feel about this special, honestly. They tried to do a real dip into Superman’s history at some moments, which kind of undermine the in-universe comedy bits. The comedy bits, on the other hand, make the real world segments feel entirely out of place. I wish they had picked one path to take and stuck with it rather than this halfhearted attempt to have their cake and eat it too.

TV Episode: Super Mega Cakes Season 1, Episode 1: “Superman.”

Looks good enough to eat, right?

Notes: True confession time. I like TV baking shows, and when I saw the ad for this new one — Super Mega Cakes — scroll across my screen at some point, I realized I would have to watch at least the first episode. Celebrity baker Duff Goldman and his team is tasked with competing against six teams of non-celebrity bakers, baking six mega cakes in battle at the same time. And because this is a Food Network show and therefore part of the Warner Bros/Discovery umbrella, at least for the next five minutes, some of the themes are connected to specific IP. One baker’s theme is Classic Cartoons (with the Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry specifically shown). Another gets an “ocean predators” theme, and I just BETCHA that episode will be airing during Shark Week. But for the first episode, the one that I’m talking about today, the pitch is Superman-themed cakes.  

The Superman battle pits Duff against baker Elizabeth Rowe, who decides to base her design on a scene in the trailer for the new movie (did I mention there was a new movie coming out?) in which a Kaiju attacks the Daily Planet office. Part of the requirements for the cake is that there has to be an animated element, so Rowe decides to have Clark, mid-change to Superman, turn his heat vision on the monster (although Rowe and her team constantly refer to his power as “laser eyes,” and part of me is rooting for her to lose just because of that). She’ll also have Lois brandishing a fire extinguisher, which is a cute touch. The final requirement that was mentioned is that the flavor of the cake has to be inspired by the theme, so Rowe decides to do a peanut butter filling because “Superman loves peanut butter.”

You know what? Superman used to SELL peanut butter, so I’m gonna allow that.

Team Duff, on the other hand, plans a three-foot tall Superman figure bursting out of the Fortress of Solitude made out of ice. Superman will be accompanied by Krypto, because Krypto is also in the new movie. (DID YOU KNOW THERE’S GOING TO BE A MOVIE?) But when Duff’s partner Ralph sees just how big Elizabeth’s kaiju is shaping up to be, he upscales the figures of Clark and Krypto to life-size. Duff’s tasting element is rhubarb jam, because Clark loves Martha’s rhubarb pie. (My wife: “Y’all nerds know way too much about this man.”) For his animated element, Supercake is going to use his (correctly-named) heat vision to carve an S-shield in the ice. 

I’m not going to go into a blow-by-blow of the whole episode. If you like these kinds of shows, you probably know how it goes – we watch the cake artists at work, we see them overcome unexpected obstacles, there’s a confessional segment where they tell about some sort of personal hardship that makes you want to root for them DESPITE the fact that they keep calling it “laser vision,” the music gets super-duper intense just before the timer runs out and then, BAM! There’s a ridiculously impressive cake. And I gotta tell ya, the cakes DO look amazing. 

Damn. Now I want cake. 

Comics: DC Vs. Vampires: World War Z #10 (Appearance by Supergirl, Lois Lane)

Tues., July 1

Comics: Adventure Comics #346-347

Notes: Once again, I find myself faced with the sad duty of eulogizing someone here in the Year of Superman blog, as yesterday afternoon we were told of the passing of Jim Shooter at the age of 73. Shooter was perhaps one of the most remarkable comic creators of all time – certainly possessing the most unique history. At the age of 13, he submitted a story to DC Comics featuring what he considered, at the time, one of DC’s weakest properties: the Legion of Super-Heroes. Not only did editor Mort Weisinger buy the story from Shooter, but at the age of 14 he was hired as the regular writer for the Legion’s tales in Adventure Comics. Shooter would go on to write other comics for DC, including – among many others – the very first ever race between Superman and the Flash from Superman #199. He wrote a variety of comics for DC, many of them part of the Superman family, for about a decade before he bounced over to Marvel Comics. There he eventually rose to the position of Editor-In-Chief, spearheading Marvel’s New Universe line and writing their first major crossover event, Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars. After leaving Marvel, Shooter founded Valiant Comics, as well as other enterprises that perhaps are not remembered as well.

Although sometimes a controversial figure (word has it that he wasn’t always the easiest editor to work with), Shooter is one of those figures whose stamp on the comic book landscape is undeniable. Both as a writer and an editor, he is responsible for some of the most significant and memorable stories and characters in comic book history.

So to commemorate him, I decided today to go back and read a story I didn’t get to back in Legion of Super-Heroes week: his first ever Legion story, a two-parter from Adventure Comics #346 and #347 – a story written by a 13-year-old boy. (Take THAT, 17-year-old Mary Shelley creating Frankenstein.) 

Hint: The traitor is the one who isn’t mentioned in any OTHER Legion stories of the past 60 years.

In the shockingly-titled “One of Us is a Traitor” Superboy, serving as interim leader, introduces four new young heroes all vying for Legion membership. Princess Projectra has the power to cast illusions! Nemesis Kid has a strange “alchemical” power that allows him to defend himself and defeat any foe! Ferro Lad can transform into living iron! And Karate Kid’s skill at Martial Arts is ALMOST enough to allow him to defeat Superboy! All four are unanimously accepted as members of the Legion. 

Before the Legion has even had a chance to welcome their newbies, though, a new threat rears its head: Garlak, warlord of the distant world of Khund, is threatening to invade Earth if the planet doesn’t surrender in one hour. And just in case Superboy gets any smart ideas, he warns them, he has a healthy supply of Kryptonite weapons. Superboy splits the Legion into three teams to protect Earth’s three defense towers, but in private, Garlak gloats that he’s already slipped a spy into the Legion ranks to guarantee his success. And in fact, when the first of the defense towers is attacked, Phantom Girl is left questioning Karate Kid’s loyalty to the team when he sends her away at a critical moment and the first of Earth’s three defense towers is destroyed.

In part two of the story, Superboy leads an air-squad to defend the second tower, but their Kryptonite weapons weaken him and the tower is lost. Checking on the Legionnaires who were supposed to defend it on the ground, they find their teammates unconscious, temporarily incapacitated by a gas attack, with one person missing – Karate Kid. Racing to Legion HQ, they find Karate Kid standing over the wreckage of the Legion’s arsenal, but when Superboy shouts out, “All right, Kid! The game’s up!” it is not Karate Kid who steps out to confess, but Nemesis Kid. He’s already signaled the Khund to attack, and plans to be richly rewarded as Earth perishes. But Superboy isn’t without his own tricks – he reveals a secret fourth defense tower that helps fend off the Khund as the Legion takes the fight to their spacecraft. Karate Kid proves his worth by singlehandedly capturing the Khund leader, but Nemesis Kid’s powers allow him to teleport away, and Superboy is left wondering if they’ll ever see him again.

He’s no Daniel LaRusso, but let’s see Jaden Smith’s Karate Kid do THAT.

First off, if you didn’t already know, there’s no way in hell you would EVER guess this story was written by a 13-year-old. Not only does it fit with the style of the other DC Comics of the 60s, it’s BETTER than most of them – a more intense story, sharper characterization, and while Karate Kid is obviously a red herring from the beginning, most red herrings at this time were obvious. The only knock I could give this story is the kind of lame way that Nemesis Kid reveals himself: “Oh, Superboy said ‘Kid.’ He must be talking to me and not the guy who’s literally standing over the destroyed arsenal, whose name also happens to have ‘Kid’ in it. Better give myself up.” But even THAT isn’t any lamer than most other stories of the time, and I can easily give it a pass.

What’s more, in his first story, Shooter has contributed SEVERAL lasting elements to the Legion of Super-Heroes: Projectra and Karate Kid would go on to have long, storied careers with the Legion (to date, Karate Kid and Mon-El, using the name Valor, are the only Legionnaires to ever get their own ongoing comic book series). Ferro Lad’s time as a Legionnaire was cut tragically short, but as the first Legionnaire to die (and stay dead) in battle, he left an indelible mark on the franchise. Kind of like Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ferro Lad turned out to be more important in death than it was in life. And even the bad guys from this story, the Khunds, would go on to be long-time alien antagonists not only for the Legion, but even in the DC comics set in the present day, although it should be noted that the Khunds would change to a more alien-like appearance, whereas in this story Shooter and artist Sheldon Moldoff (working off Shooter’s thumbnail sketches, no less!) kind of made Garlak look like Attila the Hun in space. 

Not a bad first day on the job for someone whose contemporaries made their money delivering newspapers.

Thank you, Mr. Shooter from the hearts of the fans of the Legion. And Superman. And major crossover events. And the Valiant Comics characters. Let’s face it, you had your hand in everything, and we’re all better for having your work in comics. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. You can join in the Kryptonian Konversation every day in the Year of Superman Facebook Group!

Geek Punditry #130: Three Wishes Presents Crossover Madness

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Well, my friends, once again the powers that be in the world of entertainment have proven that they turn to us here at Geek Punditry for their ideas. Last year, DC and Marvel Comics announced that they were going to be reprinting their classic crossovers of the past (stuff like Superman meeting Spider-Man, Batman fighting the Hulk, and the two universes actually merging as Amalgam Comics) in two hefty hardcover omnibus editions after two decades of the companies holding off on any kind of collaboration. At the time, I suggested that this project could potentially be a precursor for NEW crossovers to finally appear, and sure enough, earlier this year they announced a two-part event in which DC’s perennial cash cow Batman will meet Marvel’s insanely popular Merc with a Mouth, Deadpool. As this is clearly an idea that nobody else could have come up with had I not proposed it here on my blog, I am comfortable taking full credit for this world-changing news.

I expect Deadpool to thank me personally.

The fun will start in September, when Marvel’s Deadpool/Batman will arrive, written by Zeb Wells with art by Greg Capullo. In November it’ll be DC’s turn: Batman/Deadpool by Grant Morrison and Dan Mora. While this particular pairing wouldn’t have been my first choice for the new era of crossovers, I can’t pretend I don’t understand the reasoning behind it. You’re combining two of the most popular (and profitable) characters in comic books, and honestly, a fourth-wall breaking character like Deadpool is liable to be a laugh riot no matter who you partner him up with, so I’m looking forward to these two books. 

But the fun doesn’t end with Deadpool and Batman! Recently, Marvel announced that their half of the crossover – in addition to the Deadpool/Batman meeting – will include three back-up stories with other pairings. Chip Zdarsky and Terry Dodson will team up Captain America and Wonder Woman, Kelly Thompson and Gurihiru will bring us an encounter between Jeff the Land Shark and Krypto the Superdog, and perhaps most excitingly, Adam Kubert will draw a meeting between Daredevil and Green Arrow written by someone who had magnificent runs on both of those characters in the past, filmmaker and Geek Emeritus Kevin Smith. 

In many ways, I’m actually more excited for the back-ups. Not to say I don’t think that there’s fun to be had with Deadpool and Batman, but Captain America and Wonder Woman is such a natural matchup that it’s shocking it never happened in the past. Thompson and Gurihiru’s comics starring Jeff are delightful all-ages fare, and I think adding Krypto to the mix will be a blast. And again, having Smith return to the two characters with whom he arguably has done his best comics work is pretty darned exciting to me.

But let’s remember, these backups are coming in Marvel’s half of the event. DC’s book comes out two months later, so the solicitation information that tells us about the DC backups, if any, likely won’t be available until August. Considering the way these crossovers usually work, with the two publishers wanting equity for their characters, I think it’s almost certain that the DC book will give us three additional backup stories of their own. The question, then, becomes obvious: who will be the stars?

As we have already established that the two dominant publishers in the American comic book space are mining my little-known blog for their ideas (guys, just put me on the payroll, I work cheap), I’m going to take this opportunity to dust off my “Three Wishes” format, in which I throw out three things I would like to see. If it were up to me, these are the backups you would see in Batman/Deadpool come November, with an added bonus of which creators I would have handle the stories.

Booster Gold/TVA

If you didn’t watch Loki on Disney+, I should explain that the Time Variance Authority, or TVA, is an entity in the Marvel Multiverse which is tasked with protecting the integrity of the timestream. In older stories, the TVA was literally made up of a legion of faceless bureaucrats and was a nice satire on corporate politics. The Loki TV series, though, fleshed out the concept quite a bit and made it an engine that could actually support stories of its own rather than just react to things happening in other comic books. They even got their own miniseries earlier this year, in which they built a task force of multiversal heroes including Spider-Gwen, Captain Carter, and an alternate dimension version of Gambit, among others. 

So for an organization dedicated to defending the timestream, who better to have them cross paths with than DC’s Booster Gold? Michael Jon Carter, a disgraced football star from the future, decided he would be better off in another time, so he stole various pieces of technology he knew would essentially make him a superhero and travelled back in time to our present day. Booster, as a character, started off very self-centered and egotistical, but as time went on, he grew and developed greatly, eventually accepting a role of defending the timestream, even though most other heroes (except Batman, who knows the truth) picture him as a jerk and a screw-up. 

The conflict would be that Booster and the TVA basically have the same job description, but from their perspective, the TVA would view Booster as one of the time anomalies they’re dedicated to preventing. There’s room for some great storytelling here, as this would be a far more believable misunderstanding than the usual hero vs. hero battle. As for who should tell this tale, I’d recruit Ryan North – a writer with a sharp sense of humor who has done work with the TVA in the past – and Booster’s creator Dan Jurgens as co-writer and artist. 

Captain Carrot/Spider-Ham

This would build off of the Krypto/Jeff story from the first volume – something that’s a little sillier. Both Marvel and DC have a world in their multiverse that’s basically full of living cartoon animals, so matching up those characters would be natural. DC’s Captain Carrot – a character longtime readers know I’ve loved since childhood – is the leader of his Zoo Crew, the primary heroes of his Earth. Spider-Ham, on the other hand, was originally a little spider named Peter who was bitten by a radioactive pig and transformed into a pig with the powers of a spider. It’s a ridiculous reversal of Spider-Man’s origin, and that’s what I love about it.

I’m not really sure what story I would tell with these two, to be perfectly honest, but it would be enough for me just to see them share a page together. You know who I think would be able to tell a good story with them, though? Comic scribe Gail Simone, who has not only a fantastic flair for comedy, but also tells some of the best character-driven stories in comics. As for the artist, it would have to be somebody who’s shown a proclivity towards more “cartoony” comic books in their artwork. Captain Carrot’s co-creator Scott Shaw wouldn’t be a bad choice, but I think he’s retired, so instead I’d hire somebody like Roger Langridge, who did a beautiful job on the Muppet comics several years ago and recently has done a little work on Dynamite’s Darkwing Duck – another comic about a cartoon animal superhero. 

Superman/Fantastic Four

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Blake, they already DID a Superman/Fantastic Four” crossover back in 1999. Dan Jurgens wrote AND drew it. You’ve been reading and watching Superman stuff every day this year, do you mean to tell us you didn’t KNOW that?”

Of course I knew that, you dork. I’m not talking about THAT Superman or Fantastic Four. I mean the ones from the movies. 

As you may have heard, this summer’s two big superhero movies are going to be Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps. Both of these are relaunching the respective properties for their new cinematic universes. And both of them look absolutely wonderful. As a teacher, I usually don’t look forward to July – it’s like one big month-long Sunday afternoon before I have to go back to work. But this year, these two movies have me excited and thrilled for July to come. 

Some people, however, have to turn everything into a competition. Marvel fans who reflexively hate anything with the DC stamp on it, Superman fans who talk as though Clark is going to swoop in and beat up the FF…and all of that is ridiculous. The idea of the movies being in competition with each other is largely manufactured by loony fans rather than rationality. Marvel and DC have shared creators for decades in comic books, and even in the current cinematic landscape it’s still happening. (Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that James Gunn directed Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy or that Reed Richards himself, Pedro Pascal, was in Wonder Woman 1984.) There is literally no reason not to root for BOTH of these films to be huge, massive, entertaining success stories. And what’s more, the characters themselves would feel that way as well.

So that’s the story I would tell. I’d have a story where an entity from each universe – let’s say, for example, Marvel’s Grandmaster and DC’s Superboy Prime– would encounter each other in the Multiverse and get into a debate about their respective heroes, then try to pit Superman and the FF against each other…but SPECIFICALLY, the David Corenswet Superman and the MCU version of the Fantastic Four. They would meet and be told to do battle, then the Grandmaster and Prime would be utterly BAFFLED when they refuse to fight each other, citing that there’s no reason to do so, and then teaming up to defeat their captors.

The meta commentary would make the more bloodthirsty “fan’s” heads EXPLODE. So worth it.

The creative team? Well, if they don’t let me write this one myself, I think it would be a nice project for Mark Waid, who knows and loves these characters better than just about anybody. As the artist, I would get somebody old-school, such as Jerry Ordway, to put his spin on it. 

There you go, friends – three epic crossover stories that are coming soon to a comic book near you…or at least, they would be if I had my way. But these are just MY picks. What about yours? Feel free to share your own “three wishes” for potential Marvel/DC crossovers in the comments!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. This is usually where he’d make a joke about how much he loves Captain Carrot, but he already put that in the main article, so frankly, he doesn’t know how to end this. Hey, is that a rabbit over there? [Scurries away.]

Week 24: Wonder Woman, Batman, LEGO, and Father’s Day

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I woke up early on June 11th, friends. It’s summer vacation, there is no reason for me to get up early, but I was wide awake at 6 am and refreshing the AMC Theaters app, looking every few minutes to see if it had begun yet. Today, you see, was the day that Superman tickets officially went on sale. 

At noon, it turns out. I found that out later.

But I was too excited to get back to sleep, and when the app finally opened up and allowed advance ticket sales to begin, I got the first three seats in an early screening for one month from today, July 11th. I showed the tickets to Eddie, and I told him how excited I am not just to see the movie, but specifically to watch it with him.

That’s more important to me than anything else, really. Taking my son to see a new Superman movie. It’s something I never thought would happen, especially after Justice League sloughed through theaters when Eddie was only three months old. Now? I couldn’t possibly be more excited.

But that’s still a whole month away. Time for a fairly random week in the Year of Superman.

And as always, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman Archive!

Wed., June 11

Comics: Young All-Stars #10

Iron Munro’s dad was bulletproof. Mine is hard of hearing. He wins.

Notes: The first comic I’m going to discuss this week is a surprise, even to me. I’ve mentioned before that – although I’m only writing about Superman comics here – there are lots of other comics that I’m reading, and as I made my way through a bundle of Roy Thomas’s Young All-Stars from the 80s, issue #10 stopped me in my tracks. Young All-Stars was Thomas’s attempt to rebuild the Golden Age of DC history post-Crisis, in a world in which the likes of Wonder Woman, Batman, and – yes – Superman had not yet existed. And Thomas was uniquely suited to that task, having a love for the Golden Age that I maintain is unsurpassed among any comic book creator that wasn’t actually working during that era. 

One of the members of that team was Arnold “Iron” Munro – a young man of incredible strength, speed, and resilience who kind of filled the “Superman” role in the team. Munro’s first appearance was in issue one of this title, and after a few adventures, he managed to get his hands on the diary of his late father. In this issue he sits down and reads it – the diary of one Hugo Danner.

I’ve read ABOUT this before in my vast studies of the DC Universe, but this was the first time I actually read this issue, the issue in which it was revealed that Iron Munro was the son of the main character of Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator, which if you remember from the very first week of this Year of Superman project is believed by some to be at least partially where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster drew their inspiration for Superman. The issue is a straight-up adaptation of that novel, run through the frame story of Iron Munro reading the main narrative in his father’s diary. Thomas hits all the major beats, although he condenses the story greatly, and for the most part only makes minor changes.

There is one BIG change, though, and a necessary one. In the novel, Hugo Danner’s own father (whose experiments gave him his powers) informs Hugo that his process is not an inheritable trait, and that should Hugo ever have children they would not possess his power. In the comic, Dr. Danner says that he doesn’t KNOW if the process will be inherited, and Hugo replies that he always assumed he was infertile, else he’d have dropped litters of little Gladiators all over the world. (It was 1988 and Young All-Stars was a direct market title: I wonder if that comment would have snuck through if it had been made to adhere to the Comics Code.) The story of Iron Munro’s own birth is absent from this issue, and in fact, the way the diary ends it seem quite possible that Hugo didn’t know that he had successfully fathered a child before his own death, but with this completely unexpected Superman connection, I’m more excited than ever to continue reading this great series from the 80s.   

TV Episodes: Superman: The Animated Series Season 1, Episode 1-3, “The Last Son of Krypton” Parts 1-3

Up, up, and Animate!

Notes: With just a month to go before the big movie, I’m going to be ramping up how much Superman I share with my son, Eddie. My wife suggested that today we watch the pilot of Superman: The Animated Series together, a three-parter that was also released on DVD as the movie Superman: The Last Son of Krypton. I’ve seen this several times over the years, and I seem to find something else to appreciate about it every time. For example, this time around, we see Jor-El pleading with the Kryptonian Council that they have to put the entire population of the planet into the Phantom Zone before the planet is destroyed (a good idea that I’m surprised more versions of this story haven’t addressed). But the Council doesn’t listen, this time not out of pure hubris, but because the planet’s massive Brainiac computer is assuring them that Jor-El is mistaken and the planet is safe.

Keep that in mind, people: in the DC Animated Universe, the entire population of Krypton died because people trusted an evil A.I. It’s the lesson we ALL need to learn from this.

Although it isn’t as noticeable if you watch the movie version, the entire first episode of this series takes place on Krypton, with Jor-El first trying to convince the council, then turning against the ruling Brainiac computer before having to steal his own rocket prototype to send Kal-El to Earth. It’s kind of brave, really, to have an entire episode without any of the regular performers or characters, save for baby Kal-El himself, especially on a story that – even by 1996 – was pretty darn well known. But this was in an era where TV shows HAD to have a “proper” pilot episode to set everything up, and the creators brought the same love and attention to detail to the show that they did Batman: The Animated Series, so it’s hard to complain. 

Episode 2 begins with Kal-El’s rocket landing in Kansas and being found by the Kents. Martha, as usual, loves him right away, and after some minor persuasion, Jonathan agrees to take the starchild in. We get a timeskip to teenage Clark, who is excelling at school, but struggles to fit in, finally confessing to his best friend, Lana Lang, that he has incredible powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men. After he rescues a child from an explosion, Jonathan and Martha show him the rocket that brought him to Earth, where a message from Jor-El tells him about his origins. After a quick flight around Smallville, another time skip brings us to Metropolis, where people are reporting a “guardian angel” with red wings whisking around the city saving people from near-disasters. At the Daily Planet, Lois Lane is asked to take new hire Clark Kent to a LexCorp press conference unveiling a new military exosuit – a conference interrupted by a terrorist attack. As villains swarm LexCorp to steal the suit, Clark slips away and changes to his OWN special suit – Superman makes his debut, appropriately enough, saving Lois Lane. 

Back in Lois Lane week, I wrote about how good Dana Delany is as Lois Lane, and I want to reiterate it today. She’s brash, a little self-important, and utterly dumbfounded at how Clark manages to make it to LexCorp before her after she ditches him. It’s no wonder he falls in love with her. Tim Daly, meanwhile, makes his debut in this episode as well, and I’ve always liked his Superman. There’s a sort of quiet strength in his voice. He’s powerful, but confident, and he gives you the impression that being Earth’s greatest hero is effortless most of the time. These two, along with the deliciously oily Clancy Brown as Lex Luthor, were a real power trio in this show. 

Part three picks up right where part two ended, with Clark trying to save an airplane in the fallout of the terrorist attack. The Planet dubs him “Superman” and, after some advice from Jonathan and Martha (“I don’t want anybody thinking you’re like that nut in Gotham City,” she says), he swoops in to Lois to give her an interview. Later, as Clark, he tells Lois his theory that Luthor was behind the theft of his own exosuit in order to reap a windfall from the government building a better version, as well as selling the original suit to an enemy power. Lois being Lois, she tries to investigate on her own, only to get caught by the terrorists. Fortunately, in what will become quite the habit, Superman shows up in the nick of time. After cleaning up the bad guys and throwing Luthor a warning, Metropolis cheers for its new Man of Steel.

Meanwhile, in deep space, an alien craft picks up a probe with a familiar pattern – Brainiac lives.

Ah, what a great way to end the first episode of this new Superman. Even Eddie watched some of it, which is pretty good for a him. I’m going to be sharing more and more with him as we work our way up to July 11th. 

Thur., June 12

Movies: Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, Superman/Batman: Apocalypse

Notes: I didn’t necessarily plan for there to be an animated theme this week, but when it happens on its own, who am I to argue? Today I rewatched the two animated films that adapted the first two story arcs from Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman series, Public Enemies and Apocalypse.

Public enemies, but private besties.

In Public Enemies, after Lex Luthor has risen to the presidency, he drums up false charges against Superman and Batman, sending a task force of heroes (and Major Force) led by Captain Atom to take them down. The world’s finest team has to go on the run, prove their innocence, and defeat President Lex. Apocalypse, the sequel, is a pretty solid adaptation of the “Supergirl From Krypton” story arc I wrote about back in Supergirl Week. 

It’s so great to see Tim Daly, Kevin Conroy, and Clancy Brown reprising their roles from the DC Animated Universe, and this movie is full of great little moments, such a conversation between Superman and Batman after the former has been shot by a Kryptonite bullet and Bruce is trying to bring him to the Batcave for medical attention. Out of nowhere, Clark starts talking about Magpie, the first villain the two of them ever faced together. It’s a great little bit that serves no purpose other than to indicate that these two are, in fact, friends…which is how it should always be. 

When Kara started shopping at Hot Topic, Clark knew something was wrong.

The sequel, Apocalypse, is a little jarring at first. The animation style changes dramatically between the two movies, as each is trying to imitate the original artist – Ed McGuinnes for Public Enemies and Michael Turner for Apocalypse), but the continuity of having Daly and Conroy back helps. The story follows the comic book pretty closely, adding Summer Glau as Supergirl and Susan Eisenberg as Wonder Woman to round out our cast of heroes. 

As a whole, the film is a pretty straightforward adaptation of the comic book, from Kara’s discovery, to her training on Themiscyra, her abduction to Apokalips, her recovery in Smallville, and the final confrontation with Darkseid. It doesn’t tread any new ground, it just tells the story. Which is actually kind of refreshing, after you think of the way some of the more recent Batman animated movies have felt the need to change the ending (Hush, A Long Halloween, and Gotham By Gaslight all suffered from this remarkably stupid choice). While it’s true that SOME measure of change is almost always necessary to successfully adapt a story from print to film, there are too many films that seem to make the changes for no reason, and I love the fact that this one avoided that trap. 

Comics: Nightwing Vol. 4 #126 (Cameo)

Fri., June 13

Magazine: DC Comics Presents Superman

I never thought about it before, but I betcha in the DC Universe, it’s GREEN cars that have the highest insurance rates.

Notes: Last week my family stopped at Barnes & Noble for my wife’s birthday. After we had checked out, as we were walking towards the door, Erin suddenly perked up and rushed to the magazine rack. There she plucked the special edition I’d been hearing people online talking about: DC Comics Presents Superman. I knew it was out there, and I had to pick it up.

The magazine is on newsstands across America, there to serve as a sort of gateway for people who don’t read comics all the time but are interested in the movie. It reprints the first issues of three of the miniseries that James Gunn drew inspiration from for the new movie, specifically All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, Superman For All Seasons by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, and Lex Luthor: Man of Steel by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo. It’s also peppered with bits and pieces of Superman trivia, and some commentary by Gunn on each of the three stories and how they helped influence the movie.

Now let’s be clear here: if you’re a Superman superfan such as myself, there’s pretty much nothing new for this magazine to offer. I’ve read all three of the comics contained herein before. I knew almost all of the trivia tidbits. I’ve already got a DC Universe Infinite subscription, so the offer for a 30-day free trial on the back cover (so you can read the REST of the three miniseries that this magazine only samples) is useless to me. Even the cover – Dan Mora’s recreation of Action Comics #1 featuring the David Corenswet costume – isn’t new, as the same artwork was used on an Action #1 facsimile edition that came out last month. But there was absolutely no way I could let this book sit on the rack without swooping right back to the same Barnes and Noble clerk who had just checked me out and picking it up. 

I’m not going to get in-depth on the stories here, since I intend to read and discuss each of those three miniseries in the near future. I was, however, a little surprised to see the inclusion of the Lex Luthor issue. I’ve heard the other two mentioned often as being part of the inspiration for the movie, but I hadn’t heard about the Azzarello/Bermejo series before. Gunn’s commentary mentions that Nicholas Hoult’s Lex is going to be smarter and more menacing than the Luthors we’ve seen on the screen before, and with all due respect to the late Gene Hackman, I think it’s about time. It also helps to underline a point that Gunn has made on social media: that the core of the movie is going to be the three characters of Clark, Lois, and Lex Luthor. 

Simply as a Superman superfan, I’m glad to add this magazine to the collection. Functionally, the most important thing is that this alerts me that I need to move Lex Luthor: Man of Steel up in my planned reading order for the rest of this year. And for those of you who maybe AREN’T walking Superman encyclopedias such as myself, it’s a cool primer before the movie. 

Sat. June 14

TV Episodes: Superman and Lois Season 2, Eps. 12-15.

“OW. OW. OW. OW. OW. OW. OW. OW. OW.”

Notes: After getting some writing done on an unrelated project, I decided to burn the rest of season two of Superman and Lois this afternoon. Here’s the quick synopsis of all four of them: We pick up right as Clark tells Lana his big secret, a shock that drives a schism between the Kents and Lana’s family. Lana gets over her anger, but her fear of putting her own family in danger and the stress of keeping the secret wears on her. Clark and Tal manage to destroy the pendant that Ally Alston plans to use to merge people with their Bizarro-world counterparts, but a battle with Clark leaves him powerless. Before he can recover – a process he is warned may take years, Ally makes her next move, bringing a square Bizarro sun into orbit around Earth, flooding the world with red sunlight. Newly-minted Smallville mayor Lana tells the people about what’s going on, as John Henry and Natasha prepare his armor to continue the fight in Superman’s absence, but John is soon missing in action. Jordan has to reveal his powers to protect Lana and Sarah, and Sarah immediately figures out that her mother has been hiding the secret as well, proving that she’s the smart one in the family. And then, as if all that wasn’t bad enough, Earth and Bizarro World begin to flicker and merge, with Ally serving as a nexus between the two. 

The season finale begins with Chrissy Beppo of the Smallville Gazette announcing to the world that the planet is merging with its counterpart, everyone is screwed, and Superman isn’t around to save them. I guess the New York Times was reporting on the Met Gala that day. Tal hooks up again with the family to stand with them as Lois and Sam get bounced to Bizarro Earth and Bizarro Lois comes to ours. Tal tries to fight Ally in space, but his powers are drained as easily as Clark’s were, and he has to be saved by Jordan. Clark decides that the only thing to do is for Tal to throw him into the sun to jumpstart his powers and give him a fighting chance. Natasha puts together her own armor and heads to space, where she finds her father, but the odds of either of them making it home seem slim. Tal throws Clark into the sun. The plan works, and supercharged Superman races to Earth to face down Ally Alston. Knocking her from the sky, he flies around the two worlds to build up enough energy to – I am not making this up – PUNCH THEM APART. 

Of course it works. It might be absurd, but it’s still Superman. 

After the chaos ends, Jordan and Sarah have a heart-to-heart and mend fences. Then, in the most baffling moment of a TV series in which people have a conversation on the surface of the sun and a super-punch breaks apart two planets that are fusing together, Lois tells her boss Chrissy that Clark is Superman, because she’s tired of keeping secrets from her friend. Tal somehow winds up on Bizarro World and, even stranger, sends Jonathan and Jordan trucks. I…I don’t get it either. Clark takes the family out to the ocean to recreate a new Fortress of Solitude, this time for all of them and not just himself. And in a sequel hook for next season, John Henry gets evidence that Bruno Mannheim, head of Intergang, is the man who murdered his counterpart in this universe. 

Plenty of interesting things to talk about in this block of episodes. Let’s start with Tal – the bad guy of season one, as seems to be the trend in these CW shows, slowly creeps towards a redemption arc this season. He’s not a good guy, per se, but he doesn’t want to merge with his Bizarro self any more than anyone else, so he pitches in. That seems to be how these things always go, and while I usually enjoy a good redemption, sometimes it seems like the producers want to keep a good actor around after the logical course of his story is over, and this is the best way they can think of to do it. It’s also kind of weird that, considering the global consequences of this story, the only stuff we see outside of Smallville are some establishing shots of cities around the world. Yeah, it’s where the characters live and it’s kind of the home base of the series, but you’d think that maybe it would be important to impart this kind of information on to, say, the president, as opposed to the mayor of Smallville. 

Clark’s plan, meanwhile, is absurd on the face of it. Even if being chucked into the sun IS good enough to recharge his powers, there’s nothing that indicates that Ally wouldn’t be able to just steal them again when he goes back to face her. I mean, she DOESN’T, although there’s no explanation as to WHY. It’s a dumb idea and it seems idiotic to even try, but when he tells the boys that they have to hold onto hope…well damn if Tyler Hoechlin doesn’t sell that. He really is great in this role.

The Chrissy stuff is the hardest for me to deal with, though. Telling Lana Superman’s secret makes sense. The truth filtering down to Sarah works from a storytelling standpoint. But telling Chrissy just seems intended to include a comedy beat that’s pretty nonsensical and doesn’t feel earned in any way. 

There are good character moments throughout the episodes, especially the last one. Jordan and Jonathan get into a fight because Jordan is terrified their father will die, while Jonathan refuses to accept the possibility – a nice beat that’s indicative of both of them. There’s an even better moment a second later as Sam Lane, the guy who’s an antagonist half the time, gives them a speech about how lucky the world is to have their father – to have Superman. We even get to see a tearful reunion between Kyle, Lana, and the girls, that leaves me touched. And the John/Natasha stuff is just fantastic. There’s also a nice Easter Egg at the end, where the celebration of Superman’s triumph is dubbed “Miracle Monday,” which happens to be the title of a Superman novel by Elliot S! Maggin. 

The best thing about the second half of this season, though, is the greater emphasis on family. John and Natasha, by the end of the season, really do feel like members of the Kent family. Tal and Lucy both wind up closer to their respective siblings than they were when the season began. Even cluing Lana and Lucy in on the Big Secret all feels like an effort to create a true Superman family in this series. It may be CALLED Superman and Lois, but it’s becoming much more of an ensemble than I think anyone would have expected. 

The first half of this season wasn’t really my bag, but the second half – despite some moments in the finale – really brings it around. I’m feeling better about how it’s going and I’m looking forward to season three. 

Sun., June 15

Happy Father’s Day!

It’s Father’s Day here in the US, and boy, did my wife understand the assignment. This morning she and my son presented me with a Superbundle that started the day off right: the miniature figures from the new Superman movie, a DVD set of all the LEGO DC movies, a great Superman and Krypto shirt, and the best pajamas I’ve ever owned. I hope all the dads out there had a great one.

Comic: Action Comics #600

They made a statue of that like me once, but it just said “Commemorating 37 years of inventing brand-new neuroses.”

Notes: I’m reading this book for a specific purpose a little outside of the ordinary. I was invited to sit in on the excellent Back to the Bins podcast, where host Paul Sparato invites various geek pundits like myself to and discuss older comics. I’ve done the show a few times now, and I always have fun. When Paul asked me what I wanted to talk about, I just said “Something Superman-related,” because I kind of have a theme going right now. I settled on one of the books on my still-massive list of comics I hope to tackle before the end of the year, Action Comics #600, the conclusion of John Byrne’s run on this series. We’re set to record tomorrow morning, so I’m reading my pick today. 

The main story here picks up right where the previous issue left off – Superman has encountered Wonder Woman, and the two of them are engaging in a liplock that has her looking as surprised as the reader. The two first met a few months prior, during DC’s Legends crossover, and Superman has been harboring an attraction to Diana ever since. (Can you blame him?) But their “first date” is interrupted when Diana receives a distress call from Hermes on Mount Olympus. Superman goes with her to investigate, only to find that the home of the gods has been conquered by Darkseid. Although he tries to trick them into fighting each other, Superman and Wonder Woman are too clever to fall for it, and not only bring the fight to Darkseid, but show that his attempt at conquest, as Olympus is currently deserted.

None of that is why I like this story so much, good as it is. What I really like is the end, where Superman and Wonder Woman mutually realize that they’re better off as friends than lovers. To Superman, the visit to Olympus makes him realize that their worlds are simply too different to mesh, whereas Diana feels their personal philosophies are too different. 

All of this is true, but that’s not the reason I prefer Clark and Diana as friends. It’s not even because Lois and Clark are made for each other. But as I mentioned several weeks ago, Diana is, in many ways, the only person that Clark can truly relate to on this level – someone who understands the burden of his power and his struggle to do good with it. Very few people are ON his level, and most of the others are either villains or people who look up to Clark as a father figure. Diana gives him a confidant that he sorely needs, and I feel like this story kind of sets that up. 

There are also a few back-up stories, also written by Byrne, starring Wonder Woman, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen, and – bizarrely – Man-Bat. Although none of these are quite as memorable as the main story, there’s some important stuff here, particularly Lex’s discovery that the Kryptonite ring he’s been wearing is making him sick, and a moment that we may be able to pinpoint as the scene where Lois’s affections start to swivel from Superman to Clark Kent, before she knew they were the same person. The Jimmy and Man-Bat stories, on the other hand, lead into a nice Mike Mignola story that I should read soon just because I remember it and I remember it being really good.

Movie: LEGO Batman: DC Super-Heroes Unite

They’re finally animated what’s been going on in my imagination since I was nine.

Notes: After I finished reading the Action Comics issue, Eddie and I spent the afternoon watching the first of the films in the boxed set they gave me, LEGO Batman: DC Super-Heroes Unite, which happens to co-star Superman. In this one, the Joker teams up with Lex Luthor to carry out his latest nefarious scheme. Batman is determined to stop the villains on his own, despite the fact that Superman keeps popping up and trying to help him. This movie set up a whole LEGO DC Universe that ran for about a decade, with several other shorts and films that all stem from this first story, where Superman has to teach Batman that it’s okay to have friends.

It also has the great fun of LEGO movies. There are a lot of silly moments, some great comedy, buoyed by the fact that they got Clancy Brown back to voice Lex again. Christopher Corey Smith does his best Mark Hammil impression as the Joker, and Troy Baker and Travis Willingham do a solid job as Batman and Superman, respectively. The movie also has plenty of Easter Eggs for the fans and liberal use of Danny Elfman’s score for Batman and John Williams’s Superman theme. I’ve always liked this movie, and I look forward to sharing the rest of them with my son. 

Mon. June 16

Comics: Superman/Wonder Woman #1, Green Lantern Vol. 8 #22 (Guest Starring Superboy), Superman Family #216

Most people just go out for coffee on a first date.

Notes: I’m recording with Paul this morning, so before I do, I go to the DC Universe Infinite app and pull up the book he selected for the podcast, Superman/Wonder Woman #1. (Paul, for the record, made his choice first, and was the reason I went with Action #600) This was a New 52-era comic, which I haven’t discussed that much this year yet, but it’s an interesting take on the characters. In the New 52, Superman and Lois weren’t together, she didn’t know his identity, and so forth. It was also a younger Superman – Tony Daniel’s artwork makes Clark look like he’s in his early 20s, and that feels appropriate here. In this issue, which picks up on a recent Justice League issue where the two of them start dating, Clark and Diana each grapple a little bit with their burgeoning relationship before getting into a fight to try to stop a device that’s causing chaotic weather.

I’ve made my feelings about the Superman/Wonder Woman relationship pretty clear here in the past, so I won’t belabor the point. I will say, however, that this series does a decent job with the concept. If you’re going to have Superman and Wonder Woman together, it makes sense to have conversations about what that means and how they mesh together, considering how different their respective worlds actually are. Unfortunately, these conversations always seem to have a trajectory that points towards the fact that this particular pairing just isn’t that good an idea. Writer Charles Soule does his best, but I’ve never read a Superman/Wonder Woman romance that didn’t feel like an organic relationship rather than an editorial mandate, with the exception of Kingdom Come.

I am impressed, however, at how well Soule meshes the book with the Superman and Wonder Woman titles of the time. This comic picks up on threads from both of the stars’ respective series and incorporates them in ways that make the book feel relevant. Far too often, when you’ve got a team-up book where one or both of the stars have their own ongoing titles, the team-up feels kind of irrelevant. Mark Waid manages to avoid that with his current World’s Finest series by having it set in the past, but I’ve read enough of the bronze age World’s Finest to know that was a serious flaw in that title. This book avoids that nicely, and in fact, by the time this particular series ended it was essentially as relevant to the ongoing story arcs as Superman and Action Comics.

I don’t love this book, but if I’m being honest, it’s mostly because I don’t love the concept itself. If you can divorce yourself from that, it’s really not bad. 

After I finish reading, Erin takes Eddie to the living room while I set up my laptop in our bedroom, and Paul and I have a lovely chat about these two issues. I do miss podcasting. I did it for a decade pretty consistently, and it was one of my favorite ways to get my voice out there. It only ended because we had a new baby in the house, and it was impossible to get time to record. Well, the new baby is almost eight now, but it still takes a lot of string-pulling to arrange our schedule in such a way that Erin can sequester him and give me enough quiet time to have these kinds of chats. It’s not something I think I’ll be able to do again regularly any time soon, but I’m really grateful whenever Paul or any of my other podcast pals are able to bring me along for the ride. I’ll be sure to drop the link to the episode once it’s posted. 

Tues. June 17

Comic: All New Collector’s Edition #C-54 (aka Superman Vs. Wonder Woman)

“I want YOU! To knock it off and stop fighting!”

Notes: To close out this week, I decided to take a peek into another classic Superman/Wonder Woman story, this one from All New Collector’s Edition. This treasury-sized special from 1977, by Gerry Conway and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, presents a lost tale of the Superman and Wonder Woman of Earth-2, and is set firmly in the grip of the second World War. Shortly after the battle of Midway, both Superman and Wonder Woman independently have adventures which alert them to the existence of the Manhattan Project. While Clark Kent tries to report on it, Wonder Woman’s discovery that “Man’s World” is pursuing atomic weaponry horrifies her to the point that she goes to the University of Chicago in the hopes of destroying it. When word reaches the Daily Planet that Wonder Woman has seemingly gone berserk, Superman rushes to Chicago to confront her. The two friends battle fiercely, destroying city blocks before they mutually decide to take their disagreement to a neutral playing field: the moon. While on the lunar surface, their battle is interrupted when they see the lights of the eastern seaboard of the United States begin blinking in Morse Code: an SOS. Putting aside their disagreement, the heroes report to Washington where they discover that the component pieces of the atomic bomb model have been stolen. Wonder Woman chases down one of them taken by the super-powered Japanese warrior called Sumo, while Superman faces the German Baron Blitzkrieg on the streets of New Orleans. They bring the villains – and the stolen pieces of the device – together on a Pacific Island, where Blitzkrieg activates the atomic weapon. He and Sumo begin to fight over who was going to take the technology back to their respective country, while Superman and Wonder Woman retreat to a safe distance just before the island they are on is annihilated by the world’s first atomic explosion. Returning to Washington, Franklin Roosevelt assures Wonder Woman that the atomic weapon was intended only as a display of power, and that the United States would NEVER use such a thing in war.

Subtle, Mr. Conway.

This is a great book, I must say. First of all, it’s always fun to see these heroes in the World War II setting. Roy Thomas was the master of this in the 80s, but this book preceded All-Star Squadron and really did a great job painting the two respective heroes in that world. The artwork is by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and is amazing, but I repeat myself. But mostly, it’s the twist on the formula that I appreciate the most. 

There are thousands of comic books about heroes – friends – who wind up fighting each other over stupid, contrived misunderstandings, battles that should and would never have happened if anybody were to just take two seconds to have a dialogue with one another before resorting to throwing punches. But the fight in this book actually makes sense in-character. Diana Prince may have worked for the United States Army, but she wasn’t really an American, and the idea of “Man’s World” having their hands on such a horrifically powerful weapon is something that cannot sit well with her. Her attack on the University of Chicago may be a little over the top, but it’s not out of character. Superman, meanwhile, is acting to defend the interests of the United States, showing a trust in his adopted country that he was raised with but Wonder Woman wasn’t. As such, the conflict feels real and natural, even to the point where Superman has to fight Wonder Woman once she’s started her attack. In modern comics, there would have been much greater consequences of this – imagine Tom King’s Wonder Woman run after she had launched an attack on an American University – but in this special it ends neatly. It’s a great, classic one-off story.

Next week I’m going to be traveling, friends, going on a trip to visit family, but that doesn’t mean the Year of Superman is taking a break. To the contrary, I’ve already got a plan to keep going while on the road. See you next time!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can join in the Kryptonian Konversation every day in the Year of Superman Facebook Group!

Year of Superman Week 23: Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes

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If you ask Joe Public what team Superman is a member of, pretty much everyone will bring up the Justice League. And they’re not wrong – Superman is a vital member of the League, and honestly, it doesn’t really feel like the JLA without the trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. (I love the Giffen/DeMatteis run, don’t get me wrong, but that’s the JLI.) But the thing is, the Justice League isn’t the FIRST team Clark Kent was a member of. And in truth, as far as his development as a character, I don’t think it’s even the most important. This week we’re going to look at the young people he inspired and who, in turn, helped shape him into the hero he is. Superman would still be Superman if he’d never joined the Justice League…but he’s not really the hero he is without the Legion of Super-Heroes. 

And the same goes for Superboy. And Supergirl. And Jonathan Kent, too. Because of reboot after reboot, there have been a lot of versions of the Legion over the years, and Clark, Conner, Kara, and Jon have each had their own incarnation. This week I’ll try to peek at each of them, talk about why the Legion matters so much to Superman, and discuss the best (and worst) of the 31st Century’s greatest heroes. 

The Legion is kind of complicated these days, thanks to DC’s constant rebooting of their timeline. If you aren’t already familiar with them and you’re looking for a little clarification, I wrote about their convoluted history in this Geek Punditry blog a couple of months ago. Please, go check it out. 

And as always, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman Archive!

Wed., June 4

Comics: Adventure Comics #247, Action Comics #276, Absolute Superman #8, Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. Kong 2 #1

The same thing happened to me when I tried to join the Webelos.

Notes: The Legion made its first appearance in Adventure Comics #247, during the period in which the headline character of that anthology series was Superboy. In this issue, beneath a Curt Swan cover that has become one of those legendary covers that gets “Homaged” again and again, Clark Kent is on the streets of Smallville when he is addressed as Superboy by a mysterious teenager he’s never met before. He switches to his other identity and zooms off, only to be met by another teenager calling him Clark, then a third. Horrified at first that his identity has been revealed, he is relieved when the teens tell him their secret: they are time-travelers. In their future, they are members of a club for superheroes inspired by the legendary exploits of Superboy, and they have come back in time to invite him to join. They bring him to the future, where he sees that Smallville has become a bustling…well…metropolis – but only by the standards of HIS time. In their time, it’s still considered a tiny community. The teens (Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Boy) put Superboy through a series of initiation tests, but each time he is distracted by a disaster that requires his attention. At first, he thinks he’s failed, but the heroes reveal that the disasters he stopped were of their own doing, and it was just an initiation stunt. Superboy joins the team and goes home, but joining them in the future soon becomes a recurring part of his adventures.

Like so many of the other characters I’ve looked at this year, this early version of the Legion feels terribly incomplete. Heck, it’s not even called the Legion of Super-Heroes yet, just the “Super-Hero Club.” The three founders are all there, but Lightning Boy would soon change his name to Lightning Lad, and all three would quickly adopt new uniforms that didn’t sport their full names across the chest like a Ben Cooper Halloween costume. The exact time period from which they hail vacillated over the next several stories before it finally, firmly, was set at 1,000 years in the future. And although only the three founders take active part in this first issue, we see other generic teens that I assume are intended to be other Legionnaires, including one that – in the digital version on DC Universe Infinite – appears to be re-colored to suggest that it’s Brainiac 5. But that’s kind of pointless, since we’ll see his first appearance shortly. 

There isn’t a ton of meat in this first appearance, but I guess the idea of Superboy having actual peers was too good, so they not only brought them back, but soon added Supergirl to the mix, even though she and Superboy were separated by about 20 years of time. But hey, it’s time travel, that’s not really an issue. The first time she encountered the Legion, she was rejected because she was suffering from Red Kryptonite exposure, which seems pretty mean when you consider they darn well should have known that Red K only lasts for 24 hours. But in Action Comics #276, she got her next chance.

This issue begins similar to Clark’s first encounter with the Legion. Linda Lee is walking around Midvale, lamenting the fact that she’s got no super-powered friends to hang out with. (I feel compelled to point out that this was 1961, and even the most embryonic form of the Teen Titans wouldn’t first appear until 1964, but isn’t it weird that they never had Supergirl join until the Matrix version in the 90s?) To her surprise, she’s soon approached by three girls with powers: one wearing a mask, one that can move through solid objects, and another who can split into three bodies. The girl with the mask removes it to reveal that she’s Saturn Girl, one of the members of the Legion Supergirl met before. If you need an explanation for why she bothered with the mask, the only answer I have is that in the Silver Age nobody was ever straightforward about ANYTHING. The girls – Saturn Girl, Phantom Girl, and Triplicate Girl – take her to the future for a second shot at joining the Legion, this time alongside fellow prospective members Sun Boy, Bouncing Boy, and Brainiac 5. She is shocked at first to find that a descendant of one of her cousin’s greatest enemies is trying to be a hero, but is won over by his tender affection towards her. Supergirl is given a time-traveling membership like the one Superboy had, while Brainiac becomes a permanent member. Then, for absolutely no reason, she has a brief encounter in Atlantis, which only serves to lead up to a final panel where Linda remarks on the fact that she may not have a boyfriend in Midvale, but there’s an alien 1,000 years in the future AND a merman in Atlantis crushing on her, so it ain’t so bad.

Abysmal epilogue sequence aside, this is an interesting issue. It introduces not one, but FIVE significant Legionnaires (both Bouncing Boy and Sun Boy joined the team by the next time they turned up), and gives Supergirl a peer group like her cousin – in fact, the SAME one as her cousin. And just in case you’re worried about any timey-wimey problems arising from the fact that Superboy and Supergirl were members of the same team, they found ways to play with it. They established, for instance, that Saturn Girl placed a telepathic block on each of them, so that when they returned to their respective time periods, they would lose any memories they’d gained that would be relevant to their own future. Practically, this meant that Superboy only remembered that one day his superpowered cousin would come to Earth when he was actually in the future. They also usually avoided having both of them appear in a Legion story at the same time, so it didn’t come up too often.

Over the years, they would each bond with the Legion, and this is where I really think this group becomes important. The JLA is Superman’s team, sure, and he is close to several of them. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman in particular are called the DC “Trinity,” and their friendship is important, the stuff of legend.

But those are the friends he has as an adult. The Legion are his childhood friends, and that’s important. That’s special. As we learned from stories such as Stand By Me and The Sandlot, the friends we have when we’re young are a fundamental part of shaping who we are as adults. And there’s been more than one story that demonstrates just how important the Legion of Super-Heroes is to making Superboy become the Superman of legend. 

At least, until Man of Steel in 1986 upended everything by that declaring that Clark Kent had never had a career as Superboy. That change in the timeline would have catastrophic consequences for the Legion of Super-Heroes. 

But I’ll read about that tomorrow. For now, why not join me in a look at the two Superman-related comics that hit the shops this week? 

Someone’s gonna pay for that window.

Absolute Superman #8 begins the second story arc of the series. Visiting Martha Kent in Smallville, Kal-El is approached by Lois Lane…unfortunately, she’s followed by the rest of Lazarus, the Peacemakers, the Omega Men, and – oh yeah – a sniper with Kryptonite bullets. Jason Aaron keeps mixing up the DC Universe here, taking familiar pieces and putting them in unfamiliar positions, like plucking a Lego brick from a castle set and using it to build a spaceship. It’s a fun exercise, though, and I keep enjoying the stuff they’re doing.  

We also get the first issue of Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. Kong 2. Picking up a few years after the end of the previous miniseries, it’s Barry Allen’s wedding day! Unfortunately, he still hasn’t told Iris his secret identity. As the League tries to coax him into doing so, Amanda Waller reactivates Task Force X to deal with a resurgence of Titans (not the Teen ones – that’s what they call Kaiju in the Legendary Monsterverse). I love these crossovers, and I think it’s very interesting that, for the next few months at least, Godzilla is going to feature in comics from no less than THREE American publishers: the Monsterverse version here, the Toho version fighting the Marvel Universe over there, and all the wild iterations in the regular Godzilla comics from IDW Publishing. 

Thur., June 5

Comics: Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 3 #37, Superman Vol. 2 #8, Action Comics #591, Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 3 #48, Secret Six Vol. 5 #3 (Super Son)

Who says you can’t go home and have a fight with another iteration of yourself from a parallel pocket dimension again?

Notes: I’ve written at length about John Byrne’s Man of Steel in 1986 and how that reboot changed the Superman mythos. But one aspect I haven’t talked about that much is the Legion. As a team who not only had Superboy and Supergirl as members, but whose entire existence was INSPIRED by Superboy, after DC changed their continuity to declare that Superboy and Supergirl never existed, how could they explain the Legion? The solution came in this four-part story from 1987, beginning in Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 3 #37.

Cosmic Boy, having recently returned from a visit to the 20th century (in his own self-titled miniseries) reports that the past has been altered, and the Legion has to investigate. A time storm hurls them to the past, to a Smallville populated by Superboy – a time that Cosmic Boy has reported no longer exists. Arriving in Smallville, the team splits in half – one group making contact with Superboy, the others staying with the time bubble. Superboy ambushes the team, though, trapping them in a stasis-beam. When Pete Ross (an honorary Legionnaire) warns the others what Superboy has done, they attempt to flee. And in the distant future, the Legion’s old enemy the Time Trapper revels in the chaos he is sewing. Part two comes in Superman #8, set in the “present day” of 1987, where we begin with John Byrne’s Clark Kent using his powers to help Lana fix up the farm she is returning to after years away. His super-senses detect a time bubble with four super-powered teenagers appearing across Smallville, and they get into one of those required “heroes fight heroes over a misunderstanding” situations before Brainiac 5 calls an end to hostilities. Brainy tells Superman about their history with Superboy, a history he has no memory of, and as they prepare to seek answers, Superboy appears and captures the five of them in his stasis ray. 

Action Comics #591 gives us part three of the story: Superboy is being forced to attack his friends by the Time Trapper, who reveals that Superboy’s entire existence is part of a trap laid for the Legion. Over the centuries, stories of Superman’s legend had been changed, making the Legion believe in a “Superboy” era that never existed. When they first decided to time travel and meet Superboy (back in Adventures #247), the Trapper created an entire pocket universe that matched their skewed legends of Clark Kent. It was THIS Superboy that the Legion befriended, who joined them, and who they visited every time they traveled to the past. But unable to betray his friends, Superboy altered the stasis beam so Superman would escape and chase them, ultimately landing in the pocket universe. Superboy and the Legion reconcile and go to the future, returning Superman to his own universe – but this wouldn’t be his last encounter with the Pocket Universe.

We’ll get to that some other week.

The story ends tragically in Legion #38. As Superboy and the Legion confront the Time Trapper, he reveals that one of his machines has protected the Pocket Universe from the multiversal devastation that happened in Crisis on Infinite Earths. In the skies above Smallville, Superboy sacrifices his life to save his universe from destruction. The Legion brings his body back to the 30th century to mourn…with an eye towards revenge against the Time Trapper once and for all.

Paul Levitz, longtime Legion writer, had a tough task here. Remove Superboy from the board, recognize that the “real” Superman was never Superboy and never a member of the Legion, but do so in a way that was still respectful to the Legion’s history. I think he did as good a job as anybody possibly could. The “Pocket Universe” conceit manages to keep every story where Superboy, Supergirl, or the Super-Pets encountered the Legion canonical, even if they’re only canon to the Legion and not the rest of the DC Universe. Furthermore, even though Superboy may never have been “real” in the first place, Levitz gave him a sendoff worthy of the Man of Steel that he would never grow up to be — sacrificing himself to save his world is the kind of thing members of the House of El do. Kara did it in the Crisis, The Post-Crisis Superman would do it on the streets of Metropolis a few years later. Self-sacrifice is hardwired in the DNA of the Superman family, and this story demonstrated that nicely. 

Which makes it a little frustrating that six years later, Zero Hour would throw it all out the window.

Fri., June 6

Comics: “Future Tense” storyline: Superboy Vol. 3 #21, Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 4 #74, Legionnaires #31; The Legion #25-33, Legion Secret Files 3003, Teen Titans Vol. 3 #16, Teen Titans/Legion Special

Be honest, are you Team Leather Jacket or Team T-Shirt?

Notes: The Crisis was intended to streamline the DC Multiverse, and while it was largely successful, there were loose ends that just…dangled. It caused problems for a while, and in 1993 Dan Jurgens tried to close off those issues in Zero Hour: A Crisis in Time. It was a good story, and one of the changes it wrought was a reboot of the Legion of Super-Heroes. As Man of Steel did for Superman, the Legion reboot started the characters over from page one – they were teens again, the names and costumes were made a little less “Silver Age-y” (Lightning Lad, for instance, became Live Wire, Triplicate Girl became Triad, and so forth), and in this continuity, the Legion was inspired generally by the heroes of the past, and not Superboy or Superman specifically.  Our new Superboy, the one we met in “Reign of the Supermen,” had his own title by now, and first encountered the Legion in a three-part story called “Future Tense” from 1995. 

The Legion travels back in time to rescue Valor, a rebooted version of their own Mon-El (it’s a long story) that Superboy had encountered a few issues ago in his title. After the requisite “fight over a misunderstanding” happens, Superboy tells the Legion how Valor had nearly died from lead poisoning until he entered a “zone where time stands still,” because there was NO way they would be allowed to call it the “Phantom Zone.” Brainiac 5 tries to reopen the zone until, frustrated by the technology of the time, he warps all of them – Superboy included – back to their home in the 30th century. Things get more complicated when Superboy accidentally lets it slip that Valor – who, in the past millennia, has become a religious figure – is returning, causing a massive upheaval among the millions of Valorites across the galaxy. The Legion makes it look as though their attempt to rescue Valor fails, getting his devotees to back off, then rescue him for real in private before sending Superboy home.

This story was pretty emblematic of both the Legion and Superboy of the time. They’re young and they’re highly emotional. In this version, for instance, Triad’s three different bodies each have different parts of her personality, and one of her immediately gets the hots for Superboy. Superboy, meanwhile, was in his hotheaded stage, and certain members of the Legion took severe umbrage to that, specifically Leviathan (this incarnation’s version of Colossal Boy) and Brainiac 5 himself. Still, he does manage to prove his worth, and at the end of the three issues Cosmic Boy (whose name did NOT get updated) makes him an honorary member of the Legion. The kid and the team would encounter each other occasionally over the next few years, through assorted time travel shenanigans, but we wouldn’t see Superboy as a full member until 2003. 

At this point, both the Legion and Superboy had gone through some dark times, the former having its series restarted as just The Legion, and the latter having his series cancelled and being jutted over into Teen Titans. So it was surprising to see him show up on the cover to The Legion #25, wearing a classic Superman costume rather than his own uniform, no less. The story was a bit different – after an issue largely spent recapping their recent tragedies and stacking the new status quo, they found Superboy drifting inexplicably through space. This kicks off the six-part “Foundations” storyline, in which Superboy and the Legion face off against Darkseid and wind up meeting a time-tossed Clark Kent, still a teenager, before he ever put on a superhero costume. It’s a great story, really, although it is HEAVILY mired in the stuff that had happened in the Legion in the last few years, and it would probably be unadvisable to read on its own – I feel like it would be really confusing to anyone who wasn’t familiar with “Legion of the Damned” or the stories that followed it. 

The important thing is that it showed Superboy maturing, becoming a better person and a better hero, and that’s all to the good. Superboy stuck around with the team for the rest of the run, which was all well and good…except that he was also appearing concurrently in Teen Titans with no explanation. After Legion ended with issue #38, we got a two-part story wrapping everything up. In Teen Titans #16, Conner is having lunch with Cassie (Wonder Girl) when he’s plucked up by the Stargate that sent him to the 31st Century. He reappears a moment later, now wearing his Legion uniform, telling Cassie that he needs the Titans to help save the future. So his entire tenure in the Legion, presumably, takes place between those two panels: pencil that in, continuity nerds. Anyway, they’re attacked by the Persuader, and Superboy brings the Titans to the 31st Century, where the Fatal Five have created a Legion of their own to attack Earth: an army of Fatal Fives from throughout the multiverse. Fortunately, Brainiac 5 has a plan, but it requires the work of TWO speedsters: the Legion’s XS and her cousin, Bart Allen, aka Kid Flash. They manage to defeat the Five, but the Legion is lost in the timestream, all except for Shikkari, who finds herself in another world, where the Legion is…different.

Yep. Time for another reboot.

This iteration of the Legion lasted 10 years, and it’s the first one I ever read as a regular reader. As such, I have great affection for it. The stories were solid, with a classic flavor that still felt modern, and the art was wonderful. I was really sorry to see it end, but I’m glad that when it went, at least there was a member of the House of El standing with them in what looked – at the time – like their final moments. But we would see this Legion again.

Just not yet. 

Sat., June 7

Graphic Novel: Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes: Strange Visitor From Another Century (Collects Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 5 #14, Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #16-19)

“Don’t ask ME, I thought she was DEAD.”

Notes: The “Threeboot” Legion that followed the Titans/Legion special was an interesting beast. Written by Mark Waid, with art by Barry Kitson, this newest iteration gave us a Legion inspired by stories of the heroes of the past that much of the population believed to be mere legends – nobody really BELIEVED that the likes of Superman, Batman, or Wonder Woman had ever existed. Society had grown increasingly distant and oppressive – people stayed home, alone, communicating electronically but rarely seeing one another in person. What’s more, the youth of the galaxy were particularly downtrodden, with free thinking suppressed to make sure everyone conformed. In this universe, the Legion were a group of super-powered teens who rejected this system. They adopted costumes and code-names inspired by the heroes of the past and started a movement, with other young people from across the galaxy joining them.

The volume I read today picks up after their first few adventures, where they’ve proven their worth and the United Planets has reluctantly deputized them as a peacekeeping force. As the Legion licks their wounds from a recent loss, things are tossed into upheaval when a young woman professing to be the legendary Supergirl appears. Much of the galaxy believes that she’s a hoax, because they think Supergirl is a fictional character. As for Supergirl herself, this is the Kara Zor-El who climbed out of a rocket in Gotham Harbor only a few months ago (by her reckoning, but not much longer in real time). Between her adventures with her cousin, Batman, and Wonder Woman, the devastation of the Crisis, and now finding herself 1000 years in the future, the trauma has begun to affect her mind and she believes that everything that has happened to her – including her existence in the Legion’s time – is a dream, and that any minute she’s going to wake up back on Krypton.

Waid had already created a world for the Legion dissimilar from the previous two, and this was a Supergirl that was different from any other Superman family member who’d ever joined the Legion. Despite that, though, it all worked. While the WORLD was different, the Legionnaires were staunchly themselves: Cosmic Boy was the consummate leader, Lightning Lad was impulsive, Brainiac 5 an arrogant jerk who was mainly tolerated because he actually WAS the smartest one in the room as opposed to just somebody who thought he was. There were some revisions, of course – previous iterations of Shrinking Violet had often been quiet and timid, but Waid reimagined her as the ass-kicking master of espionage that somebody with her power set would logically have the ability to be. 

Meanwhile, we’ve got this traumatized Supergirl floating around with this crew, somebody who doesn’t believe that anything happening around her is actually real. Which makes it all the more impressive, I think, that she continues to act every inch the hero. She saves lives, stops disasters, fights villains, even though she believes that it’s all a dream and that nothing around her will have any consequences. Perhaps it’s the level of her consciousness that knows it’s NOT a delusion, perhaps it’s just that Kara Zor-El can’t help but help people no matter the circumstances. Whatever it is, it made for a unique dynamic. Supergirl stayed with the book for a couple of years, going home in issue #36, and the series itself ended at issue #50.

But even before this version of the Legion went away, we got glimpses of what was next. 

Sun., June 8

Graphic Novel: Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes, collects Action Comics #858-863

Now THIS is going home again.

Notes: I don’t mind telling you that Geoff Johns is one of my favorite comic book writers. His strengths, as I think he proved with his tenures on Flash and Green Lantern, come when he takes the framework of the past and expands upon them. He’s the writer, for instance, who used the existence of Sinestro’s yellow ring to extrapolate an entire Sinestro Corps, and from there, a different corps of Lanterns for each color of the spectrum. His runs on Superman have been short, but what he did with the six issues of “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” from 2007 and 2008 is one of my favorite examples of his work. Although it was running concurrently with the Supergirl and the Legion series, in this storyline Johns brought back something that had been lost from Superman’s past, much as earlier writers had brought back Krypto, the Phantom Zone, and Supergirl: he was restoring Superman’s history with the Legion.

Johns and artist Gary Frank, who would reunite in 2009 for Superman: Secret Origin, kick things off with a bang. Superman is contacted by a probe from the future sent by Brainiac 5 reactivate suppressed memories of his past with the Legion. Suddenly, Superman remembers meeting the Legion founders, being invited to join the team, and losing contact with them after the Crisis. (I know there have been a LOT of Crises in the DCU – typically they’re referring to the original Crisis on Infinite Earths when they use the definite article, i.e. THE Crisis.) The probe brings him to the future where things have gone horribly wrong: Something has turned the sun red, diminishing Superman’s powers. Earth is being run by a xenophobic “Justice League” led by a fascist calling himself Earth-Man that has made the Legion, with its many alien members, outlaws. Oh yes – and Brainiac 5, the Legionnaire who brought Superman to the future, is missing. Earth-Man, as it turns out, is a Legion reject who can absorb powers from others. He built a following claiming that Superman was a human, not an alien, and in fact was staunchly opposed to the presence of aliens on Earth. He’s been capturing the non-human Legionnaires and stealing their powers in his quest for conquest. 

Superman and the few remaining Legionnaires manage to escape Earth and track Brainiac 5 to his homeworld of Colu, the only planet in the galaxy more xenophobic than Earth. They gather Brainy and a few others, including the Legion of Substitute Heroes, and together launch an assault on the Justice League on Earth, where they learn that Earth-Man has been using the captive Sun Boy to make our sun red, weakening Superman. In the climactic battle, a powerless Superman faces an Earth-Man with the power of the entire Legion flowing through him…but there’s one thing that Superman has that Earth-Man never will.

His friends.

I cannot express enough how much I love this story. There are plenty of stories of Superboy with the Legion, and those are great, but this is one of the few stories of the Legion fighting with an adult Superman, and that’s a dynamic I want to see more of. (Recent hints in the current Superman comic books are giving me hopes that we’ll see more of that soon, but I digress.) Like I said earlier this week, Superman with the Legion is a group of friends. The tone feels more like the Titans than the Justice League, a found family standing together rather than a group of disparate heroes united for a common cause. That “found family” trope is always something that resonates with me, and I love seeing Superman as a part of it.

It’s also good to see a story that makes its points without preaching or turning into a polemic. There’s a definite message here, with Earth-Man’s hatred of anyone not from Earth, but that message is secondary to the story. Not that Johns and Frank were subtle about it – Earth-Man’s costume is as close to a Nazi uniform as you can get without actually applying swastikas, and his real name is the egregiously German Kirt Niedrigh, juuuuuuuuuust in case we didn’t get what they were going for. But parallels to World War II aside, the story also has a point to make about being an outsider. Bringing the Subs in makes it even better, having them act as a foil for Earth-Man – they were rejected from the Legion just as he was, but rather than turning into monsters, they used their disappointment as fuel to become something good. 

There are plenty of questions raised by this story, of course. First of all, which Legion is this, exactly? It’s an older Legion: despite still having words like “Boy,” “Lad,” Kid,” and “Girl” in their code-names, they all appear to be roughly the same age as Superman. But the costumes and past they share with Clark seem to indicate this is a continuity that continued the characters from some point prior to the controversial “Five Years Later” era (which was the final era of the original Legion before the reboot in 1993, beginning between their second and third encounters with the time-traveling Superman in Time and Time Again). If that’s them, how are they coexisting with Supergirl’s Legion, which I remind you, was being published in their own series at this point? Who, or what, was the “real” Legion of Super-Heroes?

To answer that question, DC again turned to Geoff Johns, in what is my single favorite Legion story of all time. 

Mon., June 9

Comics: Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds #1-5

Get ready for the most egregiously misnamed Crisis of them all!

Notes: In 2008, Geoff Johns and George Perez teamed up for this five-issue miniseries. While ostensibly a spin-off of Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis event, it really has nothing to do with the larger storyline of that series and can be read independently of it. I still may get to the main Final Crisis story at some point, since the conclusion is pretty Superman-centric, but for today I’m just going to focus on this Legion story. 

Superboy-Prime, insane survivor of Earth-Prime (see Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis for the full backstory if you don’t already know it) is plucked by the Time Trapper and hurled to the Legion’s time period. Finding the Superman Museum in Smallville, Prime is horrified to discover that he’s only a footnote in Superman’s Hall of Villains, and even worse, is pushed further over the edge by the veneration of Conner Kent, the Superboy that Prime murdered in Infinite Crisis. In Metropolis, meanwhile, the United Planets is turning against the Legion, whose members are in disarray. Brainiac 5 has been stripped of his Brainiac title by his home planet, Mon-El is suffering from the lead poisoning that plagues all Daxamites, and Sun Boy’s powers haven’t returned since his torture at the hands of Earth-Man. Things get progressively worse as Prime springs all of the Legion’s enemies from prison, creating an entire Legion of Super-Villains. The real Legion brings Superman back to their time to aid them, and Brainiac 5 reveals his plan: fight a Legion with a TRUE Legion – by summoning the Legions of two other worlds in the multiverse.

Brainy uses the Crystal Ball that the Justice League and Justice Society used for their very first team-up in the Silver Age to summon the other two Legions – the Reboot Legion that Conner had been a member of, and the Threeboot Legion that had welcomed Kara. Superman and the assembled Legions battle Prime’s army as Brainy enacts Stage Two of his plan: assembling all the electrical-powered Legionnaires to charge up XS and use her to pull her cousin, the presumed-dead Bart Allen, from the Speed Force to rejoin them as Kid Flash. Finally, the Brainiacs use Time Travel to implement Phase Three of their plan: a version of Starman in the 21st century robs a certain grave and transports its inhabitant to the Antarctic. A thousand years later, the Brainiacs unearth the body, which has been slowly healing and rebuilding for a millennia in the same Kryptonian device that brought Superman back after his battle with Doomsday. The final piece to restore him is a hair from one of his genetic donors – Lex Luthor (taken, naturally, from a point in the past BEFORE he went bald). After a thousand years, Conner Kent lives again. 

The battle rages on two fronts – Superboy, Kid Flash and the Legions versus Prime in the Arctic, Superman and the original founders versus the Time Trapper in deep space. It turns out the two battles are really one: this iteration of the Trapper is a future version of Superboy-Prime himself. But for all his power, all his anger, in the final battle, the Legion lives.

Ever since Man of Steel, the Legion’s continuity had become a mess, with two reboots failing to make things simpler, since their interactions with the heroes of the present kept contradicting each other. Legion of 3 Worlds finally solved the problem by establishing that each of the three Legions was from a different world of the Multiverse. The original Legion, the one that Clark had been a member of in his youth, was from the future of DC’s main universe. The Reboot Legion, Conner’s Legion, was from Earth-247, a world that had been destroyed in a Crisis, but not one of the ones that was restored when the Multiverse was brought back. And Kara’s Threeboot Legion, amazingly, was from the future of Earth-Prime, the world where all of the DC Comics heroes exist as fictional characters. All those times in Waid’s run when people had insisted to the Legion that the ancient stories about Superman and the Justice League weren’t real? In their universe, they were right. 

So not only was the Legion clarified in a way that made sense, but Johns used it to bring back two of the Teen Titans he’d written in an immensely satisfying way, and even used this miniseries as a springboard for the return of the Green Lantern Corps in the 31st century. The Legion was finally clear, established in a way that made sense, and ready for action. And it was done in a way that made all three Legions legitimate and viable, and set each of them up so that they could be used in different ways across the tales of the DC Multiverse. He even managed to codify the importance of the Legion in Superman’s history, explicitly stating (via R.J. Brande) that it was his interactions with Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad that taught young Clark Kent what it meant to be a hero, and that he would in turn become the inspiration for heroes for the next 1,000 years. It was the perfect fix and the perfect fit. 

Why, DC? WHY THE HELL DID YOU DECIDE TO REBOOT THEM YET AGAIN???

Tue., June 10

Comics: Superman Vol. 5 #14, 15

If you people ever doubt that I love you, remember that I read this comic again so I could write about it.

Notes: A few years post-Final Crisis, as we all know, DC rebooted their entire universe in the New 52 relaunch, including both Superman and the Legion. Once again, Superman was divorced from the roots of the Legion, but other than that, the Legion was one of the properties that was relatively unchanged. But it didn’t set sales on fire, either, and the New 52 version was quietly cancelled after two years. After that, their appearances became sporadic for a while until 2018, when Marvel superstar Brian Michael Bendis was hired by DC to take over the Superman comics.

I’m going to be blunt, guys, I’m not typically a fan of Bendis’s work. I don’t want to spend all day explaining the reasons why, but I don’t think I’ll need to, as my Legion-specific criticisms will make it clear. The biggest issue I had with his run was his treatment of Jon Kent. Lois and Clark’s son had been around in comics for a few years, and was about 10 years old. The stories of Clark raising his son were magnificent. They were fresh, they were original, they were something that we rarely saw in comics: an adult superhero teaching his child what it means to BE a hero is a dynamic that, somehow, had gone almost ignored in the 80 years that the superhero genre had been around. So when Bendis took over, of course, the first thing he did was have Jon fall into a spacehole with his grandfather and come out as a teenager. 

It’s more complicated than that, but the gist of it was that sweet and joyful Jon was now an angst-filled teenage superhero, of which we have thousands, and like most teenage superheroes his stories quickly began to drift towards “adults screw everything up, but kids MY age know better.” It’s a tired, stale trope that we’ve seen a billion times. But there is one good thing I can say about Bendis’s Superman comics: compared to his work on Legion of Super-Heroes, his Superman looks like Watchmen. 

It started in issue #14 of his Superman run, the tail end of a story arc about Superman, Supergirl, and Superboy teaming up with General Zod to capture an alien who has responsible for the destruction of Krypton. At the end of the story, the Kryptonians are brought before a coalition of alien races who were caught up in their battle, and Jon says something along the lines of, “On Earth, we have a thing called the United Nations…” Then, after his dad gives a brief speech about working together, a time portal opens. And the new, re-re-rebooted Legion of Super-Heroes spills out of it and offers Jon membership because he just invented the United Planets by saying ten words that point out something that already exists, and thus he’s the most important historical figure of the past 1,000 years.

I’m getting a headache.

In issue #15 of Superman, the word of Jon’s AMAAAAAZING insight starts to spread. Adam Strange even says “I can’t believe I’ve been out here this entire time and I didn’t think of it.” (Neither can anyone else, Adam – didn’t you ever watch Star Trek? For that matter, are we really supposed to believe that NOBODY had ever thought of this idea before in the ENTIRE GALAXY?) Then the Legion offers to take Jon to the future with them, because he’s so smart and awesome and cool and they wanna be friends with them. He winds up going and joins them for Bendis’s 12-issue Legion series which…I should read it again today. In the interest of fairness, I should read it again for this blog, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. It…it just wasn’t the Legion.

Yeah, the character names were mostly the same. So were the powers. And they were in the 31st century. But everything that makes the Legion entertaining was entirely absent. The characterizations were…I can’t even say they were WRONG, they were GONE. The members of this team had no life, no personality, other than being ASTONISHED that the GREAT JONATHAN KENT WAS THERE. It was like reading about Jon and the Legion of Sycophants. That’s another Bendisian trait, by the way – he introduces a younger version of the hero, then all of the other characters walk around and talk about how much better the new version is than the old one. (If you think I’m exaggerating, I offer the following as evidence: Miles Morales, Ironheart, and the teenage X-Men who were brought forward in time because Beast thought their adult versions sucked.) It was in full force here, with the Legion telling us how Jon – not Clark – would be remembered as THE Superman, as THE character who saved the galaxy. And I’m sorry, if you’re going to make a claim like that, you gotta convince me of it.

There were also a ton of arbitrary changes that drove me crazy, such as making Mon-El a Kryptonian descendant of Superman rather than a Daxamite like he’s been for his entire existence. And as usual, Bendis included his own characters (which is fair) like a new version of Dr. Fate (oooookay) and a Gold Lantern whose powers and history were ill-defined and didn’t really seem to add anything to the story. I made it through the 12 issues of his run, but when he closed it off with a six-issue Justice League Vs. the Legion of Super-Heroes miniseries I couldn’t even bring myself to buy the comics, reading it instead when it came to DC Universe Infinite and still feeling as though I’d overpaid. 

Since that miniseries ended, again, the Legion has returned to sporadic appearances. Some of them have reflected the Bendis Legion, but others evoke Legions of the past. Mark Waid himself went on the record recently to tell us that DC has plans for the Legion that he thinks will make everyone happy, and we’ve already seen glimpses of that in the DC All In Special and (appropriately) the Superman titles. We’ve been promised that Superman #29 (coming out in August) will feature Superman and a “mysterious ally” searching for the lost Legion of Super-Heroes. I’m anxious and I’m optimistic. For the most part, DC’s “All In” titles have been very satisfying, and if the new Legion (whatever it is) has Mark Waid’s stamp of approval, that gives me reason to hope. Because the Legion, at its best, is not JUST a team of heroes from the future. It’s about hope for the future, just as much as Superman is. And it’s a fundamental part of who and what Superman is. It’s one of the greatest concepts in comics, and it deserves to be treated as such.

So here’s hoping that, whatever begins in August, it ends with a story that leaves us all ready to slip on our flight rings, thrust our fists into the air, and join with a battle cry that will echo back ten centuries:

Even Brainiac 5 is irritated by Brainiac 5.

But you know, I can’t end it here. I can’t conclude my look at one of my favorite pieces of the entire Superman mythology with a discussion of their worst version. So how about a little bonus? Let’s join hands, hop in Brainiac 5’s Time Bubble, and zip back to 2006 so we can watch the first episode of the Legion of Super-Heroes animated series together, shall we?

TV Episode: Legion of Super-Heroes Season 1, Episode 1: “Man of Tomorrow”

It ain’t the Diniverse, but it’s still pretty dang good.

Notes: Young Clark Kent is about to leave home. He’s packing up and heading away from Smallville to go to Metropolis, where he’s got a job as a copy boy at the Daily Planet. On the night before he’s supposed to head to the big city, though, he’s approached by a group of super-powered teenagers from the future, teens who know about the powers he’s kept hidden his entire life. He won’t miss a thing, they promise, they can return him to the moment he left – and tantalized by the idea of not having to hide himself, he goes with them. Arriving in the future, he discovers that they need his help combatting their foes, the Fatal Five. In the end, Clark takes the costume he learns he’ll have someday and, as Superman, joins the Legion.

I love this cartoon. It’s the purest expression of my favorite thing about the Legion, namely that it helps shape Clark Kent into Superman while, at the same time, being inspired BY Superman. It’s a bit more literal in this version than others – the Clark that joins this Legion hasn’t ever really been in a fight and hasn’t learned how to use all of his powers yet. The Legion has plenty to teach him, and over the first season of the show, we see him grow and blossom. The second season takes place after a time skip, returning to the future after a few years away. It was an interesting retool, but ultimately the show only lasted for those two seasons. If you love the Legion like I do, though, it’s well worth seeking them out and watching them.

After all, we Legionnaires need SOMETHING to keep us occupied between now and August. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can join in the Kryptonian Konversation every day in the Year of Superman Facebook Group!

Year of Superman Week 20: Super-Sponsor

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I’ve seen a few people online worry that, with only two months left until the debut of James Gunn’s Superman, there hasn’t been enough marketing yet. They’re worried that it shows a lack of confidence in the film. But to the contrary, I think we’re about to see Warner Bros repeat what they did two years ago with Barbie. Just like Superman, up until May there wasn’t an awful lot of official chatter yet. Then there was an AVALANCHE. New trailers, merch, a website where you could turn yourself into a Barbie meme. There was no escaping it and, in case you didn’t notice it, it turned out to be the highest grossing movie of the year. I think we’re at the beginning of that same push, and it started this week.

The debut of the new Superman trailer makes this the perfect week to kick off “Super-Sponsor,” a look at some commercials and comics that have featured the Man of Steel over the years. It’s always amused me, how fictional characters get pulled in to make a pitch for things like dog food, and I’m sure that this week is going to trigger some core memories for people. But first…

Wed., May 14

Official Superman Trailer

This guy is James Gunn’s self-insert for the entire DCU.

Notes: It’s funny, as the previous Superman trailer is what actually made me decide to start this whole “Year of Superman” blog in the first place, but now James Gunn is telling us that wasn’t a trailer at all. It was a “teaser,” he says, and the first real trailer is the one that hit today, May 14. What’s the difference between the two, you ask? I’m honestly not sure. If I were to guess, I would say that the first “teaser” just gave us glimpses, flavor. The trailer gives us a little more meat – in other words, the first real clue of what the story is gonna be. And of course, as it should, it starts with Lois Lane. In the trailer, Clark agrees to allow her to interview her as Superman about some recent actions that have apparently caused no small amount of controversy. Superman, he insists, has stopped a war. But Lois is questioning if that was the right thing, on the international level.

Oh, how I LOVED this. First of all, the interplay between David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan was spot-on. They are charming and affectionate, but at the same time, she’s a reporter, dammit, and she’s not going to blanch away from asking the hard questions. He went into a foreign country. He went without permission. “You seemingly acting as a representative of the United States–”

“I wasn’t representing anybody except for me!”  

The way the tension is sculpted here is flawless. Superman going in to save lives regardless of laws or treaties? Lois refusing to back down as he has to answer for it? This is who BOTH of these characters are. 

I know that some people have been concerned about the tone, afraid that Gunn (whose Guardians of the Galaxy films and The Suicide Squad both leaned heavily on comedy) would be too jokey, too flippant. This new trailer shows us a Superman who is good, decent, and pure, and struggling against a world that has difficulty accepting these things, and while it isn’t bereft of humor, it isn’t leaning on it the way those other films either. (And come on, people, even Guardians of the Galaxy mixed in the humor with real pathos. If you watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and didn’t shed a tear, I don’t know what I can even say to you.”  

We also see María Gabriela de Faría as the Engineer, working with Lex, storming the Fortress of Solitude. We hear a nice monologue from Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, explaining how he can’t handle this alien dominating the conversation around the world. (It almost sounds like Superman is still new in town, the way Lex is talking here. We know this movie won’t be an origin story, but it remains to be seen just how far removed from the origin we’re actually going to be.)

We see more of Mr. Terrific, Guy Gardner, and Hawkgirl. We see Krypto stealing the show a few more times.

We see a movie that promises to be about a hero trying to do the right thing and a world that doesn’t know how to handle it.

I’ve been optimistic about this movie from the beginning. As of the teaser back in December, I’ve been gung-ho. Now? Now I’m…

I don’t know. What’s the next level up from gung-ho?

I’m overjoyed, and I cannot wait for July 11. 

Commercial: Milk-Bone Dog Biscuits: “For Honor” 

I don’t even have a dog and this almost worked on me.

Notes: As I said, I think this is where the marketing avalanche begins, and after Krypto became the star of the first teaser trailer, I’m not surprised to see it begin with Milk-Bone. Aside from a little Krypto footage we’ve already seen from the teaser, the trailer, and the sneak peek, we also get a scene of Mr. Terrific playing with Krypto and giving him treats, which I believe is my wife’s favorite part, as she squealed adorably with glee. I don’t own a dog, so this isn’t going to make me purchase anything, but if I did…I gotta admit, this ad would work.

Comic: Superman: A Friendship Unleashed #1 

“Unleashed?” Oh, I get it. It’s a pun, right?

Notes: In addition to the Milk-Bone commercial, we also got a new digital comic book, also sponsored by Milk-Bone. It’s a pretty simple 10-page story by Ivan Cohen and Travis Mercer, starting with Superman and Krypto playing fetch and then winding up having to save a dog park from an out-of-control fire engine, then working together to stop a S.T.A.R. Labs disaster that the fire truck was racing to prevent. Also, there are prominent Milk-Bone logos whenever it was easy to sneak it into the artwork. Is it a great comic book? No. But it’s cute enough, and it gives Krypto a little bit of a spotlight. Historically, this is mostly notable as – except a brief prophetic vision in an episode of Creature Commandos – the first actual story appearance of David Corenswet’s Superman…well…anywhere. 

Thur., May 15

Comic: Superman Meets the Quik Bunny #1

Much better than when Superman arrested the Trix Rabbit for stalking kids.

Notes: Hailing from 1986, this one-shot brings Superman face-to-face with his greatest ally: a cartoon rabbit!

No, wait, they did that in Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew #1. I guess the big difference here is that Cap gets his power from eating irradiated carrots, whereas the Quik Bunny gets his from chocolate milk.

ANYHOO…In this comic, the Weather Wizard attacks Washington, D.C., and Superman leaps into action to stop him. Why Superman instead of, say, the Flash (Weather Wizard’s usual sparring partner) or Wonder Woman (who actually lived in D.C. at the time)? Because Quik paid for Superman, dammit. Superman is quickly (no pun intended) joined by the Bunny and his friends, the Quik Club – four genius kids who are there to problem-solve and catch the Weather Wizard.

It’s a ridiculous story, but there are a couple of things for which I really do give them credit. First of all, the product placement is surprisingly kept to a minimum. The Quik Bunny and the kids are introduced while drinking chocolate milk, then it isn’t mentioned again until the climax, where the Bunny is feeling down and the kids give him a jolt of Quik to get his head back in the game. There’s one last mention on the final page, when Superman joins the Bunny and the kids for a glass, but I can allow that. After all, once you’ve saved the nation’s capital from a bad guy with control over the fundamental elements of the climate, a cool glass of chocolate milk probably WOULD hit the spot.

The other thing I like about this comic is that it’s not JUST a comic. Every two or three pages, we get a little activity that ties into the story – mazes, word scrambles, connect-the-dots, and other such games that make the book a little more interactive. Granted, modern comic book nerds would find the notion of taking a pencil to the pages of a comic book to be horrifying, but comics like this weren’t made for people who were just planning to put ‘em in plastic, they were made to give away to KIDS (and entice them to beg their parents for Nestle Quik), and kids like that sort of thing. Or at least, they did back in the 80s. Maybe it wouldn’t work now, I don’t know, but as a kid of the 80s, I for one appreciated this silly little comic book. 

Fri. May 15

Comics: Superman: The Computers That Saved Metropolis

This is the worst Legion of Super-Heroes reboot ever.

Notes: Remember Radio Shack? That little store where you could buy all the computer and electronic components that you needed? My dad was an early adopter to computer technology, and I liked accompanying him to Radio Shack because sometimes – SOMETIMES – they had these free giveaway comic books. I didn’t care that they were kind of dumb, that the “Tandy Computer Whiz Kids” were ridiculous characters, and that every book they produced were blatant commercials for Radio Shack’s TRS-80 line of personal computing devices. You know what I cared about? FREE COMICS, that’s what.

By the time I was going to Radio Shack with Dad, the comics they were producing were mostly published by Archie and starred the Whiz Kids in their own adventures, but there were three comics from before I got into them that I had to hunt down later, because they featured Superman. The first was The Computers That Saved Metropolis from 1980. The story kicks off with Superman taking time out of his busy schedule to give a guest lesson to an elementary school class about the history of computers, because apparently there were no crimes, natural disasters, or multidimensional incursions that could be a better use of his time. He begins lecturing the kids – and the reader – on the history of the computer, with a kid named Alec acting as an audience surrogate in that he finds the lecture kind of boring, despite the fact that it’s being given by Superman. 

At the end of the lecture, the kids sit down to practice using the computers just as Superman is called away to stop a freak tornado that appeared out of nowhere in the middle of Metropolis. Rather than investigating this meteorological anomaly, Superman instead goes back to school where they have a little contest to see if the computer can complete math problems faster than he can. (Spoiler alert: It ends in a tie. The most ridiculous and improbable tie since the first time Superman raced the Flash.) A second test ends in Superman’s defeat, but only because (we learn) that freak tornado was the work of Major Disaster, who used it to release millions of microscopic Kryptonite fragments all over the city. The tiny crystals aren’t enough to take Superman out entirely, but they’re fogging his brain and making it hard to control his powers. With Superman operating on reduced efficiency, Disaster starts his REAL plan, screwing up the city’s computers. So Superman, of course, calls in the Justice League to take care of the situation.

HAHA! Just kidding! No, that would make sense. No, instead he burrows under the elementary school (it’s too dangerous for him to fly), bursts through the floor, and then has children use the two computers he brought in earlier that Disaster didn’t have a chance to monkey with to help guide him through averting Major Disaster’s major disasters. In the end, of course, Major Disaster is captured, the Kryptonite passes out of Superman’s system, and Alec and Shanna wind up on the news talking about how awesome computers are. 

We just saw the origin story of the Tandy Computer Whiz Kids, folks. And yeah, it’s silly, and it’s ridiculous, and it is utterly illogical that Superman would allow children to guide him in the control of his powers when hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake. But ask yourself this question: is it any less plausible than the fact that Adventure Bay has outsourced its entire first responder system to a child and his six dogs? Or that virtually every law enforcement organization in the world accepts the help of the gang in the Mystery Machine? The children are our future, people. Time we accepted that. 

Sat., May 17

Comics: Superman: Victory By Computer, Superman: The Computer Masters of Metropolis

This is becoming a habit.

Notes: Superman followed up his first adventure with the TRS-80 Whiz Kids a year later in another special, Victory By Computer. In this one, Superman and Supergirl both appear in Alec and Shanna’s classrooms, at which point the students are immediately disappointed because the all-powerful superheroes from another planet didn’t bring new computers with them. Man, and I thought MY students had attitude sometimes.

But it’s okay! Turns out that Superman and Supergirl DID bring computers – the brand-new TRS-80 POCKET computer, small enough to fit in the little pouches under their capes! As in the first special, we launch into an educational lesson, but instead of the history of computers, this time it’s about programming and modern technology. I give Radio Shack credit for at least not repeating themselves, and there is an amusing sequence where the kids are walking across a giant keyboard that looks like they got it out of the Batcave.

Oh yeah, and Lex Luthor is up to some shenanigans, this time summoning Supergirl and trapping her in a room with red sun lamps which – as we all know – negate Kryptonian powers. Fortunately, Alec and Shanna are there once again to lend a hand, aiding Superman in his cousin’s rescue with the help of an ancient and mystical creation known as…the MODEM. 

“Ah man, not THESE weiners again.” –Superman, probably.

In the third and final team-up with the TRS-80 kids, The Computer Masters of Metropolis, we get a new guest-star. This time, it’s Wonder Woman who shows up in Alec and Shanna’s classroom. (Meanwhile, across town at another elementary school, these visits from the fire department are seeming lamer and lamer.) After the lesson, it’s time for a surprise field trip – Wonder Woman is taking the kids down to the Metropolis World’s Fair to check out the computer exhibition. Their old pal Superman, meanwhile, is already at the fair, where he’s standing guard after Lex Luthor threatened to destroy the fair because they refused to showcase any of his scientific achievements. (Golly, I wonder why?)

There’s more Wonder Woman than Superman in this book, and she spends the first half of it giving the kids a tour of the fair, talking a little bit more about the history of computers, and impressing upon them just how integrated they have become in our daily lives. It’s actually pretty quaint to read this sort of thing – in 1982, computers were still a novelty. If they were to try to write a story today talking about how everybody uses computers, it would seem as ridiculous as telling them how important cars or, like, refrigerators are. After the kids go home, Wonder Woman sticks around in her Diana Prince identity, unaware that Luthor has tricked Superman into yet another Red Sun trap. The guy must keep the factory that makes those bulbs in business all by himself.

Superman is stuck in an auditorium bathed in the red bulbs, and Luthor has rigged the place with explosives to prevent him from escaping. But he’s made a mistake, as villains do – he forgot to remove the TELEPHONE. So Superman calls the Daily Planet and…gets a busy signal. So who does he call next? Batman? Supergirl? The Inferior Five ?Ambush Bug?

HE CALLS ALEC. THE SIXTH GRADER WITH A COMPUTER.

And Alec calls Shanna.

And Shanna calls the World’s Fair and has them page Wonder Woman, who saves Superman from the trap, and they capture Luthor.

These books are wild, guys.

Like I said when I wrote about the first of these three comics, they’re silly and quaint, and just as a nerd who loves both Superman and weird comics, I enjoy having these. But there’d never be any danger of them turning up in any collected edition of the Greatest Superman Stories ever told.

On the other hand, I wonder who actually owns the TRS-80 Whiz Kids now that Radio Shack doesn’t exist anymore. Is that valuable IP floating around somewhere? Could Alec and Shanna turn up in some gritty Black Label series, probably by Tom King? And if so, would they still be…the Computer Masters of Metropolis?

I’m just kidding, guys, this is never gonna happen. 

A quick note that has nothing to do with the Whiz Kids, guys, but that I thought was interesting. If you’ll recall, I started this week’s blog writing about the new Milk-Bone comic book, and at the time, I thought it was digital-only. Looks like I was wrong, though – there WAS a print run, and you could order it from Milk-Bone with a box of dog biscuits. Apparently this was ridiculously popular, so popular that the website had to be taken down and the print version of this book is now showing up on eBay for upwards of $80. It was absurd to me, and I couldn’t figure out why people were going so crazy for it – then it hit me.

Like I said then, TECHNICALLY, that Milk-Bone comic book is the first appearance of David Corenswet’s Superman. And I bet the speculators are pouncing on it for that reason.

I’ll check eBay again in six months. It’ll probably be more reasonable then. 

Sun. May 18

Commercials: “Superman Peanut Butter,” “Superman Vs. Nick O’Teen”

Notes: Over the years, Superman has occasionally turned up in commercials for products or services that didn’t really have any relevance to him personally. In fact, in one case, they even NAMED a product after him for truly astonishing reasons. Back in the early 80s, Sunnyland Refining Co. had a new brand of Peanut Butter it was planning to launch, and so of course they asked the obvious question: who is the obvious spokesman? Peter Pan was popular, of course, so maybe another flying hero. Condorman? Casper the Friendly Ghost? Tweety Bird? No. The obvious answer, of course, was Superman. 

Or something like that, I have no idea how Sunnyland wound up making Superman Peanut Butter, and Google has not been particularly helpful in my research, but I sure as hell REMEMBER Superman Peanut Butter. I remember it, I miss it, and I firmly believe that if we could bring it back today the world would be at least a little bit better for everybody except for people like my nephew who have nut allergies. (Sorry, Grant.)

“Lex? Could you — could you not make that face in front of the kids, please?”

There were a few commercials over the years for Superman Peanut Butter, but the one I remember most fondly was this one from 1983, in which Superman has been captured by Lex Luthor. Luthor, demonstrating the primary concern of most supervillains, wanted Superman to tell him the secret of why Superman Peanut Butter tastes so great: “So fresh roasted,” Lex intones, “So creamy!” As he berates the Man of Steel for his refusal to share his legume-spread secrets, a bunch of random kids peek in through a glassless window, drop a rope, and swing Lex’s Kryptonite to a lead box that has been left conveniently open, allowing Superman to burst out of his cell and capture him. I don’t know exactly which level of the DC Multiverse this commercial takes place in, but this is clearly not the smartest Lex Luthor we’ve got. On the other hand, this Superman was willing to die in order to protect his peanut butter secret, so maybe he isn’t the smartest Supes, either.

At any rate, this goofy commercial has stuck with me for all these years, and darn it, I DO still long for a slice of toast with a thick layer of Superman Brand Peanut butter. A few weeks ago, in the Comic Book Collecting Facebook Group I help moderate, someone asked the question of whether anyone ever REALLY bought Superman Peanut Butter just because of the association with the character. 

Yes, sir. I assure you. We did. 

The same year that Superman Peanut Butter launched, we also got a trio of anti-smoking ads starring the man of tomorrow. All three ads follow the same basic pattern. A bunch of kids are being approached by a hideous villain called Nick O’Teen who tries to entice them to try cigarettes. Superman shows up. Superman kind of brutalizes Nick. Then he crushes the cigarettes with his Kryptonian might and stares at the camera.

Not since Patty O’Furniture has a villain had such a stereotypical name.

That is not to suggest that the commercials are identical, of course. In one of them, Superman destroys the cigarettes in front of Nick’s face as he begs, pathetically, for a fix. In another, Nick is disguised as a wizard teaching the kids magic tricks with cigarettes before Superman stops him. And in one, Superman just gets so fed up that he hurls Nick O’Teen far enough away that – as my wife commented as she watched the commercial with me – “he straight-up murdered him.” 

Maybe, but who’s gonna cry for the guy trying to give cigarettes to kids?

To say that these ads are poorly made is an understatement. Superman is constantly off-model, and he doesn’t even seem to have a consistent voice in the three of them. In fact, in the first it almost sounds like someone was trying to do an impression of Arnold Schwarzenneger before he began to speak the flawless English he is known for today. But the question remains: were these commercials EFFECTIVE?

Well, the message we seem to take away from them is, “If you try cigarettes, you will be brutally killed by Superman.” And I gotta admit, that’s enough to make me never want to take a puff.

In 2004 we once again saw Superman grace American televisions to shill a product. This time, though, he wasn’t alone. Superman (voiced by Patrick Warburton) is joined by none other than Jerry Seinfeld in an ad called “A Uniform Used to Mean Something” by American Express. Although most of us saw the 30- or 60-second truncated versions of this ad campaign, there’s a full five minute short film on YouTube that you can – and should – watch right now. 

“And what’s the deal with the bottle city of Kandor?”

Seinfeld (who of course CLAIMS to be a huge Superman fan, but ask yourself, where’s HIS “Year of Superman” blog? Huh? HUH?) and Superman are going out to lunch. They engage in a series of conversations that would have fit in perfectly on his self-titled sitcom – complaining about the amount of mayonnaise on a sandwich, discussing how great the surround sound on Jerry’s new DVD player will be (“What do you care? You’ve got super-hearing.” “Yeah, but it’s not SURROUND SOUND.”) And then, as Superman is stuck reading the reviews for a new musical, a crook rushes past and steals Jerry’s DVD player right out from under him. Superman stops him, of course, but not before the criminal throws it at Superman and it breaks.

WHAT DO WE DO?

Superman’s suggestion, of course, is that he fly around the world so fast that he goes back in time and stops the DVD player from being damaged. Jerry has a simpler idea – his American Express card protects his purchases from theft, damage, or being bounced off a superhero’s chest for 90 days after purchase, and he easily gets a new one.

If somebody wanted to create a time capsule of pop culture in the early years of the 21st century, they would pretty much HAVE to include this ad. It was ridiculously ubiquitous back in 2004, it seemed like it was on the air every other commercial break…and what’s more, it also serves well as a bite-sized taste of the Seinfeld TV show, as well as the kind of stunts credit card companies used to use to draw in customers. 

Man, Super-Sponsor week is a ride, my friends. 

Mon., May 19

Short Film: Stamp Day For Superman (1954)

Superman, of course, doesn’t need stamps. He sends everything big AIR mail. Heh. Get it?

Notes: Remember those days in school when the teacher would pull out a filmstrip, the VCR, or the DVD player, depending on how old you are? (If you’re too young to remember the DVD player, I’m not even sure why you’re reading this blog.) Weren’t those days the best? Well, in 1954, the people behind the TV show The Adventures of Superman made an 18-minute short film to promote US Savings Bonds. Superman (George Reeves) and Lois Lane (Noel Neill) are on a stroll down the streets of Metropolis when they’re alerted to a robbery. Lois goes off to get the story, while Clark goes after the robbers. One of them gets away, but the other turns himself in to Superman, confessing that the only reason he turned to crime is because he’s never been able to save his money, which makes you wonder how somebody from 2025 made it to the 1950s. 

Back at the Daily Planet office, Jimmy Olsen (Jack Larson) shows off the brand-new typewriter he bought when some of the US Savings Bonds he bought back when he was a kid finally matured, because even in the 50s Jimmy was one wild and crazy guy. His glittering purchase gives Clark the idea of having Superman visit Jimmy’s old school to help promote “Stamp Day,” the day to buy savings bonds. As Clark and Jimmy go to the school to help set up for the promotion, Lois gets a phone call from an informant who confesses that he’s the missing robber – he knows he’s going to get caught, and he’ll only surrender to Lois Lane, alone. 

I want to offer a US Savings Bond to anybody who can guess what happens to Lois next, but I’m a public school teacher and there’s no way in hell I can afford that many.

Thaaaaat’s right – Lois gets caught and tied up, and it’s going to be up to Superman to get her out of yet another one. This time, though, he’s got the added difficulty of setting her free in time for Stamp Day!

I haven’t gotten around to talking about the Adventures of Superman show yet, although I fully intend to do so when I do the planned week where I watch the first episodes of all the assorted Superman TV shows. But I’m delighted that this goofy little short exists, giving me a chance to wax poetically about it here during “Super-Sponsor” week. Although the story is, naturally, a blatant propaganda film promoting the purchase of savings bonds (to the film’s credit, it never tries to claim otherwise), you still get to see Reeves and Neill at their best. Reeves is square-jawed and charming, and although his Clark and Superman have very little difference in how he plays the characters, he’s like a Wayne Boring Superman climbed right off the page and came to life. And while Noel Neill’s Lois frequently had to play the damsel in distress, I don’t remember a single episode where she lost her cool, pleaded with her captors, or hatched some hare-brained scheme to entrap Superman in marriage. No, even while she’s tied up by the dubiously-named robber “Blinky,” she’s clever and snarky. Honestly, she’s got the best traits of the era’s Lois Lane and none of her foibles. 

If you extract the scenes about Stamp Day (which honestly wouldn’t be difficult to do) you would have a pretty standard – albeit short – episode of the TV show. What’s more, because the movie was made for the federal government, it’s in the public domain. And yet somehow, I wasn’t aware of its existence until 2016, when it got goofed on as the finale of the RiffTrax Live: Mystery Science Theater 3000 Reunion Show. As I’m almost as big a fan of RiffTrax and MST3K as I am of Superman, watching this film with almost every MST3K host, bot, or mad throwing out their bon mots was just a delight. It’s not a bad episode on its own, but if I’m being honest, I enjoy it more with the riff treatment.

Comics: New Gods Vol. 5 #5 (Cameo)

Tues., May 20

Commercials: Ralph Nader Kryptonite Commercial, Superman for the US Air Force

Notes: Kids, once upon a time, there was a guy named Ralph Nader. Nader is a lawyer who kind of became a celebrity through advocating for consumer protection and environmental causes. In fact, a book he wrote in the 60s pushed public opinion to the point that the government began to enforce stronger safety regulations for the automobile industry, so hey, thanks Ralph. He also ran for president several times, although he never made it as a major party candidate, but he’s still kicking it at 91 years old, so there’s still time, right?

“I’m Ralph Nader, and I have no idea why I’m giving this message.”

“Blake, why the hell are you talking about Ralph Nader?” you may be asking. And for once, Presumptuous Disembodied Voice From the Back of the Auditorium, I am in complete agreement with you. Ralph Nader showing up here in my Year of Superman blog makes no sense. But neither does what I’m about to talk to you about. In the 1980s, Nader appeared in a one-minute television spot talking about the various colors of Kryptonite. Normally, when I link to something off my site, I just kind of drop the link in the middle of a paragraph and trust that you’re smart enough to click on it, but I’m not going to do that this time. No, I need to draw attention to it, because I think everybody needs to see this. Go ahead. Click the link below and watch this commercial with me.

Ralph Nader Kryptonite Commercial on YouTube

Back? Okay, let’s talk about what we all just shared. Ralph Nader – PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE RALPH NADER – spends 60 seconds telling you about the various versions of Kryptonite that exist, and warns you to be careful not to be scammed when purchasing your Kryptonite from some sort of sleazy backroom dealer. “Gold Kryptonite robs you of your powers! Green Krytonite makes you drowsy, inert, and eventually destroys you! Red Kryptonite…now that’s the unpredictable stuff.” Then he closes off the spot by telling you that if your Kryptonite is not properly and clearly labeled, you should take your business elsewhere.

This. Is. BONKERS.

And the thing that’s MOST bonkers about this is that I have NO IDEA WHY THIS COMMERCIAL EXISTS. There’s no tag on the end that points you to a product, a service, a movie. There are clips from the old Adventures of Superman TV show with George Reeves, but if the commercial is intended to promote reruns of that show, why don’t they tell us what time and channel to tune in? And what’s more, why show panels from the comic books, or footage of the Superman balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? Neither of those would promote the TV show at all. It’s almost like a Saturday Night Live bit, but there’s no audience laughter to indicate as such, and I can’t think of any other TV show of the era that would have made a spot like this…nor does it really go wacky enough to suggest that it was intended as a comedy sketch. So what IS it? WHY WAS THIS COMMERCIAL MADE? WHY DOES IT EXIST?

If you know, friends, please tell me before it drives me insane. 

The last commercial I’m going to talk about is a recruiting spot from 1974, in which baseball player and manager Dick Williams talks about how the Air Force is like a baseball team – all about people working together and learning skills.

He’d make a hell of a wingman though, right? Ha? Ha? Okay, I’m done with the puns. For now.

As he walks through a baseball stadium, he encounters Superman (or, rather, an actor wearing a rather shoddy Superman costume) pouting because they won’t let him play baseball with them. “They say I’m too good.”

“I know how you feel,” Williams said. “Why don’t you try the Air Force?”

I mean, let’s be honest here, if Superman WERE to join the military, the Air Force makes the most sense. 

While not as completely nonsensical as the Nader spot, this one is kind of depressing, seeing a schlumpy kind of guy in a Superman costume moping around a baseball diamond. He should have cheered up anyway – he was only six years away from getting consistently shown up by a pair of sixth graders using a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer.

Comics: Challengers of the Unknown Vol. 5 #5 (Guest Appearance)

Super-Sponsor week comes to a close, friends. This was a weird one. I would have had many more commercials to choose from if I’d used actual Superman products, like the action figures, and maybe I’ll come back and do that some other time. There are also a few other giveaway comics I managed to identify – such as one from the 90s or early 2000s in which Superman and Supergirl talk about energy conservation – but I don’t actually have a copy to review. (Yet. But as long as eBay exists, the possibility stands.) At any rate, this was a bizarre spin around the world of Superman, and next week I’ll be getting back to some more traditional stuff, with TWO new Superman-related titles making their debut this month to talk about. And since one of them stars Superman’s famous cousin, I think I’ll go ahead and declare next week SUPERGIRL WEEK.

See ya then. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. You can join in the Kryptonian Konversation every day in the Year of Superman Facebook Group!

Geek Punditry #124: Compact These!

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A little over a month ago, I talked to you guys about Compact Comics, DC Comics’ incredibly well-received new publishing initiative, in which some of their most popular and well-known graphic novels have been reprinted in smaller volumes, about the same size as a modern paperback novel, for the deliciously new reader-friendly price point of $9.99. The first ten books DC released in this format all sold out and went back for additional printings, and a second wave of titles has been announced for later this year. As with the first wave, the new titles are a mix of perennial bestsellers, books with current media tie-ins, and a few offbeat titles that aren’t their usual superhero fare, but may well snare readers who want something different.

I applaud this initiative. I’m up for anything that gets more people reading comic books, and based on the success of this series so far, it seems like it’s doing the trick. But that doesn’t mean that ONLY the smash hits deserve the Compact Comics treatment. DC’s got a history going back 90 years, and in those nine decades they’ve turned out a lot of books that may not be immediately recognizable, but at the same time, are fully deserving of finding a new audience. So DC – I know you’re listening to me, I can hear you breathing – this week in Geek Punditry I’m going to give you some suggestions for a few titles that I think are worthy of inclusion and should be given the utmost consideration when the time comes to select round three of Compact Comics.

The Kents

Look, everybody knows I’m going to have at least ONE Superman-related suggestion, so why don’t we just get it out of the way early, shall we? The Kents was a 12-issue miniseries from 1997 and 1998, written by John Ostrander with art by Tim Truman (issues #1-8) and Tom Mandrake (issues #9-12).  In this series, Jonathan Kent uncovers a series of diaries, letters, and artifacts from the mid 1800s and, sharing them with his son, the two of them piece together an epic story about the history of the family that would give Earth her greatest hero. 

“Ah, who cares about the Kent family, Blake?” some of you may say. Well…people who are into the likes of Unforgiven, perhaps. Or True Grit. Or John Ford’s Stagecoach. Because The Kents isn’t a superhero story at all – it’s an epic western. In three acts, the story tells the saga of the Kent family before, during, and after the Civil War. There’s a bitter, harrowing tale of brother against brother played out against the backdrop of the American west, and in this story we not only see the seeds of righteousness and nobility that would one day so profoundly inform who Clark Kent is, but also the struggles, heartache, and betrayals that the family had to endure to build that foundation. I’ve loved this series since it first came out, and although it’s been reprinted once or twice over the years, it doesn’t look like there’s been a new edition of this book since 2012. That’s entirely too long, and it’s time it got back in the spotlight.

Camelot 3000

Speaking of 12-issue miniseries that have been out of print for over a decade, let’s talk about Camelot 3000. This science fiction/fantasy series by Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland came out from 1982 to 1984, and it tells the story of a future where King Arthur has returned to Great Britain, as the prophecy foretold. In this distant future of the year 3000, the world has been divided up into four gargantuan autocratic countries, all bickering and fighting amongst one another, and completely oblivious to a greater threat from beyond the Earth. Arthur, resurrected, has to find the reincarnations of his knights and prepare them for battle.

This is a fantastic book, showcasing Bolland’s pencils even before he sharpened them to the point where he became the artist behind Watchmen, and the story very neatly mirrors the original Arthurian legend. Barr supposedly got the inspiration for the story while taking a college course on Arthur, and the work he put into shaping this world is really remarkable. He doesn’t just re-tell the original story, but weaves in certain themes, showing just how timeless they are. The Lancelot/Guinevere story is still hanging over everyone’s heads, and the new take on Tristan and Isolde is way ahead of its time. It’s also an important book, historically speaking – DC’s first maxi-series created for the direct market only, their first time experimenting with a new format, and the first time future superstar Bolland would do full stories for an American publisher.

But most importantly, it’s just a good comic that modern audiences haven’t all had an opportunity to experience yet, and it’s an experience they frankly deserve.  

Batman: Robin Ascendant

This doesn’t actually exist. I mean, the stories exist, but this particular collection of them, to my knowledge, has not been made…but damn it, it should be. Batman, as you may have heard, has gone through a Robin or two in his time, and for a lot of us, the definitive Robin is Tim Drake. I love Dick Grayson as much as anybody, but he’s far more interesting as Nightwing than he ever was as Robin. Tim Drake, on the other hand, is probably the best Robin there’s been. Batman himself has acknowledged that Tim will be a better detective than he is some day, and he’s also the only one of the main Robins that has never particularly harbored a desire to become Batman. He stepped into the role after the death of Jason Todd (who, of course, got better), during a period where Batman was being consumed with self-doubt and anger, and it seemed like the Dark Knight was going to go far, far darker than ever before. Tim  deduced the original Robin’s identity, and from there, it was easy enough to determine that Batman was Bruce Wayne, so he arrived on Bruce’s doorstep not because he wanted to be a superhero, but because he knew that Batman is better with a Robin.

The story in which this is told was called “A Lonely Place of Dying,” by Marv Wolfman, George Perez, and Jim Aparo, and while it has been collected many times, it’s only five issues long. (Batman #440-442 and New Titans #60-61) One of the few legitimate complaints I’ve heard anyone have about any of the Compact Comics is that certain ones – specifically the ones that reprint original graphic novels like Joker or Wonder Woman: Earth One – are too short compared to the ones that squeeze in a hefty 12 issues worth of content. So in order to combat this volume having the same problem, I propose a bundle of sorts, combining this story with two shorter, subsequent ones. Bruce didn’t make Tim a Robin immediately, dedicating himself to training the boy so as not to repeat the mistakes of Jason Todd, and there were a few good Tim stories before he put on the costume again. In “Rite of Passage,” from Detective Comics #618-620 (by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle), Tim’s parents are kidnapped by a villain called the Obeah Man, leading to a tragedy that would shape Tim dramatically. I would include that, then cap off the book with “Identity Crisis” from Batman #455-457 (Grant and Breyfogle again). Here, Tim is grappling with the events of “Rite of Passage,” struggling with the legacy of the two previous Robins looming over him, and is grounded while Batman sets out to take on the Scarecrow. But Tim figures out that Batman is walking into a trap, and realizes that he’s the hero’s only hope. 

When you put these three stories together, you’ve got a nice chronology of Tim Drake, leading up to him officially taking the mantle on the final page. And you’d get 11 issues of content, which is perfectly in keeping with the size of the better-received Compact Comics.

Tales of the Green Lantern Corps

One of the first Green Lantern stories I ever read – thanks to some comics given to me by my Uncle Todd – was the three-issue Tales of the Green Lantern Corps miniseries from 1981 by Mike W. Barr, Len Wein, and Joe Staton. In this truly epic story, all 3600 members of the Corps are called together to face the most dire of threats – their ancient enemy Krona has returned. Krona, a twisted member of the same race that eventually became the Guardians of the Universe, has forged an alliance with Nekron, a god of Death, and is planning to rend a hole between the worlds of the living and the dead, beginning with the destruction of the Corps’ central power battery on Oa. The Corps only has one charge remaining – a mere 24 hours to save the universe.

This is an incredible storyline – wide-reaching and eventful, that showcases not only Hal Jordan, but so many other Lanterns. Classics like Katma Tui and Tomar-Re show up, little-known GLs like Charlie Vicker make an appearance, and we get the debut of Arisia, who would go on to be a major player in the series. Furthermore, elements from this story would be used decades later in Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night, another awesome story that should get the Compact Comics treatment.

The only problem is all of this universe-spanning action takes place in only three issues, and, like I said, that just ain’t enough to satisfy Compact Comics reader. Fortunately, DC has already provided us with a solution. Tales of the Green Lantern Corps was not only the title of this miniseries, but also the banner under which solo tales of Green Lanterns from beyond the Earth appeared as back-up stories in the main comic for years. There were also three annual specials using this title with the same concept: short stories of various GLs. Some of those were amazing, such as the introduction of the bizarre and delightful Rot Lop Fan from Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #3 (story by Alan Moore and Bill Willingham). Once you’ve included the three issue miniseries, it would be quite simple to cherry pick the best of the other Tales and build up enough of a collection to make a suitable Compact Comics volume.

Legion of Super-Heroes: The Great Darkness Saga

The Legion of Super-Heroes is one of DC’s greatest properties, and yet somehow it gets less respect and love than so many. It deserves more, and showcasing one of its crowning achievements in The Great Darkness Saga would be a way to show them off to a new audience. In this one, the heroes of the 30th Century find themselves coming into conflict with bizarre, shadowed figures who turn out to be corrupt clones of heroes from the past. The race to discover the truth about these threats leads to a collision with the characters of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, finally bringing the Legion into conflict with the embodiment of evil in the DC Universe: Darkseid himself. The story was a smash hit when it was first published in the early 80s, and was credited with making Legion one of the best-selling comics in America for a while. It showcases virtually every character who was or had ever been a member of the Legion, as well as drawing in many of their allies like the Legion of Substitute Heroes and the Wanderers. If you’re looking for a showcase of everything the 30th Century had to offer, this is the book to read.

The main storyline is, again, somewhat short, running in Legion of Super-Heroes #290-294. However, there was a long buildup before the main story began, and previous collections have included material going back to issue #286 and their first annual, with an epilogue of sorts appearing in the third annual. And if you really want to link it to the greater DCU, years later there was another side-story that connected to it in issue #32 of Booster Gold, a series in which the time-travelling hero often found himself stumbling into classic DC storylines. There’s certainly enough to collect a full-size volume here.  

Ambush Bug

My final suggestion is probably my most off-the-wall, but I will defend it vigorously. For the last few years DC Comics has been trying to turn Harley Quinn into their answer to Deadpool, with the sort of fourth-wall breaking shenanigans he’s known for. With all due respect to the creators who have been involved in those stories, that’s a mistake. Harley became a hit character on her own merit, and changing who she is to fit some other character’s template is foolish, especially since they’ve already got a much better candidate: Ambush Bug.

Ambush Bug, created by Paul Kupperberg and Keith Giffen, is (supposedly) Irwin Schwab, a schlub who found an alien super suit that gave him the ability to teleport. Schwab is also ludicrously insane and a wholly unreliable narrator, making everything we know about him (including his real name, his origin, and his rivalry with the alien sock Argh!yle) suspect at best. Who or whatever Ambush Bug really is, he first showed up as an antagonist in DC Comics Presents #52, running afoul of Superman and the Doom Patrol. He came back a few issues later, causing problems for Superman and the Legion of Substitute Heroes, then decided to try becoming a hero after an encounter with Supergirl in her own comic. (He initially mistook Supergirl for her cousin. He’s that crazy.) Co-creator Keith Giffen and his writing partner Robert Loren Fleming soon started to run with the character, having him show up in three issues of Action Comics (where he quickly realized that Superman looked exactly like Clark Kent – he’s that crazy) before he got popular enough to get miniseries and specials all his own.

Ambush Bug was breaking the fourth wall before Harley, before Deadpool, even before John Byrne’s She-Hulk raised such a thing to an art form. He is fully aware of the fact that he’s a comic book character, and he was proficient in meta humor long before it became popular. His stories are bizarre, surrealistic, and utterly bonkers, and they’re a lot of fun because of that. Unfortunately, since the passing of Giffen, there really hasn’t been anybody else who has a great hold on the character and he doesn’t appear much these days. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before somebody tries to bring him back, and when that happens, I hope they find creators who have just the right blend of humor and irreverence to do him justice. 

In the meantime, though, we can grease the wheels for his return with the Compact Comics treatment. Ambush Bug Vol. 1 should include his early appearances in DC Comics Presents, Action Comics, and Supergirl, as well as his first four-issue miniseries from 1985, and the Ambush Bug Stocking Stuffer Christmas special. Once that first volume is a sales juggernaut (as all my suggestions clearly would be) they could follow it up with Vol. 2, collecting the Son of Ambush Bug five-issue miniseries from 1986, the Ambush Bug Nothing Special from 1992, and the six-issue revival miniseries Ambush Bug: Year None from 2008. 

There you go, DC. I know the books for Compact Comics series two have already been chosen, so consider these six suggestions the first half of a wave three. I’m sure you can figure out the rest of that wave yourselves. You guys are pretty good at this too. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He hopes you all appreciate the fact that he got to the end of this without talking about Captain Carrot. That wasn’t easy, people. 

Year of Superman Week 19: Superman Who?

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We’re here approaching the middle of May already, and for me that means the end of a school year. This week is the last week for my 12th graders, while my 11th graders are gearing up for their last two weeks. All of this boils down to less time for me, so I don’t think I’m going to work too hard to maintain any sort of theme this week. Let’s just take it as it comes and see what turns up.

Wed., May 7

Comics: Action Comics #558, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #138, Justice League of America #23

Ironically, this is what I feel like when I get an ice cream headache.

Notes: Here’s another one of those semi-random issues that turns up in my classic comic read-throughs, and it really illustrates something about the middle years of Superman. After the Silver Age silliness started to die down, there was a long period where it didn’t quite seem that the writers knew what to do with him. He only had a few great villains, like Luthor and Brainiac, and it’s not like he could face off against them twice every month, or they’d be overused. Attempts at creating new villains tended to turn out losers with little meat behind them, such as Terra-Man, or else random alien or mystical opponents who were only good for one story each. Other than that, they had him facing off against natural disasters or some sort of personal mishap that made Superman himself (temporarily) dangerous or otherwise imperiled without having an actual antagonist. 

As for his personal relationships – the perpetual Second Act of ongoing comic books is on no greater display than it was here. They didn’t want Clark to get married, they kept Lois as a hanger-on, they didn’t add any characters, they didn’t remove any, and that’s how things were for decades. They finally made a slight shift in the late 70s and early 80s: moving Clark to WGBS added a few characters to the cast, and bringing back an adult Lana Lang who was finally infatuated with Clark Kent rather than Superboy changed up the classic Superman/Lois/Clark love triangle. Ultimately, though, these changes were largely cosmetic, and the actual plots didn’t change all that much. When somebody calls Superman boring I disagree with them vehemently, but I have to assume that the majority of their exposure to the character probably comes from this era.

All of this is to say, “The All-Searing Eyes” from Action Comics #558 is another example of a Superman story that’s low on threat and doesn’t really have any reaching impact. Superman is brought into contact with a scientist attempting to solve the world’s energy problems, and he thinks he’s found the way to do it: Superman’s heat vision. He believes if he can discern how Superman’s heat vision works, he may potentially be able to harness that energy for the benefit of the people of the world. Superman, being Superman, agrees to have his heat vision tested, but he’s forced to end the experiment prematurely to avert a disaster, and as a result, he finds himself unable to turn the heat vision off.

Is there story potential here? Sure. A Superman unable to turn off his heat vision would be horribly dangerous, something that was actually addressed in a 90s storyline in which his powers went out of control for a while. But true to the time period, there wasn’t much room for real drama here. Superman realizes he’s in a pickle, he causes a small amount of trouble but no lasting damage, and at the end of 12 pages the scientist manages to get his heat vision back to normal. Ultimately this – like a lot of the comics of the era – feels pretty inconsequential. It has no lasting impact for any of our characters, and nothing that happens is ever referenced again. This isn’t to say that every single Superman story (or every story for any ongoing character, for that matter) HAS to have long-reaching consequences, but if they don’t, they should at least reveal something about the characters or, at bare minimum, be original and fun. This story, and many of them of the era, just don’t tick any of those boxes. In a modern age where it seems like comic books are rebooted every twenty minutes and it never matters anymore, you can look at books like this one – books that happened in the years before the first major reboot – and you can understand why DC felt like it was necessary. 

Thur., May 8

Comics: Superman #126, Blue Devil #3 (Guest Appearance), Action Comics #375, Infinity, Inc. #5 (Power Girl)

And this is what it takes to get RID of an ice cream headache.

Notes: As I’ve said before, on weeks when I’m not pursuing a particular theme, there’s little rhyme or reason to the choices I make as to which Superman content I’ll explore. For example, Superman #126? It’s on the docket for today solely because I was scrolling through the DC Universe Infinity app, the cover caught my eye, and I don’t think I’ve ever read this story before.

I should clarify: I’ve never read the story presented in this PARTICULAR issue before…but I have most CERTAINLY read stories about Superman with amnesia. They were strikingly common in the Silver Age, and even as late as the early 90s there was the “Blackout” five-parter, in which Superman’s memory was accidentally wiped by an experiment Emil Hamilton was working on and he wound up on a tropical island almost marrying a native princess. (Hmm. Should I read that one next? It’s been a while.)

But for now, I’m focusing on “Superman’s Hunt For Clark Kent.” While experimenting for a possible antidote to Kryptonite radiation at the Fortress of Solitude, an accident causes Superman to lose his memory…but fortunately not his powers, which he needs to fly down to Metropolis to start piecing together his missing life. He gets clothes from a British chap who is literally giving them away to the first person he sees who’ll fit them and who seems to have no idea who Superman is, then decides to adopt a “secret identity.” He disguises himself as a Brit, bleaches his hair blond, takes the name “Clarence Kelvin,” and applies for a job at the Daily Planet. 

You know, there’s an adage in writing that goes something like, “In real life, we expect coincidence. In fiction, we do not stand for it.” I imagine that adage was coined in response to stories like this one. Superman’s behavior is completely absurd and preposterous, and seems to happen only to keep him from telling literally anybody on the planet the predicament he’s in, at which point every scientist in the world (except for Lex Luthor) would be falling over themselves to try to cure his amnesia. But instead he…fights a whale. 

Eventually, he learns who he really is by flying into space far enough to overtake the rays of light coming from Earth and using his telescopic vision to watch himself, in the past, changing his clothes, making him realize he’s Clark Kent – and that may be the LEAST scientifically implausible thing about this story. At the end, everything goes back to normal, with Clark settling in at the Planet again…but something about this is bothering me. He discovers that he’s really Clark Kent. He resumes his life as Clark Kent. But at NO POINT does the story actually say that his MEMORY returns. Does that mean that Superman technically had amnesia for the rest of the Silver Age?

Where’s that grim and gritty follow-up?

As usual for this era, there are three stories in the issue. The second one isn’t particularly memorable, but the third one made me do a double-take. In “The Two Faces of Superman,” Lois deliberately makes herself unattractive to ward off a blind date and Clark, catching wind of this, decides to teach her a lesson. He decided to do that a LOT in the Silver Age, in and of itself there would be nothing noteworthy about this. But as Superman, he whisks her off on a date, at the end of which he “confesses” that he always wears a rubber mask as Superman and wants to finally show her his true face. And when he does…well…see for yourself.

“What, me Kryptonian?”

Yep. Superman decides to turn himself into the spitting image of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. 

And this, it should be noted, was long BEFORE Mad was published by DC Comics. 

Anyway, to her credit, Lois is smart enough to figure out Superman’s ruse (after a few pages of angst and soul-searching) and calls his bluff by accepting a marriage proposal he never thought she would go for. In the end, both of them put their cards on the table and admit the truth, and Lois even concedes that it was wrong of her to blow off her blind date in such a way, then goes right back to dreaming about wanting to marry Superman – but NOT by tricking him. I guess that’s the sort of thing that passed for noble aspirations in 1959. 

Fri., May 9

Comic: Absolute Superman #7

This is what it felt like when I got an ant farm in 4th grade.

Notes: Only one new Superman-related comic hit the stands this week, although I did get the Dan Mora variant cover for the Action Comics #1 facsimile, because I’m a sucker. The one new book, Absolute Superman #7, is our introduction to the Brainiac of this dark universe. In fact, Superman doesn’t technically appear at all. Instead we spend the entire issue exploring this new incarnation of the villain and his obsession with the Superman that has somehow appeared on Earth. This version of Brainiac has a bit in common with Geoff Johns’ re-imagining of the character several years ago, but there’s a madness to him that I’ve never seen in a Brainiac before. It suits the grimmer universe that the Absolute titles occupy quite well, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next.

Most interestingly, though, is the cover. I have to talk about my love for this cover, by Rafa Sandoval. It’s not just that it’s a good piece of art, although, it is, but look at it. Word balloons. How often do comic book covers have word balloons these days? It’s a lost art, and when it IS used, it’s usually used for comedic purposes. To see it done this way is both unexpected and exciting. Good on ya, DC. 

Sat., May 10

TV Episode: Superman and Lois, Season 2, Episode 8, “Into Oblivion”; Episode 9, “30 Days and 30 Nights.”

After I make it to work on a day like this I usually text my wife and say “Careful, the fog is crazy this morning.”

Notes: The assorted subplots that have defined this season continue in episode 8. Jonathan, expelled from school, is given permission to complete his coursework online and is forced to get a job. Jordan discovers that the reason his brother has refused to tell anyone about his sources for X-Kryptonite is because he’s trying to protect Candice, the girl he’s been seeing, who’s trying to support her family. John Henry is recovering from amnesia (more amnesia?) and has forgotten that he’s not married to Lois in this universe, and his recovery is triggering Natalie, who remembers how the Superman of her original universe murdered her mother. Lana’s husband Kyle – despite their estrangement – tries to help her prepare for her upcoming debate in the race for Mayor of Smallville, while Sarah tries to convince Jordan to become friends with the girl she hooked up with in summer camp. 

Sometimes the synopsis of these episodes make me long for the quiet subtlety of a Silver Age issue of Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane.

In episode 9, cult leader Ally Allston (the one who sucked Lucy Lane into her web) breaks DOD custody and manages to hop into a portal to another dimension. Superman goes after her and winds up trapped in that other dimension for…well, the name of the episode IS “30 Days and 30 Nights.” In that time, disasters go unchecked and lives are lost as the world cries out, “Where is Superman?” As John Henry sets out in his Steel armor to fill in the gaps, Jordan tries to use his super-senses to find his absent father. Ah yes – and the Smallville mayoral election happens, and lest we forget, Lana is on the ballot. 

As much as I want to enjoy this series, in episode 8 there’s just too much going on, and it’s not connecting with me as a result. I feel like I need a scorecard to keep track of all the storylines, and for somebody who navigated the entire Triangle Era of Superman comics with no issues, that’s saying something. That said, there are a few things that I liked here. Jonathan taking the fall for Candice, for example, feels like a very Kent thing to do. He’s protecting someone and taking the heat on his own, and while he’s doing it in a stupid way, he’s also a teenage boy and thus a certain level of stupidity is to be expected when girls are concerned. I also like the way that Clark tries to mend fences with Natalie, someone he has never wronged, but at the same time, someone who may be the only person on Earth with a legitimate reason to be traumatized by Superman. There are a few good scenes with the two of them, and I like the development of her character.

I’m not wild about the continued development with Lucy and the cult leader who sucked her in, and the end of the episode has Lucy taking a turn that not only marks her as a bit of a villain, but a way bigger idiot than even Jonathan. It does lead into Episode 9, though, which improves over 8 considerably. It starts with John Henry suiting up in his armor and trying to fill in the gaps left by Clark’s absence. There’s also a great bit where Kyle – a firefighter – is trapped in a burning building and Jordan has to use his powers to save him. Lois is outraged, but Jordan stands his ground and insists that he did the right thing. And damn it, Lois, you know he’s right. Finally – FINALLY – we get some of the stuff I’ve been wanting to see in this series. Jordan uses his powers to save somebody’s life. Lois argues that he should have let John Henry handle it, but Jordan points out that John wouldn’t have made it in time and Kyle would have died. Jordan is 100 percent right – he used his super powers to save somebody’s life, and that is ESPECIALLY important while his father is missing. On the other hand, Lois isn’t approaching this as someone who is desperate for a new superhero in the world. She looks at it from the perspective of a wife whose husband is missing and whose son just did something incredibly dangerous, sparking her fears of losing him too. Lois is totally in the wrong, and yet, her reaction is entirely understandable and in-character. And that, my friends, is what makes for a compelling conflict.

This episode also finally gives us a little forward momentum on the X-Kryptonite storyline, as Jonathan breaks down and tells his mother where to find the distributor, sending Lois, Sam Lane, and Jordan on a stakeout that goes bad. (There’s a cute bit here where Lois’s knowledge of the kind of knots used to keep them in check makes her father question just how many times his daughter has been tied up over the years.) Despite Lois’s protests, Jordan comes in to save his mother and grandfather, and maybe for the first time in this whole series, we see a glimpse of the Superboy he just may be destined to be. I love what they do with him in this episode, it’s the best we’ve seen from Jordan yet. 

Although Sarah dumping him at the end of the episode because he keeps disappearing and won’t tell her what’s going on is more of a Peter Parker consequence than a Clark Kent one. Ah well. He’s got the powers, best he learn what it takes to be a superhero now. 

It ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, and it’s probably the best episode of the season so far. And Superman isn’t even actually IN it. Go figure. 

Sun. May 11

Comics: World of Smallville #1-4

Notes: It’s Mother’s Day here in the US, and in the Year of Superman I thought I should devote my reading today to that mom of moms, Martha Kent. Let’s face it, Martha and Jonathan are probably the greatest parents in all fiction. They took a child with the power of the gods and raised him to a man who uses that power only to help people. That is A-plus parenting no matter how you slice it.

Nobody else even comes close. No disrespect to May Parker, but look at the little bundle of neuroses SHE raised. And sure, Susan Richards’s son is plenty powerful, but they actually put a mental block on him to prevent him from accessing his abilities. I mean, I get it – when Eddie was little we put a lock on our oven because it was too dangerous to allow him to open it at will. Same thing. But still, Martha had no such protections, and she STILL knocked it out of the park.

Problem is…there aren’t really a ton of great comic book stories ABOUT Martha. Sure, she appears a lot, especially since the Man of Steel reboot, but she’s almost always in a supportive capacity. There have been a few stories about Jonathan, but Martha almost always appears to impart a little wisdom like a midwestern Yoda, to fuss over her son like any other mom even if he IS Superman, or to bake.

So even though it’s really more about Jonathan and Martha as a couple, today I decided to read the World of Smallville miniseries from 1988. This was actually the middle part of a trilogy of miniseries written by John Byrne expanding upon Superman’s corner of the DC Universe after his reboot, preceded by World of Krypton and concluding with World of Metropolis. In this one, Clark comes home to Smallville to visit with his parents, but a slip of the tongue by Jonathan sends him probing into family secrets he never heard before.

You know how they tell you if you find an old videotape in your parents’ closet you shouldn’t watch it? Well, this is nothing at all like that, you sicko.

Although Jonathan Kent and Martha Clark were sweethearts from a young age, their lives were shattered he was missing and presumed dead in World War II (I assume that, were they to reference this story today, they’d update it, perhaps to the first Gulf War). By the time Jonathan was found alive, Martha had married Daniel Fordman, a member of Smallville’s wealthiest family, although she never stopped loving him. Jonathan comes home to find yet another shock – Dan is dying of cancer, and he wants Jonathan to take Martha from him. Jonathan is shocked at the idea and, despite his sister’s encouragement, is planning to reject Daniel’s proposal. It turns out to be a moot point, though, as when he arrives at the Fordman house to do so, he’s there just in time to see Daniel fighting with his sister – a fight that drives him to his death. Jonathan and Martha, we learn, were engaged six months later.

It’s not exactly Romeo and Juliet, but that’s a good thing, since those two both ended up dead.

After the first two issues, which tell that story and a re-telling of how the Kents learned they couldn’t conceive a child and then, miracle of miracles, found one in a rocket ship, issue three brings in Lana Lang to talk about a little of the trauma SHE was subjected to by John Byrne. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely his fault. At least part of the blame has to go to Steve Englehart, author of DC’s 1988 crossover event, Millennium. In that story we learned that the Manhunters – the failed android race that preceded the Green Lantern Corps as peacekeepers in the universe – had stationed agents all over Earth to spy on its burgeoning superhero population. The editorial edict was that each comic had to have someone revealed to be a Manhunter spying on their respective hero. Byrne went one better – in the Superman titles it turned out the Manhunter was Doctor Whitney, Smallville’s pediatrician, who was sent to watch the child from Krypton. Whitney implanted a device into the spinal column of every child he delivered for the next two decades, turning every kid in Smallville into a sleeper agent that was to be activated to report on the actions of Clark Kent. 

They got better after Millennium, fortunately. In fact, Lana was the only one who even remembered the ordeal. But these last two issues deal with what happened to her as a result. It’s a dark story, and the miniseries as a whole serves mostly to fill in blanks from Man of Steel and to connect the dots to the Millennium revelations. It’s good, and it’s worth including if you do a read of the Byrne era Superman. It’s a shame, though, that there just aren’t a lot of other great Martha stories out there.  

Mon., May 12

Comics: “Blackout,” from Adventures of Superman #484, Action Comics #671, Superman: The Man of Steel #6, Superman Vol. 2 #62, Adventures of Superman #485

Notes: Ever since I got that dose of Super-amnesia from the reading I did a few days ago, that concept has stayed with me, and I decided to go ahead and read the old “Blackout” storyline again. This was 1991, about a year before the Death of Superman, but after Lois and Clark got engaged and she learned about his double life, and this was deep into my formative years as a Superman reader. I was about two years into being a regular and any time I went to a comic shop or convention I scoured the back issue bins for everything post-1987 Superman that I could find. What’s more, when the new Man of Steel series launched, DC ran ads offering a discounted subscription rate for all four of the Superman titles for a year, and I asked my parents to buy me the subscription for my birthday, ensuring (in this era before I had a pull folder at a local comic shop) that I would never be in danger of missing an issue. It was a present they renewed for the next several years. It was a sweet time for me.

Something something ice cream headache.

“Blackout” begins in Adventures #484, when the mysterious Mr. Z reads in a newspaper about Superman’s friendship with Professor Emil Hamilton. Mr. Z was a villain Superman had faced a few times before (first in Superman #51, then during his jaunt into World War II during the “Time and Time Again” storyline I wrote about waaaaaaay back in Week Three) – seemingly immortal, with the ability to mesmerize others. When Superman visits Hamilton to test a remote apparatus he’s developing to help monitor the Antarctic Fortress of Solitude, he learns that Mr. Z hypnotized Emil, turning the viewing device into a trap. Z learns that the magic gem Superman confiscated from him during their previous encounter is being held in the Fortress, and commands Superman to bring him to it. Hamilton, freed from Z’s commands, tries to override the device remotely, but the enormous power drain not only plunges Metropolis into a blackout, but winds up wiping out both Superman AND Mr. Z’s memories.

In Part Two (Action Comics #671), Metropolis struggles to deal with the blackout. Gangbuster is doing his best to pick up the slack, and the chaos in the streets prompts Rose Forrest’s alternate personality, the Thorn, to come out of retirement. Then, in the midst of the blackout, a figure appears to try to bring the city some sense of normalcy: Lex Luthor II, “son” of the “late” industrialist. Meanwhile, after a brief stopover at an Antarctic research base, the mind-wiped Superman and Mr. Z wind up on an uncharted island full of prehistoric beasties. 

Fair warning, guys, telling your wife, “It wasn’t my fault I had amnesia” does NOT work. Don’t ask me how I know.

Man of Steel #6 gives us part three. Superman and Z discover that they’re not alone on the island with the dinosaurs – there’s a tribe of natives there as well. Most of them, it seems, are fairly neanderthal in appearance. The notable exception, naturally, is their princess, an exotic bombshell that immediately falls for Superman. The princess, Lola-La (BECAUSE OF COURSE THERE’S A DOUBLE-L) arranges for her marriage to Superman, but despite his amnesia, he resists her advances, a voice in the back of his head telling him that it’s not right. Back in Metropolis, Hamilton and Lois (source of the voice in his head we mentioned before) meet up with Guardian, who takes them out in the Whiz Wagon to look for the missing Superman.

Part Four: Superman #62! In addition to having a Lois Lane vs. Lola-La cover that no doubt inspired a LOT of fanfiction, there’s a story here as well. Lois, Hamilton, and Guardian find Superman JUST in time to stop the wedding. After a tussle with Lola-La, Lois sparks upon a method that juuuuuust might bring back Superman’s memory. Oh yeah – and in Metropolis, Agent Liberty shows up to help fight the rioting from the blackout.

Some anthropologists theorize the modern internet was invented just so people would write their own versions of how this scene played out.

The story wraps up in Adventures #485, which picks up where the previous part left off – with Lois trying to kiss Superman’s memories back. It doesn’t quite work, but Superman is convinced to return to Metropolis with her. They leave, Mr. Z staying behind, having found some peace in his tropical paradise. Guardian whips them back to Metropolis, arranging for Project: Cadmus’s resident telepath Dubbilex to help try to restore Superman’s memory. 

I’ve always enjoyed this storyline. There’s a degree of tonal whiplash going on here, but I think it’s justified. The scenes in Metropolis, with the blackout and the riots, are played seriously, but the stuff on the island is a straight-up comedy. There’s misunderstanding, coquettish flirtation, and lots of silly jokes (including a Gilligan’s Island gag) that make it a joy to read. There’s little that happens in this storyline of future relevance, though, except for the abandonment of the Mr. Z storyline. I don’t remember off the top of my head if he ever came back after this issue, it may well be that he’s still living a happy life out there on his tropical island, his memory of the atrocities he committed in the past completely wiped away. And it’s always pleasant to see Lois taking such a proactive role, leading the quest first to find Superman, then restore his memory. The final sequence, where Dubbilex leads Superman through his own mind, also has the added fun of making his mental “fortress” look like the classic Arctic Fortress of Solitude, which in this continuity had never existed, complete with the giant golden door and key. 

The Metropolis stuff, on the other hand, had pretty major significance for the next several years of the Superman titles. First, it’s the on-panel debut of Lex Luthor the Second. We (the readers) didn’t know it yet, but this would turn out to be the original Luthor, having faked his death and cloned a new body to pass off as his own son, and it was a substantial part of the Superman comics for quite some time. We also got the return of Rose and Thorn, a Bronze age vigilante who had the unique condition of being what at the time was called a multiple personality. Rose had no idea that a vigilante called Thorn took over her body to fight crime, spurred by the hatred of the mafia ties in her own family. Thorn became a semi-regular character in the Superman comics for a while, similar to Gangbuster and Guardian. Finally, this story gave us one of the earliest appearances of Agent Liberty, one of those government-sponsored superheroes that you hear about all the time. He, too, became a pretty big part of the supporting cast for a while, even joining the Justice League briefly after Superman’s death. 

Mostly, though, I just like this story. There’s enough meat to make it feel substantial and juuuuust enough silliness to keep the whole thing feeling like a lot of fun. And sometimes, that’s all you want. 

Tues., May 13

Comic: World’s Finest Comics #90

Notes: It’s been a day, guys. If you’ve had day where it’s just “a day,” you know what I mean, and with the end of the school year rapidly approaching, I feel like these “days” are going to be coming fast and furious over the next couple of weeks. And frankly, on “a day” I usually don’t want to do any more than find a hole to crawl into and hope that tomorrow is NOT – with apologies to Scarlett O’Hara – “another day.”

“If you think this is irritating, Bruce, wait’ll I tell you about the Alfred E. Neuman mask I had to use on Lois the other day…”

Still, I made a promise to myself that I was going to find some Superman every day this year, and that includes “days,” so I carved out enough time to read an oldie, World’s Finest Comics #90. Modern readers may forget this, but there actually was a Batwoman and Bat-Girl in the Silver Age, Kathy Kane and her niece Bette, respectively. Although the modern Batwoman kind of shares the original’s name (she goes by “Kate” these days), that’s pretty much where the resemblance ends – old school Batwoman was a socialite who embarked upon a crimefighting career specifically in the hopes of snaring Batman into marriage. It doesn’t say specifically, but I would guess she was a big fan of Lois Lane’s column. Anyway, for most of the stories in the era, that was Batwoman’s primary motivation. In this particular story, Batman had recently discovered her secret identity and forced her into retirement, reasoning that if he could figure out who she really was, so could the bad guys. But things get more complicated when a criminal escapes from prison boasting that he’s got a capsule that will give him Superman’s powers for 24 hours. Superman, hearing about this on the news, immediately recognizes this as a capsule invented by his father, Jor-El, back on Krypton, and reasons that the box must have crashed on Earth, so he zips over to Gotham City to lend a hand.

This set-up raises any number of questions. 

First of all, if Jor-El could give anyone super powers for 24 hours, why didn’t he use those pills to empower some people to maybe stop the planet from exploding? Or at the LEAST, to help with the evacuation?

Second, is there ANY piece of the destroyed planet Krypton that did NOT eventually make its way to the Earth? Was our planet just bombarded with their leftovers for decades? How is it more people weren’t killed by falling Kryptonite meteors? 

Third, how did the crook know that the capsule would give him super powers? Did Jor-El label the box? In English?

FOURTH, if you have a capsule like that in your possession, why would you HIDE it? 

And FINALLY, even if you have a good reason to hide it, why would you TELL EVERYBODY ABOUT IT?

Anyway, Batwoman disobeys Batman’s retirement order because he…needs her help… and beats the crook to the capsule, taking it and giving herself Superman’s powers for 24 hours. What would you do with Superman’s powers for a day, friends? Fight crime? Try to solve world hunger? Read every book in the library? Grab a sack of coal and just start turning out diamonds? 

Well, that’s because you’re not insane. But Batwoman apparently was, because when she gets powers the ONLY thing she wants to do with them is figure out Batman’s secret identity. Her first attempt – looking through his and Robin’s masks with X-Ray vision – fails, because as soon as Batman found out she had powers, he and Robin lined their masks with lead. Say what you will, but as the saying goes, you’re not paranoid if they really ARE out to get you.

As Batman and Superman try to hatch a plan to discourage Batwoman, she has plans of her own. She trails Batman and Robin back to the Batcave and, upon seeing whose house it’s under, is satisfied that she’s solved the riddle of their dual identities. Then she turns her attention to figuring out Superman’s identity because…reasons. Her plan is simple: just stick to him like glue until she sees him change his clothes. He tries to shake her by flying through a lightning storm, through Niagara Falls…nothing. That is, until he walks into an old decrepit house, which scares off a Batwoman with Kryptonian powers because – I swear to Christ I am not making this part up – THERE MIGHT BE MICE INSIDE.

But she keeps on following him, even to the Daily Planet, where Superman is pleasantly surprised to find Clark Kent waiting for him. It’s actually Batman in disguise, of course, helping a brother out. But as Batwoman’s powers fade away, she reveals she’s found Batman’s true identity: JOHN MARTIN!

Actually, the Batcave she saw him drive into was a fake that Superman carved. Helping a brother out. 

But in the end, Batman decides that Batwoman’s acts of stalking, childishness, and mice-fearing “showed such cleverness and courage that I can’t ask you to drop your career completely.”

My friends. Today is May 13th. As of this writing, I have read 377 separate comic books featuring Superman or a member of the Superman family. And that’s just in 2025. And that’s just the SUPERMAN comics I’ve read. And I can say with full sincerity and conviction that this issue contains the stupidest portrayal of an adult female human being I have yet to come across.

On the other hand, I guess it’s nice to know that Lois Lane isn’t the only woman the writers of the era mistreated ever so badly. 

I’m hoping that tomorrow will help break my recent chain of “a day”s. The first full trailer for the new Superman movie is supposed to drop (will already have dropped by the time you read this), and I’m sure I’ll have stuff to say about it. And in honor of both that new trailer and what appears to be the beginning of the movie merchandising blitz – starting with an ad for Milkbone dog biscuits – I’ve decided that next week will be the week of Superman: The Super-Sponsor! I’ll be looking at commercials and comic books where Superman is there to sell ya something. This should be fun. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. You can join in the Kryptonian Konversation every day in the Year of Superman Facebook Group!

Year of Superman Week 18: Supermen of Other Worlds

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself dipping into stories of Supermen of Other Worlds. Not just Elseworlds, although those certainly apply, but other stories of other Supermen as well…books that were published during the time that DC wasn’t using the Elseworlds imprint or special event comics such as Just Imagine or the Tangent universe. This week, I decided it would be fun to get in and explore some of those other worlds. So for Week 18 – with a slight detour coming on Saturday – we’re going to spend some time with these Other Supermen. 

I’ve kind of had the “other worlds” in my head since I read the first volume of Earth One a few weeks ago. Reading that sent me towards Origin Week, which was fun, but it didn’t quite scratch the itch I have in my mind right now. I want to dig into the stories of Supermen from different worlds, reimagined from the ground up. Some of them, naturally, will be similar to our own, but not all of them. 

Wed., April 30

Comics: Superman: Earth One Vol. 2-3, DC Comics Presents #71, Secret Six Vol. 5 #2, Batman/Superman: World’s Finest 2025 Annual

What the Snyderbros wish they could do with the David Corenswet costume.

Notes: Since Earth One is what started me on this little trek, I decided to begin the Supermen of Other Worlds week by finishing that particular trilogy. At the end of volume one, if you’ll recall, Superman had driven off an invasion by the same force responsible for the destruction of Krypton, and Clark Kent used his exclusive ties to the Man of Steel to write an interview that landed him his job at the Daily Planet. In Volume 2, Clark finds a new apartment with a particularly friendly neighbor named Lisa LaSalle (because it doesn’t matter where in the multiverse you are, Kal-El is a magnet for L.L. names). As she tries to cozy up to him, Lois begins a deep dive into the past of her mysterious new coworker, the military makes plans for how to deal with an invulnerable man, and the Parasite is on the rise.

Volume 3 continues these stories – Lisa and Clark get closer, the fallout of Superman’s geopolitical actions in Volume 2 begin to reverberate, the most unique version of Lex Luthor in the entire multiverse is developed, and…oh yeah. Zod.

Reading these two books in tandem, it really strikes me how J. Michael Straczynski structured the graphic novels the way you would a season of a TV show. That shouldn’t be surprising, of course. Straczynski has a long history in television, including creating and writing most of the episodes of one of my favorite science fiction series of all time, Babylon 5. And although he’d written a great number of comic books at this point and brought some of those storytelling habits over, this is his work that most clearly feels like television. Each volume has an A-plot (the invasion of Earth in Vol. 1, the Parasite in Vol. 2, Zod in Vol. 3). Also, just like a TV show, there are several running B-plots of a more personal nature, such as Clark’s relationship with Lisa and Lois’s pursuit of Clark’s past. Then there are the ongoing subplots that build and develop along with the A-plot, such as the way the world’s governments are trying to figure out the “Superman Problem.” In a seasonal TV show format, it’s these third types of plots that run concurrently which usually wind up comprising the main arc of the season, gaining in prominence until they become the primary focus of the last episode or two. And I feel like this is exactly what Straczysnki had planned, had this series continued past Vol. 3. 

That’s the tragedy of it, I think. I really enjoyed all three of these books. And each of them was satisfying in the way that a single episode of a television series is satisfying. But Strazynski’s TV-writing style is evocative of the current style of longer arcs and stories (in truth, he pioneered that style with Babylon 5). There’s so much left to explore in this universe. I genuinely want to see what becomes of Clark’s relationship with Lisa. I want to know what this universe’s Lex Luthor has up her sleeve (yes, that’s the correct pronoun). And – given the sort of world-building Straczynski has proven himself capable of time and time again, not just with Babylon 5, but with his comic book work like Rising Stars, I want to see just how far this particular corner of the DC Multiverse diverges from the worlds we’re all more familiar with.

After volume three of this book, Straczynski stepped away from comics for a while. He’s back now, and doing work for AWA and Marvel, and I hope that the prospects of him returning to this series are still there, because I fully believe there’s more story left to tell. 

In terms of new comics, hitting stores today, we have Batman/Superman: World’s Finest 2025 Annual, part three of the “We Are Yesterday” crossover with Justice League Unlimited. In this one, Grodd has gone back in time to gather up younger, purer versions of the Legion of Doom to help him combat the new unlimited Justice League of today, but winds up fighting the League in two different timelines. Mark Waid is the co-plotter of this issue, along with scripter Christopher Cantwell. Together, they progress the story well, leading up to a great cliffhanger ending. I’m really excited for the second part of this crossover, the first in DC’s “All In” era. 

Thur., May 1

Comics: Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating Superman #1, Superman #9, Supergirl Vol. 2 #23

“And he needs to have an alliterative name, too, like ‘Clark… Clark…’ dang it, what name starts with the same sound as ‘Clark’?”

Notes: Back in 2001, the comic book world was shocked by the news that Stan Lee, the public face and most effusive promoter of Marvel Comics, was going to do his first-ever work for their Distinguished Competition. Lee, along with co-writer Michael Uslan and a plethora of top-notch artists, produced 12 one shots under the Just Imagine banner. In each one-shot, Lee took a different DC property and – using the name as inspiration – did his own take on the concept. Some of the new versions weren’t all that different from the original, while others had nothing in common except for the title. Stan Lee’s Superman was kind of in the middle. 

In Lee’s Superman, with art by his long-time legendary collaborator John Buscema, we are introduced to an alien police officer named Salden. When Salden’s wife, Lyella, is murdered by an escape convict, Salden chases the killer onto a hijacked spacecraft. The two of them crash on Earth, and Salden realizes that the planet’s lesser gravity has given him great strength, speed, and endurance. Trying to blend in, he takes a job at a circus using names he pulled off an ice cream truck and street sign: “Clark Kent.” “Clark”’s circus act is such a hit that he’s approached by a talent agent, Lois Lane, who dubs him “Superman” and begins booking him gigs. With his spacecraft destroyed, Salden has no way off Earth, and decides to use his abilities to fight the injustices of the world that he sees as distractions from the pursuit of science, hoping that if he can bring about world peace, the world will advance to the point where it can invent a craft capable of bringing him home. 

Like I said, as far as the Just Imagine books go, this one is about halfway between the “fairly similar” books like Wonder Woman and those that are utterly unrecognizable, like Green Lantern. This new Superman carries over his human name, and a new version of Lois Lane comes with him. His powers are very similar to the earliest Golden Age Superman, diluted compared to the Superman we’re all familiar with, but incredible to a populace that would have never seen such a thing before. And he’s still an alien, although the name of his planet is never revealed (Grant Morrison would later declare it to be this universe’s version of Krypton in the Multiversity series). 

Other things, however, are quite different. His motivation, first of all, starts with the very Stan Lee-ish goal of avenging his dead wife. (And although the people of Salden’s world don’t seem to have surnames, it’s worth noting that even Lee couldn’t resist the lure of the multiple-L supporting characters with Lyella.) His motive to become a hero is because he can’t think of any other way to get home. And his dialogue and behavior is kind Ben Grimm-ish in presentation. If Ben had gotten the strength of the Thing without his orange, rocky exterior, I think he would have been very close to Salden’s Superman. 

The Just Imagine characters haven’t turned up as often as some of the others we’ll glimpse this week, although they turned up here and there in various multiverse stories. In fact, I think Salden and several of this world’s other inhabitants were killed in one of them – Death Metal, maybe? I’m honestly not sure, and considering that the multiverse has been jerked around a few times since then, it may not even be relevant anymore. I do know that all of these characters turned up once more after that, in a special tribute edition DC published after Stan Lee’s death. He’s not the most memorable version of Superman, to be fair, but if I was the kind of person who dealt in puns the way an artist deals in paint, I might say he is the most “Marvelous” of all Supermen in the multiverse.

Okay, I’m exactly that kind of person.

In addition to the “Year of Superman” reading I do for this blog, I’ve also got several old and new comic book series I’m reading through via the DC and Marvel apps. I mentioned them in the log here, if there’s a Superman-family character involved, but I don’t always write about them. Today brought me to Superman #9, a Golden Age issue which I’m only bringing up for one reason. In the final story in this issue, Lois is captured by criminals, but they don’t immediately recognize her for who she is? Why not? Because she’s wearing a pair of glasses.

Man, whoever wrote that issue got jokes. 

Fri., May 2

Comics: Tangent Comics: The Superman #1, New Adventures of Superboy #34, Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 2 #313, Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane #13

RIP, Jackson “Butch” Guice”

Notes: I didn’t think about this before I began this whole “Year of Superman” project, but in retrospect, I suppose I should have. It seems inevitable that, over the course of an entire year, somebody that we all closely relate to Superman would leave us. It happened a few months ago with Gene Hackman, and it happened again on May 1 with Jackson “Butch” Guice. Guice was a great artist, with work for lots of publishers over the years. He co-created Resurrection Man for DC Comics, and was doing variant covers for the current miniseries featuring the character. To Superman fans, though, he’ll be remembered most warmly for his run on Action Comics in the 90s, a run that included the Death of Superman saga. 

Guice’s artwork was pretty unique among Superman artists. His work tended to have a more photographic quality to it – poses and angles that looked like they had been pulled from the walls of a gallery. His men – Superman in particular – had a hardness to them. It was as if John Buscema’s characters somehow came to life and were captured on camera. It was a darker, harsher style than many of the other artists of the day, and that turned out to be perfect for the book documenting the Last Son of Krypton, aka the Eradicator.

It’s something in the eyes, I think.

I’d already planned on reading this book for Supermen of Other Worlds Week, but when I found out that Guice had passed away, I thought that moving Tangent Comics: The Superman to the front of the line was appropriate. Tangent Comics was a DC event in 1997 and 1998, each wave producing a series of nine one-shots set in an alternate universe in which the names of the DC characters, places, and various hangers-on still existed, but virtually everything else was different. The Superman starred Harvey Dent, a cop who had been born in a secret facility built by the spy agency known as Nightwing. Part of an experiment, Dent’s mother died in childbirth and he grew up an orphan. He eventually became a cop and led a fairly ordinary life until the day he tried to stop a jumper named Carter Hall from taking a plunge off a skyscraper. Dent failed to save Hall and, in fact, was pulled off the building WITH him. Rather than dying on impact, though, crashing to the ground unlocked something in his mind. As he recovered, he found he was developing mental powers – telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, and an intelligence that, once normal, was now skyrocketing off the charts. As his powers grew stronger, Dent grew colder, divorcing himself more and more from the humanity of which he had once belonged.

The idea behind Tangent was that only the name would be the same, and damned if that doesn’t live up to the concept here. THE Superman is absolutely nothing like OUR Superman. He strikes me more as a sort of Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen – a man whose power sets him apart from humanity instead of making him learn to respect it. By the end, he’s still acting as a hero, but there’s a darkness to him. This would become clearer in the later Tangent: Superman’s Reign miniseries, in which the Tangent heroes and the main DCU characters would collide and The Superman became the main antagonist. In truth, the Superman he resembles most closely is the one from Jerry Siegel’s original short story, “Reign of the Superman,” about a villain with great mental powers, before he came back and gave the name to a hero.

Mark Millar wrote the issue (more with him in a few days), with art by Guice, and the team was perfect. The dark story played to both of their sensibilities, creating a Superman that doesn’t match with any other in the multiverse, but still makes for a compelling read. I may have to dip my toes back into Superman’s Reign at some point.

For now, though, RIP, Mr. Guice. 

Sat., May 3

Comics: Free Comic Book Day Specials: DC All In 2025 Special Edition, Superman’s Good Guy Gang

My production assistant and I hope you had a great Free Comic Book Day.

Notes: Today is one of my favorite days of the entire year, Free Comic Book Day. My local shop, BSI Comics, graciously hosts me along with several other local writers and artists. I sell a few books, I talk to fellow nerds, I’ve made a lot of friends at FCBD. It’s the best. And also – free comics! DC’s offerings this year include a pair of Superman-related comics, so why don’t we take a look at them?

How many covers do you think Superman has punched through over the years? Twelve? Gotta be at least twelve.

First up is the DC All In 2025 Special Edition, a flipbook that gives us a look at DC’s Absolute Universe on one side and a preview of the upcoming Superman Unlimited on the other. The Absolute story is a devilish tease, as we watch a mysterious figure observing the heroes of this new universe, specifically Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. There are cryptic comments about some major danger approaching, then we get one of those double-page spreads DC loves to do from time to time where we see lots of notes and scribbles that all seem to point towards future storylines. DC’s been doing this kind of thing at least as far back as the 52 series in 2007, and it’s always fun, but also kind of frustrating. I feel like they overreach with these, often teasing stories that wind up never happening. Time will tell if these play out for us, but the final panel is a great little surprise that promises an upcoming major story.

The other side of the book is the one I’m more excited about, the preview of Dan Slott and Rafael Albuquerque’s upcoming Superman Unlimited series. The story opens up with the news of a massive expansion of the Daily Planet. There’s a new boss over the company that owns it, and she’s planning to expand the Planet from a “great Metropolitan newspaper” into a massive global media enterprise. This happens every so often – has been happening as far back as the Bronze Age, really, when Clark began to split his time between reporting for the Planet and being a news anchor for WGBS. Newspapers have had to evolve constantly since Siegel and Shuster chose that profession for Clark Kent back in 1938, and every few years DC tries to modernize the concept while still keeping true to the core of who Clark Kent is. I’ve got no problem with them handling it the way they’re doing here, but that’s not what’s most interesting to me.

I’m really here for the middle part of this story, which is where we get a feel for Slott’s take on the character. And I have to say, I like it. We see several vignettes of Superman averting disasters, saving lives, and making people simply feel better. He captures a crook who stops to thank him for saving Star City from Titano because his aunt lives there. A pilot in a plane that’s falling out of the sky tells his passengers that everything is going to be okay, and all they need to do to know that is look out the window. Little things that show the pureness of the character and the effect he has on people. It’s sweet, and it’s a great start. The story ends with a cliffhanger that leads into the first issue of the new series coming later this month and, as if there was any doubt, I’m there for it. 

The haircut on Guy looks just as good on a 9-year-old as it does on an adult.

DC’s other offering this year, as usual, is a preview of one of their all-ages graphic novels. This time, it’s Rob Justus’s upcoming book Superman’s Good Guy Gang. In this one, child incarnations of Superman and Green Lantern (Guy Gardner) find a strange winged woman stealing puppies and swoop in to stop her, unaware that a much bigger problem is looming. It’s a super quick read (no pun intended), and full of silly moments like Superman and Guy arguing over what the name of their superhero team is going to be. It is absolutely no coincidence that the characters chosen for this book also happen to be the ones who are going to be in James Gunn’s Superman movie, but that’s fine. This is a book for  beginning readers, and it’s great that they’re doing it, but it would be foolish to ignore the characters that are going to be in their next huge media event. It’s a charming little read, and I’ll be happy to pick up the full version for my son when it comes out in July.

Sun., May 4

Comics: Superman: Red Son #1-3

“No, not Red SUN, Red SON. SON. S-O– It’s a PUN, David!”

Notes: I admittedly have a complicated relationship with the work of writer Mark Millar. When he does his own characters, with comics like Kick-Ass or Wanted, I find him hit or miss. When he works with established characters, I find that I rarely care for his stories. He often completely disregards characterization in favor of whatever story he’s planning to tell, and while that approach is okay when dealing with your own, original characters and you have the freedom to shape the characterization how you please, I am far less charitable when the work throws away decades of who a character is in favor of a plot point, the most egregious examples of which can be found in Marvel’s Civil War.

However, I find that he often does a good job with Superman. Early in his career he did a very entertaining run on Superman Adventures, the comic book based on Superman: The Animated Series. He wrote the aforementioned Tangent one-shot. And then there’s Superman: Red Son, perhaps the most acclaimed Superman Elseworlds series of all time. The supposition here is that the rocket that brought Superman to Earth landed not in the Kansas heartland, but somewhere in the Soviet Union. The child who would become Superman grew up indoctrinated with Socialist values, rather than American ones, and the world is rocked to its core as a result.

Millar does a lot of interesting things here. With Superman as a Soviet, the US government recruits its brightest mind – Dr. Lex Luthor, of course – to try to create some sort of countermeasure. With the U.S.S.R. completely ascendant, Princess Diana of Themiscyra makes contact with the outside world via the Russians rather than the Americans. And although we don’t know if there’s a little boy in America named Bruce Wayne, in Russia we see a tragedy that turns one of her citizens into this world’s version of the Batman.

The thing I find most fascinating is Millar’s take on who Superman is. In the prime DC Universe – and in most other iterations of the character – his personality boils down to someone who will always try to do what’s right, always stand up for injustice, and never turn his back on a cry for help. The Red Son Superman shares these traits, with the major difference being that his perspective on what is “right” is colored by socialist values rather than democratic ones. He’s still going to be there to save anyone – even an American – from a disaster like the falling globe from the top of the Daily Planet building, but when he sees the injustice of children standing in bread lines, he decides to use his power to put a stop to that by taking the control of the government that had been offered him after the death of Stalin, but that he had heretofore resisted. 

This whole thing is especially interesting to me from a sociological perspective. Superman at first rejects the notion of succeeding Stalin as the Soviet Premier because he knows people only want him because of his abilities, and the idea that his powers make him special goes against Socialist doctrine. But just like in the real world, he sees the inequities that have happened under Soviet rule and decides at the end of issue one to use his powers to fix them anyway. 

Book two takes the idea further. Superman has been in charge of the USSR for 20 years, and its influence has swallowed nearly the entire world. Only the USA and Chile remain holdouts, and both are hanging on by a thread. But there’s a mysterious Batman fighting against Superman’s rule, while back in the USA, Dr. Luthor is introduced to an alien power source that crashed on American soil decades before – a green one. While good-intentioned, Superman’s influence is beginning to atrophy human progress. People are growing careless, expecting their super-savior to take care of everything. Seatbelts go unused in cars, ships stop providing live preservers, all predicated on the idea that President Superman is going to take care of everything. When someone in his own government approaches Batman with an opportunity to take Superman down, Batman recognizes that the humans who would fill the void might be worse, but stopping him now may be the only way to prevent Super-rule that would last thousands or even millions of years.

There’s another time skip to book three. The Soviets have grown even more powerful and America is on the verge of collapse – until it elects Dr. Luthor President of the United States. Luthor’s unparalleled genius turns the country around overnight and Superman, who has been waiting for the US to finally collapse under its own weight and join their Soviet collective, realizes that it’s not going to happen. The climax of the story comes in a battle between Superman’s forces, Wonder Woman’s Amazons, and the American Green Lantern Corps, all of which coalesce in a turnaround for Superman that proves, even in this corner of the multiverse, he’s still the same man at his core. 

In a way, this entire story is a rebuttal to the whole “Nature versus Nurture” argument, demonstrating that BOTH aspects are of importance to the arc of a person’s life. And honestly, if that’s what Millar was trying to say here, it’s a sentiment I’ve always agreed with. Using Superman to put that idea forth works for me, and very well.

The end of the story is the real genius part of it though, and if you’ve never read Red Son, I don’t want to spoil it for you. Suffice it to say, it’s one of those conclusions that leaves you laughing ironically and calling the writer a magnificent bastard for coming up with such a thing. This isn’t my FAVORITE Superman of another world, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not, objectively speaking, one of the best stories of that sort that has been told. 

Mon., May 5

Comics: Superman: Secret Identity #1-4

Why DC based a comic on an obscure Jerry O’Connell TV show from the 1980s I’ll never know.

Notes: I’ve talked quite a bit in this blog about Mark Waid and how great a superhero writer he is, but although I eagerly place him at the top of the pyramid, he’s not there alone. Right up there, in my estimation, is Kurt Busiek. He’s the author of the phenomenal series Marvels and the creator of Astro City, which you’ll hear about again later when I do the week on heroes inspired by Superman. He also had a run on Superman’s regular title and he’s done work with the Justice League, most notably the JLA/Avengers crossover, in which Superman got to wield Thor’s hammer. Man, I should read that again before this year is out.

But his greatest work with Superman isn’t with “our” Superman at all, but rather the miniseries Superman: Secret Identity. An Elseworlds comic in all but name, this 2004 series was done with former Adventures of Superman artist Stuart Immonen, and was about a young man named Clark Kent from a small town in Kansas, but in a world where there are no superheroes and Superman is a fictional character. Whereas Waid is better than anybody at showing the wild, fun, grandeur of a superhero universe, Busiek’s greatest strength comes in humanizing superhero stories. Marvels was the history of the Marvel Universe through the perspective of a bystander. Astro City shows what it’s like to live in a superhero universe from a different perspective in every story. And Secret Identity is about being a hero in a world that doesn’t have them.

The concept is almost identical to the original version of Superboy-Prime, who showed up during Crisis on Infinite Earth as an inhabitant of Earth-Prime, which in the older DC Comics had ostensibly been the “real” world where the readers and creators of DC Comics live. This was before he changed to become a meta-commentary on toxic fandom, which I have to admit, was actually a pretty clever take. But Secret Identity takes the initial concept and keeps it contained, pure.

Clark Kent’s parents gave him the name because their last name was “Kent,” they lived in Kansas, and they thought it would be cute. Clark is not as enamored of his name as they are, having grown up being taunted for the famous name and spending every birthday getting laden with Superman-themed presents he couldn’t be less interested in. The boy grows up introverted, without any close friends and preferring to spend time alone. It’s on a solitary hiking trip that he suddenly, inexplicably begins to manifest the powers of his namesake. He begins using his powers to help people in secret, but it doesn’t take long before word of the flying “Superboy” begins to leak out. 

The four issues track Clark’s entire life story – growing into becoming a writer, although not a reporter, falling in love with a woman (naturally) named Lois, becoming a father. The government tries to track him early on, even capturing him at one point, before they settle into an uneasy alliance and “Superman” becomes a hidden force for good. Slowly, we watch how the world changes under his influence. More importantly, though, we see how HE changes over the course of a lifetime. 

This is a beautiful book. It’s almost not even accurate to call it a “superhero” comic. Yes, he has powers, and yes, he even wears the costume, but there are no supervillains, no world-threatening cataclysms…there’s not even really an antagonist. It’s a story about a life, with ups and downs and pitfalls and triumphs and success and tragedies. It’s a story about someone who is just like everybody else, with the obvious exception of being faster than a speeding bullet. It’s Busiek doing what Busiek does best. 

It’s also Immonen at his peak. I was always a fan of his work on the mainstream Superman, but this version is different. It’s still unmistakably his work, but there’s a softness to it that you don’t usually see when he’s drawing a mainstream story about Superman punching out Metallo or something. Looking at these panels, you see a different quality, a lighter touch. It looks almost like a fantasy world, which is rather fitting from the perspective of this Clark Kent, living what must seem to him to be a fantasy life. 

And unlike some of the other alternate Supermen we’ve looked at over the last few days, this is a Superman who hasn’t shown up again. In fact, I’m not even certain that this “world” has a specific designation in the current DC Multiverse the way the others we’ve looked at has. And if it doesn’t, that’s okay. There’s room for more stories of the Earth-One Superman, the Just Imagine Superman, or the Tangent Superman. But the Secret Identity Superman’s story is complete in these four volumes – complete and beautiful. This is one of my favorites. 

Tues., May 6

Animated Feature: Justice League: Gods and Monsters

Wait, which ones are the gods and which ones are the monsters?

Notes: Here’s a REALLY different Superman of another world. Bruce Timm, one of the architects of the DC Animated Universe that began with Batman: The Animated Series, returned to the characters with this film. It too was essentially an Elseworlds, even though it didn’t have the brand and wasn’t based on any pre-existing story. In this world, in the minutes before the destruction of Krypton, Jor-El and Lara are prevented from sending Kal-El into space by the sudden interruption of General Zod, who places his own son in the spacecraft bound to Earth. It is the Zod child, not Kal-El, who makes the journey across the stars, and the world becomes a very different place.

In this world, the Justice League is comprised of Zod’s son, now called Superman; Kirk Langstrom, a vampire Batman; and the New God Bekka, who has taken the name Wonder Woman. This Justice League is more brutal and far less forgiving than the League we’re accustomed to, and public opinion on the team is tearing the public down the middle. Things get worse when top scientists such as Victor Stone, John Henry Irons, Ray Palmer, and others are targeted by mysterious assassins with methods that seem to imitate those of the Justice League.

In a lot of ways, I’m surprised that this movie was even made. Granted, the whole “multiverse” concept has become mainstream now, but this is SUCH a different take on the concept that I feel relatively certain only Bruce Timm’s sway with Warner Bros Animation ever got this one off the ground. And it follows the classic Elseworlds pattern perfectly: it begins by showing what makes this world diverse from ours, it continues with an exploration of that world, and then it it follows a main plot that both tells a strong story and reveals corners of the world that are both similar to and very different from the one we’re accustomed to. 

Benjamin Bratt voices Superman in this one, with an edge that the Clark Kent versions of the character usually doesn’t have, but it works quite well in this one. We also get Tamara Taylor as Wonder Woman and, in what I have to assume was a meta joke in the casting department, we get Dexter star Michael C. Hall once again obsessed with blood as the vampire Batman. 

As this is the Year of Superman, though, rather than the Year of the Justice League, let’s focus on this movie’s version of our hero. Baby Zod lands in Latin America rather than Kansas, and is named Hector Guerra. As he grows up, he knows very little of his heritage on Krypton, unaware of where exactly he came from. And while he’s darker and more brutal than our Superman, he’s not his father either. Knowing more about his true parentage than he does, it’s natural for the viewer to expect some sort of face-heel turn, becoming the bad guy before the film ends. Well, spoiler alert – he doesn’t. He’s not OUR Superman, but he is A Superman, and like most of them, he’s there to protect people. It’s actually refreshing that he DOESN’T become the bad guy at any point.

The film ends on a hook that clearly leaves the door open to revisit this universe, but to date, it hasn’t happened yet. There were a few prequel comic books and a webseries that preceded it, but unless I missed something somewhere, we’ve yet to explore this world following the conclusion of the film. While I’m not exactly itching for more of the Gods and Monsters universe the way I am Earth-One, I wouldn’t be opposed to it either. It’s an interesting place, and there are more stories to tell. 

This was a fun week, looking at different, non-mainstream versions of our hero. And you know, there are an awful lot of other worlds out there in the multiverse. I may do this again before the year is up.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. You can join in the Kryptonian Konversation every day in the Year of Superman Facebook Group!

Year of Superman Week 17: Lex, Batman, Power Girl, Batman, Elseworlds, Batman, and Spam

blakemp Year of Superman , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Another week, another round of the Year of Superman! It’s going to be another random week, a week where I’m not going to be adhering to any particular theme or category, and just reading or watching whatever catches my fancy. And there’s some fancy, fancy stuff coming down the pipe this week, from the big 25th issue of Joshua Williamson’s run on Superman to the completed three-part Last Days of Lex Luthor miniseries, and…well, I don’t even know what else will come up, because I’m writing this at the beginning of the week and I’ve got no idea where the solar winds of Rao will take me. Join me and let’s find out!

Wed., April 23

I feel like Perry is kinda burying the lede here…

Comic: Superman Vol. 6 #25

Notes: Since Williamson kicked off his run on the main Superman comic about two years ago, he’s been building up a pretty epic storyline involving Lex Luthor. It began after Lex was taken into custody, turning over his company to Superman and making it “SuperCorp.” As one of the few people on Earth whose memory of Superman’s double identity remained (it was because of him that it was wiped out anyway), he decided that if he couldn’t destroy Superman, he would force him to work WITH him, and it was a strategy that worked pretty well for some time. Along the way, though, Lex lost his memory, leaving him a man who wasn’t quite as brilliant as before, but who had a genuine benevolence to him, seeming to want to atone for the crimes of his former self. It was a change for the better for everyone – except for Mercy Graves.

In this climactic issue, Mercy has let loose one of Lex’s failed experiments, X-El, a Luthor/Kryptonian hybrid clone, that she’s hoping to have supplant the “new” Luthor, and it’s Superman, Superwoman, and Lex vs. X-El. I loved this issue – it feels like a real culmination of the story so far, with everything that’s been happening building up to an incredible fight that lasts for most of the extra-sized issue. What’s more, the usual penciler Jamal Campbell (who has been doing a bang-up job on this series) is joined by a murderer’s row of talent, including Eddy Barrows, Eber Ferreira, and Dan Mora. Campbell and Alejandro Sanchez are credited as colorists as well, and although you don’t often discuss the colorists when you’re talking about comic books, this is one issue where it really stand out to me. Every page has at least one panel that could be turned into a poster I’d expect to see in any comic shop. 

Although the issue is, like I said, kind of a culmination of the storyline in that it has brought everything together, it would be a mistake to imply that it’s the END of the story. In fact, this issue ends in a cliffhanger that’s really got me itching for issue #26. But man, I can’t say enough good things about this run and this creative team. 

Thur., April 24

I just wish that Bryan Hitch would have the guts to put a little symbolism into his artwork.

Comics: Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor #1-3

Notes: About a month ago, when the long-delayed second issue of this miniseries finally came out, I decided to wait to read it until I had the third and final issue in my hands. I don’t know if the story would have been less impactful had I not chosen to wait, but I DO know that it would have driven me crazy to have to wait for the final installment, because ultimately, this is one of the finest Superman stories I have ever read.

And if you haven’t noticed, I’ve read a LOT of them.

In the first issue (which, again, came out nearly two years ago, and that’s the last time I’ll reference the delay), Superman is attacked once again by his greatest enemy…but this time, Luthor’s goal is not the death of the man of steel. No, for once, he needs his HELP. Lex Luthor, it seems, is dying. Some strange, exotic radiation is attacking his cells, and he knows that Superman is the one being in the universe who will stop at nothing to find a cure, because Superman…well…Superman is the man who saves everybody.

I don’t want to say too much more about the story, because there are some incredible twists and surprises throughout this miniseries. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a LOT to say. The reason Luthor turns to Superman, again, is because he knows that Superman will absolutely refuse to quit as long as there is a life in jeopardy, and the fact that the life in question belongs to his greatest enemy makes no difference whatsoever. Luthor sees this as foolishness, as a weakness on Superman’s part, but throughout this story, Mark Waid demonstrates why this is actually his greatest strength. Superman is confronted by friends who cannot fathom why he would risk so much to help Luthor. The quest to save his enemy becomes public knowledge, making some of the public turn against him. His quest takes him to Kandor, Atlantis, Themiscyra, and even the 31st Century, before the final reveal of what’s really going on turns everything on its ear and seals the fate of the two characters.

It’s an odd choice, to make this a Black Label book. Black Label is ostensibly a “mature reader’s” imprint, but there’s nothing in this book that warrants that marker. It’s out of continuity, to be certain, and I wonder if this would have been listed as Elseworlds, had that label been resurrected when the first issue appeared. But no matter what imprint this story falls under, it’s a masterpiece. It’s Mark Waid’s dissertation on who Superman is and why he has to be who he is. We learn the same things about Lex Luthor, in fact, and the relationship between these two characters has never been laid out so bare, so stark, so clean as in this story.

This story is brilliant. This is one of the best Superman stories I’ve ever read. 

Fri., April 25

Comics: Justice League Unlimited Vol. 2 #6

Notes: The second part of “We are Yesterday” in Justice League Unlimited doesn’t have a ton of Super-action, but it’s a great issue nonetheless. In this issue, we see Grodd hatching his plan to infiltrate the past and collect purer versions of his former compatriots in the Legion of Doom to act as a countermeasure to the now-larger League. We also get a glimpse of the moment when Superman recruited Air Wave – who has become a surprisingly important character in this series – to join the League. Air Wave is an interesting character – a D-lister for years, and Waid has already found a way to make him compelling and sympathetic through a comparatively small number of pages in the first six issues of this title. I really hope that we get to see more of his story after this crossover with World’s Finest reaches its conclusion. 

Graphic Novel: Batman: Hush (Collects Batman #608-619, Superman appears in #611, 612, and 619)

“Say it, Bruce! SAY THAT GLASSES ARE A PERFECTLY ADEQUATE DISGUISE!”

Notes: With “Hush 2” currently running in the ongoing Batman comic book, I wanted to go back and re-read the original, as it’s been a while. I’m not going to dig into it too deeply, as this ain’t the “Year of Batman,” and Superman’s appearances are brief. But brief or not, they ARE impactful, and I wanted to point out a few things. 

First comes in Chapter 4 (issue #611 of the ongoing), in which Bruce Wayne visits Metropolis and, specifically, the offices of the Daily Planet. At this time, Bruce actually OWNED the Planet. I’m not sure if he still does or not. Hey, DC, give us a ruling. But regardless, in this issue he’s been finding himself growing more and more drawn to Catwoman, with whom he’s always had a “will they/won’t they” relationship. At the Planet office, he watches Lois and Clark together and marvels at how Clark has found someone with whom he’s willing to trust his greatest secret. A few chapters later (kinda spoilers, in case you’ve never read “Hush” before), Bruce reveals his own identity to Selina for the first time. It’s one of those rare status quo changes – like Lois and Clark getting married – that has stuck, and I find it very interesting that writer Jeph Loeb decided to use the Lois and Clark relationship as a way of sort of justifying that relationship upgrade for Selina and Bruce.

Superman has a bigger presence in Chapter 5 (issue #612), in which he’s being controlled by Poison Ivy and comes to blows with Batman in the sewers of Metropolis. (Side note: it’s VERY odd to see the way Catwoman fights both Ivy and Harley Quinn in this storyline, considering the way that the three of them would become the “Gotham City Sirens” just a few years later.) It’s a pretty good fight, all things considered. Bruce has his Kryptonite ring, and he’s counting on both that and the fact that he knows Superman is actively fighting against Ivy’s mind control to keep him alive. I think the most interesting thing about this fight, though, comes from a two-page spread in the middle, where Bruce’s inner narration makes a comment that the internet has elevated to meme status: “Deep down, Clark’s essentially a good person…and deep down, I’m not.” People love to use this quote, but I think a lot of them miss the point. The way I read it, this is something that Bruce sincerely believes…but he’s wrong. Not about Clark, of course, but about himself. And Clark would be the first one to tell him that.

Also, in this issue, Poison Ivy gets captured by Krypto, and that’s just adorable.

Superman then dips out of the rest of the story until the denouement in Chapter 12 (issue #619). The mysterious Hush has been defeated and Bruce turns once again to Superman…not just because he needs a friend, but also because he needs someone with X-Ray vision to make sure that Hush didn’t do anything inside of his head…and literally, not the way the Joker does it. The three appearances of Superman in this story really speak strongly towards the bond between these two heroes and the trust that they share. At the same time as this storyline was winding down, Loeb was launching the ongoing Superman/Batman series, and I don’t believe for a second that this was a coincidence. He writes both heroes well. He writes them TOGETHER excellently. 

Sat., April 26

Comic: Power Girl Vol. 4 #20

“Meet Kara who’s never had a home
From Argo City to the Phantom Zone
But PAIGE HAS MADE FRIENDS LEFT AND RIGHT
TO GO WITH HER KRYTPONIAN MIGHT!
Whaaaat a crazy pair…”

Notes: This volume of Power Girl ends with this issue and, much as I hate to say it, I’m not really upset to see it go. It had a promising start, but the series seemed to be all about trying to figure out who Power Girl is and…frankly…I’m tired of that. A lack of identity has been Power Girl’s defining characteristic for the past 40 years, and that’s at least 39 years too long for that to be interesting in any individual character. At first, it seemed as though this series was going to lock her in to a true identity, but as evidenced by the cover of this last issue, it never really felt like it gelled. The book built up her world, built up her supporting cast, but didn’t really build up HER. I get it. It’s difficult. The elevator pitch of the character is “older Supergirl from Earth-2,” and since we’ve already got the “Prime” Supergirl, that doesn’t seem to leave room for her. But if all you do with the character is point out that she seems superfluous without redefining her in a satisfying way…well, what have you actually done? I hope somebody else gets their hands on Power Girl soon. I don’t care if it’s as a supporting player in the Superman titles or if she rejoins the Justice Society or what, but I want somebody, ANYBODY to take Kara Zor-L and finally, after all these years, say “This is who she is and this is what makes her unique, and can we please stop having the same conversation?”

Is that so much to ask? 

Sun., April 27

Comics: Batman Vol. 3 #36-37

Part one: Bromance. Part two: Romance.

Notes: When I read Hush a few days ago, I noticed a scene in the chapter where Superman is controlled by Poison Ivy where Catwoman tries to break him out of it by threatening Lois Lane’s life. She didn’t mean it, of course, she did it because Batman told her that Superman was close to the people who worked at the Daily Planet and that endangering one of them would help him break from Ivy’s control. Nor did she know specifically that Lois was Clark’s wife – Bruce also told her that Jimmy Olsen and Perry White would have been suitable for this purpose. But the scene put me in mind of a more recent meeting between these four, and I wanted to read it today.

Tom King’s run on Batman is controversial for reasons I’m not going to get into here, but the two-part “Super Friends” story from Batman Vol. 3 #36 and 37 is one of the best stories about Superman and Batman I have ever read. Batman and Catwoman have recently become engaged, and in the first issue Bruce and Clark each have conversations with their respective significant others about the fact that they haven’t spoken to one another about the engagement yet. Clark is convinced that the fact that Bruce hasn’t called him is evidence that they’re not really that close, Bruce says he shouldn’t have to call Clark because his best friend is actually Jim Gordon (who doesn’t know his real name) or Alfred (who Selina points out is on his payroll, and therefore doesn’t count). The bulk of the issue is taken up with cutting back and forth between these two conversations, and the quick realization that Lois and Selina know Clark and Bruce far better than either of the world’s two greatest heroes know themselves. At the end of the first issue, the two couples come together in one of the most charming meet-cutes I’ve ever seen. You’ve probably seen the page on the internet even if you’ve never read the issue.

Yeah, that’s the stuff.

In part two, the foursome go on a double date to an amusement park which is celebrating “Superhero Night” – you have to have on a superhero costume to get in. Under the ladies’ suggestions, Bruce and Clark wear each other’s costumes and enter the park to enjoy an extremely rare night for themselves. 

Tom King’s depiction of this relationship is spot-on. They’re best friends, even though neither one of them really wants to admit it. Their differences are what make them work together, not something that drives them apart. And the scenes of Lois and Selina bonding with one another are absolutely joyous. We fans talk quite a bit about how difficult it must be for superheroes to hide the secret of their dual lives, but we don’t talk enough about the toll it might take on those who love them. Giving Lois a new friend in Selina really feels natural. I was, I admit, disappointed when the Batman/Catwoman wedding didn’t go through, because I thought that DC would finally have the guts to push Batman’s status quo in a new direction permanently. I still think that it would have been better if they’d remained together. But mostly, I miss the chance to have more issues like this one, with Clark and Lois and Selina and (however begrudgingly) Bruce just being friends.

Don’t we all need that? 

Mon., April 28

TV Episode: Superman and Lois, Season 2, Episode 7, “Anti-Hero”

Or the “Lana’s Trauma Conga Express.”

Notes: Superman has been taken into custody by the DOD, who are holding him under a red sun lamp to negate his powers. As Lois and Sam try to figure out a way to navigate his release, Jordan is still angry at his brother for lying about the source of his newfound powers, and Lana and Sarah are dealing with the fallout of Lana’s impending separation from her husband.

Did you notice how each plot point I recapped there got progressively less superhero-y and more soap opera-ish? To be fair, there has been overlap in the kind of storytelling done by superheroes and soap operas for a very long time. Even as far back as the Golden Age you had the occasional unrequited love runner that punctuated early superheroes. Then, once Stan Lee brought in the Marvel Age of comics, the greater emphasis of serialized storytelling made it virtually inevitable that elements like Spider-Man’s disastrous love life would become an ongoing story point. But at times, Superman and Lois feels far more like a teen drama than a superhero show. It’s not fair to criticize the show on that point – for what it’s doing, it seems to do it just fine. But it isn’t exactly what I’m looking for here.

Some of the soap opera stuff is done well. For instance, there’s a nice scene where Lois and Lana are bonding over their respective family struggles – Lana with the fact that her husband cheated on her, Lois with the fact that her son got caught with a backpack full of drugs. The odd thing is that they’re treating X-Kryptonite as if it was any other drug. Jonathan’s bag had 20 vials, each of which could turn a teenager into a walking weapon of mass destruction, but the conversation they have could have been ripped straight out of a 70s After School Special about a mom who caught her son with a joint. 

That’s not to say that there’s no superhero stuff going on, of course. The story of Clark in custody, held under the red lamps with his half-brother Morgan Edge, is exactly what I’m hoping to see. The DOD even weaponizes Superman’s compassion, threatening to harm Edge if he doesn’t give them information that they want, which he does despite the fact that his brother is also his enemy. I even like the way the two of them put their differences aside and work together. The CW has a tradition of villains slowly reforming and joining the heroes that goes back to when they were the WB network and it happened every season on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so if that turns out to be the long game with Morgan Edge’s character, I’m used to it. Once they meet up with the hologram of Lara and the Alternate-Superman (can we PLEASE just call him Bizarro?), there’s some good action stuff here. 

But none of that addresses the real problem I’ve been having with this show in season two. I love Hoechlin’s Superman, but the problem here is that they’ve isolated him. The show is stronger when he’s paired with Lois or where he’s working with his sons and their struggles with Jordan’s powers and Jonathan’s typical lack thereof. If you’re not doing that kind of thing, if you have him segregated from the rest of the main cast, you may as well be watching two entirely different shows. 

Clark, fortunately, returns to Lois at the end of the episode. But before that we get one more little scene I liked. Edge is still in custody, still the bad guy, but at the end of it Clark addresses him as “Brother.” This actually goes directly against something said earlier in the episode, when she tells Jonathan that his father would never forgive him for his involvement with X-K. But as the end of this episode shows you, Superman’s forgiveness is infinite. You mean to tell me, Lois, that you don’t think he would forgive his SON? Come on, you know him better than that.  

Then again, the episode ends with Clark tearing into Jonathan and not allowing him the opportunity to talk, so what do I know? 

Tues., April 28

Comic: Superman: Speeding Bullets #1, Action Comics #374

When the dry cleaner at the Hall of Justice mixes up the bags.

Notes: I’ve got a new writing project I’m working on today, so I needed something quick to slip in to the Year of Superman. The classic Elseworlds one-shot Superman: Speeding Bullets seemed like just the thing. Written by J.M. DeMatteis with art by Eduardo Barreto, this is about as close to the old Marvel What If? format as Elseworlds got, basically asking the question, “What if Kal-El was found by Thomas and Martha Wayne instead of Jonathan and Martha Kent?” Thomas and Martha – childless in this universe – find the rocket ship and adopt the child much like the Kents did, naming him Bruce and raising him as their own. Kal-El’s life in Gotham is pretty similar to the mainstream Bruce Wayne until the night of his parents’ murder, when – seeing the people he loved most in the world gunned down in front of him – his head vision activated and he roasted Joe Chill to death. In shock, Bruce developed a mental block about that night, forgetting his powers until – as a young adult – robbers break into Wayne Manor. His heat vision – and memories – come back, and he becomes a much more brutal version of Batman and the one in our universe.

When I say this was close to a What If?, I don’t just mean in premise, but also in execution. The classic What If? stories tended to end in one of two ways: either the universe attempts to “course correct,” resulting in a world as close to the original as possible, or things go so dark and bleak that it may as well be the apocalypse, at least for the characters involved, if not literally. Some of the ways we see that here are Bruce deciding to buy the Gotham Gazette and hiring Perry White and Lois Lane, falling in love with the latter, and Lex Luthor suffering an accident in a chemical plant, transforming him into this world’s version of the Joker. Since this is a world that can’t have both a Superman and a Batman, we watch Bruce Wayne transform from one to another. Lois’s influence cools his rage, getting him to pull back on his bloodlust, and eventually abandoning the Batman identity to become his world’s Superman. It’s an interesting book, and it works well as an Elseworlds. I have to admit, though, I’m surprised that this version of Bat/Superman hasn’t turned up the way other Elseworlds versions like Red Son or the Vampire Batman have once the Multiverse was opened up again. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. You can join in the Kryptonian Konversation every day in the Year of Superman Facebook Group!