The other day when we decorated our Christmas tree, I opened up a few ornaments I bought weeks ago in preparation for this moment. One of them – it should be no surprise – was a Superman ornament from the new movie, poised to go on the tree in the midst of a half-dozen other Superman ornaments of various types and origin, including one of his s-shield, a LEGO Superman, and Krypto the Superdog, amongst others. The second newbie was from this year’s other great superhero movie, Fantastic Four: First Steps: a figure of my favorite Marvel character Benjamin J. Grimm, the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing. And as I hung it on the tree, I was struck with a bit of a giggle as I realized that here I was, Baptised and confirmed Catholic, placing on my Christmas tree one of the most famously Jewish superheroes that ever existed.
“IT’S CAROLIN’ TIME!”
And I can’t help but think that Stan Lee would find that pretty amusing as well.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Ben’s co-creators, were both Jewish, and although the classic comics never really made it explicit, there were a lot of things about Ben’s dialogue and backstory that coded him as a New York Jew. The comics didn’t deal with religion that much at the time, although by the 80s writers began to feel freer about incorporating religion as part of a character’s background. Kitty Pryde of the X-Men and Marc Spector, Moon Knight, were both marked as Jewish early in their careers, and existing heroes like Nightcrawler (also of the X-Men) and Daredevil had their own Catholic faith emphasized as major aspects of their characterization. The degree to which any character’s particular religious affiliation is relevant tends to wax and wane depending on the writer, but addressing these issues helped make the Marvel Universe as a whole feel more real in a way, as it was no longer ignoring such a major part of culture. All that said, it’s weird that it took 40 years, until the early 2000s, before Marvel published a story that specifically had the Thing make reference to his Jewish heritage.
Since then it’s come up far more often, including an intriguing story by Dan Slott where Ben got a Bar Mitzvah as an adult using the logic that becoming the Thing was sort of a second birth and the 13 years that had elapsed since then (in-universe, that is) allowed for that. I’m no Hebrew scholar so I’ve got no idea if that would fly in real life, but it was a great story all the same. At any rate, I think Stan would be fine with me putting Ben on the same tree as I put the little ornament that commemorated the 50th anniversary of our local Catholic church, the snowman bauble my son made for us in Kindergarten, the Peanuts gang, this weird Nicholas Cage ornament my wife thinks is absolutely hilarious, and the golden Enterprise Hallmark produced for Star Trek’s own 50th anniversary. Whether you yourself are religious or not, I feel like we nerds have embraced the holidays as another way to let our geek flags fly.
Guess which one of these is my wife’s favorite.
Hallmark is not the only company to have embraced this part of our culture, of course, but I feel like they’re probably the most recognizable. Every year, I have friends who eagerly await that moment – usually sometime in July – when Hallmark releases their catalogue of new ornaments that will be available for the holiday season. And there’s never any telling what you’re going to get, there are some things that are pretty reliable. That year’s big movies usually get a few ornaments, and there’s almost always stuff to be added to their collection of Star Wars and Star Trek decorations whether there was a new movie that year or not. And as they continue to milk those properties for every character, vehicle, and scenario they can possibly immortalize, they’ve gotten increasingly elaborate. This year’s offerings include a $100 ornament, full of lights and sound, of the scene in the first Star Wars movie where Chewbacca and R2-D2 are playing holographic chess, complete with an actual hologram function. And while that ornament may fall out of MY price range, I’ve got absolutely no doubt that they sold out.
It’s called “Let the Wookie Win.” “Wookie” is slang for “your desperate need to display your youth on a Douglas Fir.”
But Hallmark doesn’t stop at the usual. A cursory glance at their website reveals that this year’s offerings – in addition to the usual IP from Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and DC Comics – also include the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog, Harry Potter, an XBox controller, Heinz Ketchup, Shrek, the NFL, Friends, and your favorite seasonal horror movie characters like M3gan, Chucky, and Michael Meyers – specifically from Halloween II. If you simply took every licensed ornament produced by Hallmark in the past two decades and put them on one enormous tree, you could show it to an alien as a perfect capsule summary of western culture in the 21st century.
It’s not just Christmas trees, of course, but pretty much all aspects of holiday decorating allow for you to show off the kind of stuff that you’re into. We’ve always had Christmas inflatables in our yard, for instance. Over the years, those inflatables have included multiple Star Wars characters, sitting out there right next to the likes of Snoopy, Frosty the Snowman, Bluey, and a shark wearing a Santa hat. (My wife desperately tried to find oversized yellow Christmas light decorations to put behind the shark in an attempt to recreate the scene from Jaws in our yard, but she was unsuccessful before the shark’s motor failed and the inflatable decoration had to be retired. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.)
If you don’t have stuff like this on your lawn are you even really celebrating the birth of our Savior?
In my classroom, I’ve got a collection of geeky knickknacks (mostly – but not all – Superman-related) that I keep near my desk. Around the holidays, though, I break out specialized ones – monsters at Halloween, family groups for Thanksgiving. And now, at Christmas, my collectible display includes multiple DC and Marvel characters in Christmas outfits, Charlie Brown in his snow suit next to Snoopy sleeping on his decorated doghouse, and for a hint of traditionality, Santa Claus and Rudolph. Santa, although, is in New Orleans Saints gear, because we very much use the holidays as an excuse to mash together EVERYTHING we love.
Harley is winking because she and Deadpool have shenanigans to get up to during my planning period.
And lest we forget, we don’t just decorate our environment, friends. We decorate ourselves. I’ve long prided myself on my collection of nerdy t-shirts, but at Christmas there’s a special subsection that gets broken out with Christmas-themed takes on the Flintstones, the Muppets, the Looney Tunes, Disney characters, and of course, my favorite superheroes. The “Ugly Sweater” trend gives us yet another opportunity to put ourselves on display. You can find designs dedicated to virtually any movie, TV show, or video game you can think of. Last year I broke down and ordered the Svengoolie Christmas sweater, wearing it any time it was cold enough outside to justify it. (I live in Louisiana, of course, so that only happened like twice. But still.) And of course, Santa hats are just one more excuse to customize the holidays. I’ve got a Superman Santa hat I’ve worn for many years, and just this week my wife got one in Harley Quinn colors. My friend Owen Marshall, who I know is reading this right now – hi, buddy! – has a collection of different Santa hats that could occupy an entire section of a Christmas museum.
Only seven years old in this picture and he’s already looking away from his dad in embarrassment.
A few years ago, my brother introduced me to RSVLTS, a company that makes very cool, comfortable shirts in deliciously nerdy patterns, and those shirts have come to dominate my casual wardrobe. I often hold back on buying their seasonal shirts, as they’re kind of expensive for a shirt I can only wear a month of out of the year, but I eventually acquired a shirt of Mickey and Minnie ice-skating, a great pattern of the characters from Rankin and Bass’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and last month my sweet wife got me my favorite Disney character, Scrooge McDuck, on a RSVLTS shirt celebrating his definitive performance as Ebenezer Scrooge from the motion picture Mickey’s Christmas Carol.
Imagine this shirt, but with my head sticking out of it.
RSVLTS does not pay me for my frequent endorsements, but damn it, they should.
The point is, we all celebrate the holidays in our own ways, and that’s as it should be. And one of the things I like about them the most is the opportunity for people to use them to show off who they are. Put out your geekiest ornaments and your nerdiest lawn decorations. Wear your wildest shirts and hats. And let your geek flag fly. Christmas should be a celebration of love, and while that should PRIMARILY be the people we love (you know who you are), I think there’s room in it for the things we love as well.
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. If Santa is listening, he’s still got his eye on that G.I. Joe aircraft carrier. Everybody reading this knows what he’s talking about.
Early in 2024, when DC and Marvel Comics announced that they were overcoming years of – let’s be frank – hostility with one another to release a pair of omnibus editions of their various crossovers from years past, I was excited. Not only that, but I was hopeful that this would lead to further collaborations between the two of them. Earlier this year, that hope was justified when the publishers released their first new crossover in almost 20 years, a pair of books teaming up Batman and Deadpool. Not only that, but each of those books would have several back-up stories featuring other team-ups, such as Green Lantern/Rocket Raccoon, Captain America/Wonder Woman, and Krypto the Superdog/Jeff the Land Shark. And it was nice.
Nice.
And then stuff started happening.
At first, it was stuff that wasn’t too difficult to see as an expansion of this new era of cooperation. Both Marvel and DC have been in the business of publishing “facsimile editions” of classic comics for a few years now – key issues reprinted in their entirety, including the original advertisements, letter columns, and other features that we don’t usually see when a story is reprinted elsewhere. In this spirit, they announced facsimile editions of the original Spider-Boy one-shot from the classic Amalgam Comics event, with a character that mashed up Spider-Man and Superboy (the Conner Kent version) into one hero. This is going to be followed by a facsimile edition of the first-ever meeting between Marvel and DC characters, 1976’s Superman Vs. the Amazing Spider-Man. And then the big magilla – although still not technically anything shocking – they announced that the two Batman/Deadpool comics would be followed some time in 2026 with two new Superman/Spider-Man events.
Awesome sauce, right?
But it didn’t end there, either.
Last week, totally out of the blue, subscribers to the Marvel Universe app (such as myself) got an email announcing a brand-new digital-only comic book…a crossover between Thor and Shazam! Not only that, but it was written by Al Ewing, who has been helming major books for both Marvel and DC for the past few years, including Thor’s ongoing series and DC’s Absolute Green Lantern, among others. Only minutes later, subscribers to the DC Infinity app (such as myself) ALSO got an e-mail, this time announcing a surprise digital crossover starring the Flash and the Fantastic Four, written by former Flash and current Green Lantern and Aquaman writer Jeremy Adams. Both of them were fun reads, totally unexpected, and available for free even if you didn’t have a subscription to the app.
It was like Christmas in November! Or, like every store in North America calls it, “Late Christmas.”
“What a nice surprise,” I thought to myself. It’s really rare that a comic book publisher these days would even change the color of Spider-Gwen’s shoelaces without putting out a press release about it, so a pair of totally unexpected crossovers was a delightful treat.
Then it really started to get weird.
Because the day after the crossovers dropped, Marvel and DC each sent out ANOTHER email. Marvel’s was a code for their subscribers to get a free 30-day trial of DC Infinity. And DC’s email? You guessed it – a code for 30 free days of Hello Fresh.
No, just kidding. Of course, it was a code for a free trial of the Marvel app. And at this point, I started to get uneasy. You see, Marvel and DC have historically been the two biggest competitors in the comic book game. And while there have always been creators who moved freely between the companies, working for one and then the other or even (such as is the case with Ewing) working for them both at the same time, the higher-ups have had a kind of bitter antagonism for the past few decades. Both Marvel and DC have undergone regime changes since the harshest days of the feud, though, and even the Omnibus editions were evidence that the temperature between them has cooled. Even so, seeing them shamelessly promoting each other is…unsettling. Imagine, for example, that you grew up in a household where your parents were fighting all of the time, and then suddenly without warning, the fighting just STOPPED. In some ways, the quiet would be even more disturbing than the fight.
That’s where comic book fans are at the moment. We’ve gone from “Isn’t it nice that Mom and Dad are being friendly again?” all the way around to “What in the HELL is going on?”
Because maybe it’s just me and the basic state of paranoia that exists hardwired right into my brain, but it feels like there’s more happening behind the scenes than the fans are being made aware of. And sure, it could just be more crossovers like Batman/Deadpool or Superman/Spider-Man. Maybe it will become a new annual event. Maybe even more than annual.
Or maybe it’s something else.
This is the only reasonable reaction.
The good thing is that I talk to a lot of comic nerds (shout out to my homies in the best Comic Book Collecting group on Facebook) so I know I’m not the ONLY one who feels this way. A few people have speculated that one of the publishers, or their parent companies, is considering buying the other one. I don’t really think this is the case, and I sincerely HOPE it isn’t, and for a few reasons. First, I think competition is healthy – putting the two biggest brands under a single umbrella would undercut that dramatically. Also, the odds of Warner Bros purchasing Marvel from Disney – one of Disney’s major cash cows, in a time when Warner Bros itself is on the market for a new owner – is virtually nonexistent. The possibility of the WB selling DC to Disney, on the other hand, feels more plausible, but that would be bad because…I’m going to be frank here…DC is crushing it right now. The comic book line’s sales and critical response are up and the movie and TV production is firing on all cylinders, despite what that one jackass who writes for “Cosmic Book News” is desperately trying to convince people. Handing that brand over to Disney and Marvel – whose works, let’s face it, have kind of been declining the last few years – would not be optimal for anybody.
Seriously, compared to “Cosmic Book News,” this thing is the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Another possibility, one that I would be far more open to, would be some sort of distribution partnership. Much has been made about the chaos behind the scenes of the comic book world with the slow death of Diamond Distribution this year, and seeing Marvel and DC cooperate on a new distribution venture would be not be out of the question and, frankly, would probably be a net benefit for the comic shops, although smaller publishers would justifiably be concerned about the two juggernauts creating a new distribution juggernaut before we’ve even buried the ashes of the old one. There’s also the possibility of the Marvel and DC apps perhaps being offered in a subscription bundle, not unlike many TV and movie streamers these days. As someone who has subscribed to both for quite some time, I wouldn’t hate that.
But what if it’s something else? What if the big thing they’re working on isn’t anything behind-the-scenes, but in the content? DC Studios boss James Gunn – whose rise to prominence came from helming the Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel – has spoken more than once about liking the idea of some sort of crossover movie between the two, and Marvel head Kevin Feige has shown effusive support for Gunn himself.
You might even call this photo the smoking GUNN. Get it? GET IT?
And with both studios embracing the multiverse concept, it wouldn’t be that difficult from a story perspective. Can you imagine David Corenswet and Tom Holland in a Superman/Spider-Man movie? They would sell so many tickets that they’d have to bring in a third crossover character, such as the Count from Sesame Street, to keep track of them all.
BUT – and I hate to put a damper on things – Gunn’s DC Universe consists of exactly one movie and two seasons of television so far. There’s more on the horizon, of course – the Lanterns TV series and the Supergirl and Clayface movies are all on the schedule for 2026 – but I feel like Gunn probably needs more time to really establish his DCU before any sort of crossover becomes a real possibility.
The comics, on the other hand, are already well established. And they’ve played the crossover game many times before. But what if this time it was more than just this guy meets that guy? There have been larger crossovers in the past. DC Vs. Marvel not only pitted their entire universes against each other, but also included the Amalgam mashups. JLA/Avengers, famously, featured every character who had ever been a member of either team (at the time – if they did that these days the ways the rosters have expanded they would need another 16 issues). But these crossovers have almost NEVER been addressed in-canon. There have been only two exceptions that I’m aware of, both from DC. First was a random issue of Green Lantern that had a cameo by Access – a character introduced in DC Vs. Marvel with the power to move between the two universes – which happened to be written by Access’s co-creator Ro Marz. Second, an “egg” holding an embryonic universe that was created in JLA/Avengers later became a McGuffin in a JLA storyline written by that crossover’s writer, Kurt Busiek. References to the “other” universe have always been oblique outside of the crossovers themselves, which is understandable due to things like copyright and reprint considerations.
But what if they could get past all that and tell a story that REALLY impacts the two worlds?
They’ve wanted to do it for some time. In the 80s and 90s, there were infrequent appearances in the Marvel universe of a guy in a suit and glasses named “Clark,” always just for a panel or two, but a definite wink at the camera. Other Marvel multiverse storylines have often made vague references to the DC characters as well. DC has also played that game. In his Hawkman series, Robert Venditti heavily explored the fact that Hawkman is a character who has been reincarnated for thousands of years, not only on Earth but on other worlds such as Krypton. But he also dropped hints that some of Hawkman’s reincarnates may have included certain Marvel characters with “Hawk” in their name, such as Starhawk of the original Guardians of the Galaxy.
This is from an issue of Thor. Can you believe he’s using GLASSES as a disguise? What a dork.
Then there’s the big enchilada, Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s Doomsday Clock, the series which brought the world of Watchmen into direct conflict with the DC Universe. In that story Dr. Manhattan, who lives outside of linear time and can see the past, present, and future as if it’s all happening now, looked ahead to an event he called the “Secret Crisis” happening in 2030. In that crisis, he foresaw Superman fighting Thor (as a character from Norse mythology, anyone is allowed to use the name “Thor” without a copyright issue, so long as they don’t have a picture of the Marvel version of the character), as well as a “green behemoth” who would sacrifice his own life to save Superman, a clear reference to the Hulk. By the way, the Hulk’s comic book, at the moment, is written by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, who is currently writing a miniseries at DC Comics about a character bouncing around in time…dang it, who is that again? Oh yeah…it’s Superman. In fact, the book is called Adventures of Superman: House of El, and it’s tying off plot threads leftover from Johnson’s run on the main Superman comics from a few years ago.
It’s prophecy, people!
Now Dr. M told us that the Secret Crisis would happen in 2030 and I don’t know that they would be making plans today for an event that wouldn’t see publication for another five years, but one of the major reveals of Doomsday Clock was an explanation of the elastic nature of time in the DC Universe, so skirting the exact date wouldn’t really be a problem. And both Marvel and DC are currently playing with the multiverse in various stories. So…y’know.
All of this, of course, is circumstantial evidence. None of it would hold up in court. But as far as pure speculation goes, I find it all AWFULLY interesting. Would it be possible, in this new spirit of cooperation between the two publishers, for them to go forth with a story that actually brings the two universes together in a way that is indisputably canonical? To tell a story that has actual weight and impact on the heroes of two worlds going forward? Would they actually kill the Hulk to save Superman? (I know they won’t kill the Hulk PERMANENTLY, this is comic book spiritualism, where Heaven is easier to escape than a prison in New Orleans. But that’s not the point.)
Ongoing comic books, especially the “Big Two,” exist in a state of what some writers call a “perpetual second act.” What that means is that although there are ongoing stories and things can change, at some point or another there’ll be another reset, because corporate characters like Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, or the X-Men are too valuable to ever take off the table. If the characters were allowed to truly have a “third act,” that would be the END of their story, and nobody REALLY wants that. With that mindset, is there any reason that the next “second act” couldn’t be a story that involves the two largest mythologies in American culture coming together for an event that would have lasting repercussions for them both? It’s worth noting that the original plans for DC Vs. Marvel included having She-Hulk and the Martian Manhunter stranded in each other’s universe for about a year after the crossover ended, but the lawyers at the time told them not to do it. A character swap right now sounds somewhat less impossible.
Is this what Marvel and DC are planning? Are they doing it right under our noses? Is the call coming from inside the house?
Maybe not.
But it’s sure a lot of fun to think about.
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. His own “permanent second act” involves a constant reset of where his son hid the remote control after watching YouTube.
Last week, I wrote about some of Superman’s strangest team-ups. This week I’ve decided to focus on some of his more conventional crossovers, meetings where Superman has encountered the heroes (and villains) of other worlds. I’ve already written about a couple of them, most notably the first Superman/Aliens miniseries from Dark Horse, but this week I’ve got a list of times he met with characters from Marvel Comics, Image Comics, other Dark Horse heroes, and more. It actually may wind up being more than one week, honestly, it’s a long list. But I’m going to begin at the beginning.
Notes: This special from 1976 was the first official meeting between characters from the Marvel and DC Universes. Gerry Conway, who had written both characters, teamed up with penciller Ross Andru and inker Dick Giordano for this one, a pretty substantial endeavor at the time. 96 pages, a hefty $2 price point, and an oversized book demanded a story that was worth it…and Conway delivered. The book opens up with a pair of extended prologues where Superman and Spider-Man face off against and capture their respective arch-foes, Lex Luthor and Dr. Octopus. Either of these prologues, by the way, could have easily served as the first half of a story in the heroes’ individual comics, with a standard set-up and nothing that indicates that these two formerly separate universes had begun to bleed together. That doesn’t come until Prologue 3, when Lex is marched into his new prison cell in a maximum security facility in New Mexico, only to find that Otto Octavius is right down the hall. Luthor asks Octavius if he’d be interested in a team-up before revealing he’d hidden a set of tools beneath a layer of fake skin that allowed for a prison break.
Finally, a third of the way into this mammoth comic book, we reach “Chapter One,” in which Peter Parker and Clark Kent finally encounter one another for the first time at a science conference. Both newsmen are having a rough time – Peter finally quits the Daily Bugle in a fit of rage at ol’ J. Jonah Jameson’s frequent abuse, and Clark learns that he’s having a major story ripped out from under him at WGBS because the network wants a “bigger name” reporter. They’re each licking their respective wounds when Superman – or rather, someone who looks like him – swoops in and kidnaps Lois Lane and Mary Jane Watson by zapping them with rays that make them disappear. The heroes both duck out and change clothes, only to encounter one another on the roof. Spider-Man thinks Superman was behind the kidnapping, whereas Spidey’s reputation (thanks to the aforementioned J.J.J.) makes Superman suspect he’s involved, and we get the requisite fight scene. Luthor and Doc Ock are nearby and decide to make things more fun by zapping Spidey with a ray that temporarily enhances his powers, making him strong enough to hold his own against the Man of Steel. After throwing enough punches to satisfy the readers, they calm down, compare notes, and decide to team up to get to the bottom of things.
From there, the story goes largely as you expect – they track down the villains who are holding the girls hostage, they’re sent on a few wild goose chases, and ultimately, the day is saved. But it’s really great to see how well the two of them work together. Honestly, the fight scene is the weakest part of the book, because it requires you to believe that both of these veteran heroes are going to go in spoiling for a fight. It MAY be justifiable if they were totally unfamiliar with one another, but in this iteration where the DC and Marvel heroes co-exist, they know each other by reputation. Superman MAY think Spidey is sketchy thanks to his bad press, but there’s no way Spider-Man would go in swinging against Superman.
Once you get past that, it’s much more satisfying to see them working together, fighting the bad guys, and rescuing Lois and MJ. Conway cleverly aligns things so that each hero gets a moment at the end that gives them a win that they couldn’t have done without the other. Luthor’s schemes wind up cooking up a tsunami Spider-Man could never stop it on his own, but Superman can…only the bad guys would escape were he to do so…if not for Spider-Man. Neat little trick that allows them each to have their moment in the sun.
It took time, but this was the pebble that eventually led to an avalanche of crossovers in the 90s, to the point that it started to feel less special. The sad thing is that familiarity – plus a bit of bad blood – led to the publishers doing nothing together for close to two decades. Next month’s Deadpool/Batman is finally bringing it back, and I couldn’t be happier about that. I love a good crossover, a good combination of characters that don’t usually appear together.
Thur., Aug. 7
Comics: Superman/Madman Hullabalo #1-3
A crisis of philosophical proportions!
Notes: Next up on my tour of Superman Crossovers Past is this little gem from 1997, Mike Allred’s Superman/Madman Hullabaloo. I discovered Allred’s Madman in college (which I believe is scientifically proven to be the best way to discover the character) and I quite quickly became a fan. Madman is markedly different from most other superhero characters. He is — or was, at this point — an enigmatic creature, a corpse brought back to life with no memory of his past except for a fleeting vision he believes to be the Hand of God. Taking the name Frank Einstein (there is no reason to be subtle in comic books) he becomes a sort of science hero, having adventures in the face of the strangest things imaginable.
In this story, Frank and Superman — in their respective universes — are each working on an experiment that causes them to collide. Their bodies remain in place, but their minds swap places and universes, leaving each hero wearing a mashup of their uniforms and possessing a fragment of Superman’s powers. As Superman is found by Frank’s team, Lois Lane finds Frank and brings him to Emil Hamilton. On two different worlds the heroes look for a solution.
Superman and Frank’s team manage to snap over to Metropolis where they meet up with Lois, Hamilton, and Frank. They quickly manage to restore the heroes to their proper bodies, but fragments of Superman’s powers have been absorbed by various people in both dimensions, leading to the heroes teaming up and hunting them down to restore Superman to full power. In their search, they discover that Mr. Myzptlyk is behind their difficulties, leading Frank to challenge the imp to a contest to give up the game…the greatest contest of them all. It’s Mxy versus the Madman in a game of…(drumroll please)… TWISTER.
It’s really impressive to me just how easily Superman mixes in with Allred’s universe. He looks fantastic in Allred’s art style, and I love the two mashup designs for the blended heroes. Even more than that, though, Superman works so well with the Madman tone. Madman is perhaps the most philosophical ongoing superhero comic book of all time, after all, just as prone to quietly contemplating the meaning of existence as he is to getting into fisticuffs. In fact, one of the first things he does after he and Clark are separated and get to have a real conversation is ask the Man of Steel if he believes in God. How often does that sort of thing turn up in mainstream comics?
Allred also easily evades the trap of having the heroes fight each other for no real reason before the team up begins. As Superman himself points out, he and Frank were literally parts of one another for a while there — if he can’t trust him, who can he trust? They work together very well. If they appeared in the same world on a regular basis, in fact, I could truly believe the two of them are friends. It’s a lovely, quiet, unorthodox little crossover, and I love it.
I don’t think Superman always gets enough credit — from fans or writers — for his intelligence. I don’t mean the whole “Super scientist who builds robot duplicates of himself” either, I mean his emotional intelligence. He’s shown himself often of being so capable of connecting with people on a deep, real level. And in a way, that’s kind of what Madman is all about — connection, trying to find out how the universe is all tied together. Frank is literally a walking corpse, but he’s found love. He’s found a home. He has friends and people who care about him. I’m gonna put on my English teacher hat here for a moment and posit that the reason that Victor Frankenstein is “the monster” in Mary Shelley’s novel isn’t necessarily because he “played God.” Doctors do that every day. But where Victor failed — and where those surrounding Frank Einstein succeed — is that he didn’t give any love to the creature he willed into existence. Jo and Dr. Flem may not be the creators of our ginchy hero, but they give him what Frankenstein didn’t. Earlier in this year we examined Superman as the Frankenstein monster in an Elseworlds tale, and I think the combination of these two heroes would be an interesting place to explore that further.
Allred worked on Superman again just a couple of years ago, in the “Not an Elseworlds Because We Weren’t Using That Label At the Time” miniseries Superman: Space Age where he was teamed with writer Mark Russell. And it was good. But I would love to see Frank Einstein and Clark Kent cross paths again.
Fri., Aug. 8
Comics: Superman/Gen 13 #1-3
Nope, Kara didn’t get a dye job…
Notes: When Image Comics was founded in the early 90s, Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Studios was one of the major players, with hits like WildC.A.T.S., Stormwatch, and Gen 13. And I think all of us were pretty surprised when, in 1998, he signed on at DC Comics, selling his studio and characters to DC and becoming one of their executives. Since then he’s only risen higher in the ranks, now serving as co-publisher. But in those early days of the marriage of DC and Wildstorm, when the two universes were still separate, this crossover was a nice little event.
Written by Adam Hughes with art by later Lex Luthor: Man of Steel artist Lee Bermejo, it begins with the Gen 13 kids – super-powered fugitives running from the government project that gave them their powers – taking a trip to Metropolis. Their leader, Caitlin Fairchild, is an unabashed Superman fan, and is ecstatic when they almost immediately run across a battle between Superman and Titano. Caitlin is knocked out in the chaos, and Superman puts his cape over her for protection as he goes off to tussle with the super-ape. When Caitlin wakes up she has lost her memory. She wanders into traffic and is hit by a fire truck, but survives without a scratch, and looking down at the cape that was draped over her when she woke up she comes to the obvious conclusion: she must be Supergirl.
Superman promises the Gen 13 kids to help them track down Caitlin, and they wind up at the Daily Planet, where Lois immediately figures out that they’re super-powered, because she’s smarter than the entire team put together. Meanwhile, Caitlin has acquired a store-bought Supergirl costume and makes her “debut” thwarting a bank robbery. Trying to embark upon a superhero career, Caitlin’s natural clumsiness comes out, causing one disaster after another as Superman and her teammates are always stuck one step behind her, cleaning up the messes that she’s made. And it all gets even worse when the real Supergirl gets wind of the chaos being done in her name.
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I have a preference for crossovers that don’t do the standard “meet, fight, team-up” formula that we’ve seen so many times, and this particular series has the most clever sidestep for that I’ve ever seen. Not only do the respective heroes never get into a physical fight, there’s not really even a traditional antagonist. Oh sure, there are a couple of bad guys that need to be thwarted, but they’re all pretty incidental and interchangeable. The real story here is about Caitlin going missing and the ideological struggle between Superman and the rest of the Gen 13 kids. With the exception of Caitlin, the rest of the team is stuck in the mindset of Superman being a boring stiff, with Grunge at one point even expressing this to Clark Kent’s face, unaware of who he’s really talking to. We even get to see a nice conversation with Lois and Clark in which he does his best not to show how deeply hurt he actually is by the way the kids perceive him. As the story goes on, one by one, they slowly come around to realizing his true worth…although this kind of has the side effect of making them seem childish sometimes. From a character standpoint, it may be acceptable that a group of 90s teenagers would think of Superman as lame, but to have three of them making fun of the fourth for cooperating when Superman is actively trying to find their missing friend makes them all seem…well, not “lame,” but a much harsher word for it.
It’s a very nice workaround that tells a very different kind of crossover story. I don’t even mind the cliched depiction of amnesia here – nothing realistic about it, but you’ve got to allow for a certain suspension of disbelief. This one is just fun.
Sat., Aug 9
Comics: Superman & Savage Dragon: Chicago #1 &Superman & Savage Dragon: Metropolis #1
When you draw the whole Superman crossover but you only have time for roughs of the cover, who do you get to finish it? Alex Ross.
Notes: I’ve never been a Savage Dragon reader, but I get anything with Superman in it, so I’ve had these two books in my collection since they were first released. That was over 20 years ago, though, and I don’t think I’ve read either of them since. I had to check the League of Comic Geeks website to even remind myself which one came out first, and as it turned out, that was a mistake. I got a few pages into Metropolis when Superman and Dragon first encounter each other and start talking like old friends, which got me confused. Metropolis came out in 1999, according to the website, whereas Chicago wasn’t released until the beginning of 2002. But I picked up Chicago instead and saw that I was getting the story of Superman and the Dragon’s first meeting. I wasn’t sure why they were published this way, although I have to wonder if Erik Larsen’s Chicago book was intended to come first but wound up suffering from the kind of delays that frequently plagued Image Comics at the time. When I got to the point where Lois Lane mentions that she’s engaged – an engagement that had ended in marriage several years earlier at that point – I figured that must be the case. The point of this paragraph is that if you happen to have both of these books, read Chicago first.
In Chicago, with story and art by Larsen, some of Superman’s foes are cropping up in the Windy City, having joined forces with the Dragon’s enemies in a crime organization called the Vicious Circle. Superman is called in to help with the menace, something that doesn’t sit well with Officer Dragon of the CPD. The two of them partner up, although the Dragon deeply resents this intruder into his city. Eventually, they manage to mend fences and beat the bad guy. And hey, at least they didn’t actually come to blows with each other.
Larsen has always kind of been hit or miss with me. I like some of his work, but the few times I’ve tried Savage Dragon I haven’t really found it to be to my taste. I can say that he doesn’t mind making his own character look like the jerk in this book, something that a lot of creators would refuse to do, and I appreciate that he writes a pretty solid Superman. Perhaps the best bit, though, is when Lois gets the Dragon to admit that at least part of his animosity against Big Blue is just because of simple jealousy.
Note: this scene does not appear in this book. But isn’t Bogdanove’s artwork nifty?
I was a bigger fan of Superman & Savage Dragon: Metropolis, written by Karl Kesel with art by one of my favorite Superman artists, “Triangle Era” mainstay Jon Bogdanove. Superman and the Dragon’s second meeting (although the first published) begins with Superman crashing to Earth in a burning field in a scene highly reminiscent of how the Dragon was found in his own very first issue. When he wakes up, Superman has no memory of the last few days, and the Dragon is called in to help him piece together the mystery of what happened to him and how it’s linked to a series of strange murders in the city’s homeless population. Their investigation brings them across Killroy, son of Steppenwolf, and into battle with Darkseid and the forces of Apokalips.
As I said, I prefer this book to the other one. It’s more steeped in the Superman world, which is of course more engaging to me, and Kesel has some fun with it. When Superman and the Dragon visit the Daily Planet office to look into what Clark Kent had been working on before Superman’s disappearance, for instance, there’s a funny scene where Superman and Lois have a strained discussion over what Clark’s password is on the computer system: Superman insists that “Clark” told him that he had changed it, whereas Lois insists that “he” would have told her so. Yeah, they’re married at this point, and the scene, played out in front of Jimmy and the Dragon, is highly amusing. We also get to visit with Bibbo in Suicide Slum, who declares that the Dragon is okay because any pal of Superman’s is a pal of his too. The fun here is seeing how the Dragon responds to the way that the people of Metropolis treat their hero, as opposed to the treatment he’s used to.
The one knock on this book is that the Dragon himself is kind of secondary. The other book plays off of the differences between the two of them more, with Dragon’s animosity grinding Superman and vice versa. In this one, the hatchet has been buried and they’re friends, which means you could swap out the Dragon with pretty much any other character that has super strength and the changes to the plot would be negligible. It does end on a really cute note, though. Feeling bad about Lois being worried about him during his disappearance, Superman asks the Dragon to cover for him in Metropolis so he could have a night off from fighting crime. His buddy the Dragon agrees, which leads to a last page that is just the kind of winking-at-the-camera nonsense that a reader like me digs.
Comics: Superman/Fantastic Four #1, Jon Kent: This Internship Is My Kryptonite #2
When you draw the whole Superman crossover but you only have time for roughs of the cover, who do you get to finish it? ALEX ROSS.
Notes: For the first time since this project started, I’m going back to re-read something. At the beginning of the year, I was finishing up the mammoth DC/Marvel Omnibus that came out last fall, and I read a few books at the tail end of that, but I didn’t write about them in detail. But this week, when I’m talking about great Superman crossovers, I felt like I really should address that time Superman met the team that he’s sharing cinemas with this summer in Dan Jurgens’ oversized Superman/Fantastic Four one-shot from 1999.
In this one, Superman finds a message from his late father, Jor-El, who tells him that he wants his son to avenge the destruction of Krypton, which he now claims was destroyed by the world-devourer, Galactus. But in this book, which came out post-DC Vs. Marvel (which I’m planning to read soon), Superman is aware that Galactus is a cosmic force that has been encountered by the heroes of the “Other” Earth (aka, the Marvel Universe), and decides to seek out the world-hopping metahuman from that crossover, Access, to help him traverse the universes. (Access is name-dropped but, like “Sir Not Appearing in This Picture” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he is mysteriously absent.)In the Marvel Universe, meanwhile, Franklin Richards is playing with the action figure of his favorite cartoon character, Superman, who is apparently a fictional hero on Earth-616. No one is more delighted than Frank when the real deal shows up at Four Freedoms Plaza asking for their help. But Superman winds up having to fight for the Four when their defense systems turn on them, having been hijacked somehow by the Cyborg Superman. Things get worse – much worse – when Galactus shows up and decides he wants Superman for his new herald.
You know how I keep talking about how I dislike crossovers where the heroes fight each other for no reason? Well thank Rao, this story actually gives us a reason. Superman being transformed into a Herald of Galactus is a more than legit reason for him to face off against the FF, but even then, the conflict is brief and has more of a feeling of a rescue mission than actual combat. The FF know that Superman is a hero, and they’re trying to free him from Galactus’s control rather than actually take him down.
I also like the fact that this crossover – as well as a few others from this time period – recognized the fact that DC Vs. Marvel happened and used that as part of the fabric of the story. It allows this story to fit into the continuity of both sets of characters, which the early crossovers like his encounter with Spider-Man simply can’t do. Unfortunately, by the time JLA/Avengers rolled around a few years later, that angle was dropped. The heroes were still from separate universes, but there was no recognition of the fact that any of them had met in the past. I can’t help but wonder what the plans are for Deadpool/Batman and the assorted back-up crossovers that are going to come in those two books.
Finally, although this isn’t really about Superman, this issue makes me wish Dan Jurgens had done a run on Fantastic Four at some point. He has the voices for the characters down very well, and I love his rendition of the Thing (my #2 all-time favorite character), but peeking at his credits I only see a handful of FF-related comics, and none on any of their regular titles. There’s still time, Marvel. I love what Ryan North is doing these days, but how about hitting Jurgens up for a miniseries or something?
Mon., Aug. 11
Comics: Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle #1-3
And yet we still haven’t seen the John Carter/J’onn J’onzz crossover.
Notes: I love a good crossover. I love a good Elseworlds story. To the best of my knowledge, the two have only collided twice. The first was John Byrne’s excellent World War II romp, Batman and Captain America. The other was this three-issue miniseries by Chuck Dixon and artist Carlos Meglia. In this one, the mutiny that leads to the abandonment of Lord Greystoke and his wife is thwarted when a star streaks through the sky. Taking it as a sign from God, the mutineers retreat from their plan and the family makes its way back to England. That streak, however, lands in the thick of the jungle, where a familiar ape tribe finds what appears to be a human baby in the wreckage. When the child demonstrates remarkable strength, they adopt him and name him “Argo-Zan,” meaning “Fire-skin.” The Greystokes have their child, named John, and the two babies grow into very different men. In the jungle Argo-Zan finds the wreckage of the craft that brought him to the apes, along with a holographic vision of his true parents. As he learns of the legacy of Krypton and adopts his true name, Kal-El, in England John Greystoke advances through school – a brilliant scholar, but somehow lost and empty, as though there is some hole in his life he cannot account for.
After some struggles, Kal-El finds himself able to bond with a human tribe, but an enemy ape has an eye out for a mysterious glowing rock that seems to plague his rival. Greystoke, meanwhile, has been wandering the world trying to find himself, finally planning an expedition to Africa. Along with him is a correspondent for the Daily Planet, Lois Lane, as well as Lois’s aide, Jane Porter. Their dirigible is brought down by a hostile tribe but, believing the aircraft is from Krypton, Kal-El leaps to their defense. In the ensuing battle, both men find themselves and their purpose. Kal-El returns to civilization with Lois, while John Clayton chooses to remain in Africa with Jane Porter, adopting the name the friendly tribes have given him: Tarzan.
As I said, I’m a big fan of crossovers. I am not, however, particularly steeped in Tarzan lore. I’ve seen a few of the movies, read a few of the comics, but I’ve never dove into the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novels (I’m more of a John Carter of Mars fan) so I can’t really say how closely this comic traces any of the original lore. I’m not even sure which characters (aside from Lois, Clark, Tarzan, and Jane) are Burroughs characters and which are original creations of Dixon and Meglia. That said, there’s a lot I like here. We’ve got the classic Elseworlds concept of taking the hero and switching his origin with somebody else, as we saw when Kal-El became Bruce Wayne in Superman:Speeding Bullets or when Bruce Wayne became Green Lantern in Batman: In Darkest Knight. And although the book ends in the old “What If”/“Elseworlds” format of bringing the heroes as close to the “real” status quo as possible, it does so without giving us obvious analogues for Lex Luthor or any of Superman’s main villains, which is a nice change of pace.
As a crossover, it’s pretty unique. Not only do Superman and Tarzan not fight each other in this one, but Kal-El and John Clayton never even interact until the last few pages of the three-issue story. In some ways it’s more like a crossover of worlds than of characters. The book ends (as these often do) as soon as a new status quo is established, something ALMOST the same as the “real” universe, and we don’t really get to see any of the aftermath. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but in this case, I actually wish there were more. It feels like we’ve read one act of a story. I’m left wanting to see how the ape-raised Kal-El adapts to a society that he doesn’t truly understand, especially with the power at his disposal. I’m curious as to what kind of man Tarzan is when raised by his human parents instead of an ape tribe. And I really want to see the two of them interact a bit more. And you know, leaving the audience wanting more is typically considered a good thing. The problem is when that desire is because it feels as though the story is unfinished, and to a small degree, that’s kind of how I feel here.
It’s not unusual in comics for a different artist to do the covers than the interior artwork, but in this case I think you’ll forgive me for not realizing that happened until I double checked the credits to write this. Carlos Meglia’s style is reminiscent of an adventure cartoon, with the kind of big eyes and oversized feet that bring to mind Japanese manga, so you can understand that I didn’t notice Humberto Ramos ONLY did the covers for this series. Their styles are very similar at first glance, and should Mr. Meglia ever somehow read this, I hope he knows I mean that as a compliment.
This is a unique crossover, and one I enjoyed. It would be nice to see more Elseworlds crossovers. And now that DC has brought that imprint back from the dead, it doesn’t feel impossible.
Tue., Aug 12
Comics: The Darkness/Superman #1-2
Wait — why does the mobster get top billing?
Notes: I’m going to close off this week of Superman crossovers with the two-issue team-up between Top Cow and DC from 2005, The Darkness/Superman, written by Ron Marz with art by Tyler Kirkham. I know even less about The Darkness than I do Tarzan. I know it’s a Witchblade spin-off, and I believe that the main character is the son of a mafia kingpin or something, but that’s pretty much it. Did that stop me from getting the crossover when it dropped? Absolutely not. Seriously, it’s been 32 weeks, you’d think you would know me better than that by now.
Fortunately for me, the book gives me a quick rundown on who the character is – Jackie Estacado, mafia hitman who becomes the controller of a mysterious demonic power called “The Darkness” on his 21st birthday. After he killed the guy who killed his girlfriend, he became…I dunno, not a hero. He’s still a mobster – the book even starts off with him meeting up with Metallo in Metropolis to flex his muscles and show he’s the man to take over their organized crime rackets. The Daily Planet gets word that Estacado is in town and Perry sends his top people out to find out what they can, which leads to Superman stumbling on an encounter between Estacado and Metropolis’s Grasso crime family. Estacado tries to convince Superman that he’s the better crime lord for Metropolis – that he would run a smooth organization that doesn’t let innocent people get caught in the crossfire, unlike the current regime. But the meeting is interrupted when Metallo shows up again, brandishing his Kryptonite heart as usual, and takes Lois Lane hostage, because it was like already February 3rd and Lois had only been held hostage four times so far that year.
When Metallo escapes with Lois, Estacado offers to help Superman get her back, recognizing that the Kryptonite keeps the Man of Steel at bay and that Lois is, and I quote, “More than just a cute reporter to you.” Superman reluctantly takes him up on his offer and is forced to watch from a distance as Estacado invades the Grasso’s hideout in an effort to save her. Once Lois is safe, he returns to Superman and reiterates his plan to move into Metropolis…but Superman stands his ground. The two of them come to blows before Superman defeats him because…the sun comes up? That seems to be what happens. I guess Jackie Estacado’s powers go away in daylight? At any rate, once that happens he gives up and promises to stay out of Metropolis. Superman lets him go out of gratitude for saving Lois. The two part neither as allies nor as friends, but at least not as enemies.
At least this time the requisite crossover fight makes sense. This isn’t Superman teaming up with a hero, he’s forging an uneasy alliance with an anti-villain. Jackie even tells him at one point, “I’m a bad guy, but I’m not a BAD GUY.” (This was seven years before Wreck-It Ralph used almost exactly the same line, so good for you, writer Ron Marz.) And I concede, that’s the vibe I’m getting here. Jackie isn’t really a pure villain, but there’s definite Michael Corleone energy here. And to be fair, he works pretty well as that kind of character. I’ve enjoyed Marz’s work for a long time, so I’m not surprised that he made this work for me as well.
That said, there are a few things that don’t quite gel. Superman sitting on the side while someone else fights Metallo for him, first of all. Sure, Metallo has the whole Kryptonite thing going on, but when has that ever stopped Superman from going in for the fight? And although I suppose Jackie was written in-character (I assume, since Marz was the writer for The Darkness’s ongoing series at the time, that he knew how he would behave), but it still seems a little bit of a stretch to think he’d really believe Superman would turn a blind eye to his operations just because he’s the lesser of two evils. Superman isn’t going to settle for ANY evils if he’s got anything to say about it.
It was a fun week, poking around at more Superman crossovers, and there are still more that I haven’t looked at yet, including the epic DC Vs. Marvel event and its several spin-offs, such as the Amalgam Comics line. I’m looking at the big, gorgeous omnibus edition that DC published of that series last year, just waiting to be read, and I think I’ll get around to that pretty soon. Maybe even next week.
As I sit down to write this, a little after 7 pm on the evening of July 23rd, I’m exhausted. My wife got three days off work in a row and so we decided to take a quick trip to Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi. We visited the beach, took in a Biloxi Shuckers baseball game, visited the excellent Mississippi Aquarium, and I even managed to squeeze in a visit to 3 Alarm Comics, one of the shops in the area. Now, Wednesday evening, I haven’t read anything Superman-related yet today, so I’m going to dig into the pile and pick something pretty much at random to pontificate about. I suspect the rest of this week will be kind of random too. Hope that’s okay with everybody out there.
Notes: Off the top of my head, I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned Ambush Bug here in the Year of Superman before. I know I wrote about him a couple of months ago, when I suggested that DC collect his early appearances in their new Compact Comics line, but that’s a whole different animal, even if it is on the same website. Ambush Bug was a co-creation of Paul Kupperberg and Keith Giffen. Originally a villain, he was really more of an annoyance than a threat to Superman, and he got even MORE annoying when he decided to go straight and become a hero. Ambush Bug also beat Deadpool to the fourth wall breaking schtick by well over a decade (maybe more – I don’t know exactly when Deadpool started doing that bit). He’s fully aware that he’s a comic book character and had frequent conversations with his creators in the later issues in which he appeared.
Although he gets the cover of this issue of Action, Ambugh Bug doesn’t actually show up until the second story. The first one, “Meet John Doe” by Kupperberg and artist Alex Saviuk, features Superman facing off a villain calling himself…well…John Doe. The story kicks off with Doe escaping prison, then deciding to take out his frustration on the various institutions that kept him incarcerated for over two decades. When Superman encounters him he starts suffering from bizarre bouts of amnesia, temporarily forgetting things like his dual identity or some of his powers, and Doe gleefully takes credit for his sudden selective memory loss.
It’s a pretty standard early-80s Superman story, taking down a villain with a little bit of misdirection. Doe also isn’t even a memorable villain (although I suppose that’s appropriate enough), and I don’t believe he ever showed up again. The most interesting thing about this story is that Doe appears to be sponsored by a mysterious figure in a satellite calling himself the Monitor. The DC Universe, at this point in 1984, was already trying to put together the pieces for what would eventually be Crisis on Infinite Earths, but some of these early Monitor appearances really don’t make much sense in the context of who the character would eventually become.
Giffen flies solo on the Ambush Bug back-up story. In “Police Blotter,” the recently “reformed” Ambush Bug has moved to Metropolis and set up a private detective agency. Getting word of this, Clark Kent decides to investigate the investigator, only for Ambush Bug to suss out his secret identity before they even reach the bottom of the second page. From there, the rest of the pages are less of a cohesive story and more like assorted glimpses of Ambush Bug making his way through Metropolis by doing things like arresting a car with an expired parking meter and dragging it to the steps of the police station, then popping into the Daily Planet offices to pay his best pal Superman a visit.
I’ve read this story before. It was one of the earliest Superman stories I read as a child (I would have been six or seven when it was published and, while I don’t think I read it quite that young, I don’t think I was much older than that), and it was certainly my first exposure to what we now call meta humor. (Yes, meta humor was a thing back then. Meta humor has been a thing for hundreds — maybe thousands — of years, it’s only recently that we started to CLASSIFY it.) I know I didn’t get the joke about Ambush Bug not doing something particularly gruesome because Giffen had drawn him behind an office door – I don’t think I even knew who Giffen was at the time. I knew, vaguely, that somebody had to write and draw comic books, but I wasn’t particularly paying attention to the credits yet to see who those people were. Now, as an adult, I love this kind of stuff, and Giffen was one of the greats. The story is really funny, highly bizarre, and just the kind of thing that makes me want to read more Ambush Bug. The character still pops up from time to time, but nobody has really had a great handle on him since Giffen’s last go-round. I know that the way comics work he won’t remain in limbo forever, but I hope that someone who’s half as good as Giffen was gets their hands on Irwin Schwab someday.
Thur., June 24
Comics: Superman #327
And you thought your family reunion was rough.
Notes: You know how you can get home from a trip and then the next day you feel like you’re in over your head? Even though our Mississippi sojourn was only three days, that’s what today has been like for me, catching up on a dozen different things and not realizing I still had to clock in the Year of Superman entry for today until late afternoon. But it’s been 205 days since I started this whole thing, and I haven’t missed a day yet. Being busy sure as hell isn’t going to do it to me. So I did the same thing I did yesterday, digging into my unread pile and choosing a fairly random book, in this case, Superman #327 from 1978. I picked this one, I don’t mind admitting, based on the cover. Kobra has captured Jonathan and Martha Kent! Superman has to do his bidding or they’re doomed! I was so surprised to see this cover, in which Kobra has clearly learned Superman’s secret identity, that I totally forgot that the pre-Crisis Ma and Pa Kent were actually already dead by the time Clark became Superman.
Anyway, the story begins with Clark Kent returning home to his apartment only to be attacked by Kobra and some of his stooges. Superman has never faced Kobra before (although some of his fellow Justice Leaguers have), but he has in his possession one of Kobra’s weapons, a teleportation gun, with a homing beacon that Kobra followed to Clark’s apartment, revealing his secret identity, which actually automatically puts him in the top 0.3 percent of every villain Superman had ever battled in terms of awareness. Kobra escapes, but later kicks up a sandstorm to draw Superman out. There he reveals that he’s plucked the late Jonathan and Martha Kent from the timestream about a week before their deaths, and if Superman doesn’t obey his every whim, he’ll…kill them!
It’s kind of a strange plan, isn’t it? Superman’s reaction is that he has to save the Kents because if they were to die it would change his personal history. And…I mean…it WOULD, but would having them die one week sooner really made that much of a difference? Don’t get me wrong, Superman should save them regardless, but the logic doesn’t necessarily track. Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Kobra, since he apparently can do this sort of thing, to pull the Kents out of time when Clark was a baby? Or when THEY were babies? The consequences would be much more profound, I think.
Anyway, Superman beats Kobra because Superman beats Kobra, but Kobra gets away and, at the end of the story, still knows Superman is Clark Kent. I really wonder where I have to follow this story to see how the cat got back in the bag.
The back-up story in this issue is a tale of “Mr. and Mrs. Superman,” the Lois and Clark of Earth-2, who periodically showed up in tales of their life as a married couple at this time. The newlyweds are moving into a new apartment when they’re nearly crushed by their own couch. Clark, naturally, saves the day, but it soon becomes apparent that their brush with death was no accident – Clark is being targeted by members of a criminal organization called the Colonel Future Gang for a series of expose’s he’s been writing, and they’re trying to take him out for good.
I’m gonna keep my lips shut on how this one ends because it’s actually really good. But what I WILL say is that it’s actually Lois and her razor-sharp brain that solves the problem this time around, and you guys all know how much I love it when Lois is played to the top of her intelligence. It wasn’t always the default back in the era when this story was written, and it was even rarer for the Golden Age Lois, who this story stars. It’s great to see her outsmarting the bad guys here, and I’m really pleased with this story. I don’t think these “Mr. and Mrs. Superman” stories have ever been collected anywhere, and DC should do something about that.
There’s actually a lot of stuff from this era that has been kind of lost. I suppose it’s a consequence of the fact that DC’s stories weren’t always on fire then. This was the period when Marvel was making moves with new characters that pushed the limits like Ghost Rider, Dracula, Power Man and Iron Fist, and the like. DC, on the other hand, was kind of coasting on the same characters they’d brought in during the Silver Age, with only Firestorm being notable as a new addition to the lineup in this period. And except for some of the Batman stories of the age, a lot of it has been forgotten. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t stories from the 70s and 80s worth reading.
Fri., July 25
Comics: Jon Kent: This Internship is My Kryptonite #1, Green Lantern Vol. 8 #24
Hot take: don’t read this book.
Notes: Late last year, DC Comics kicked off their “DC Go!” program on the app. It’s basically the same thing as the Infinity Comics Marvel has been publishing online for some years now. The idea here is that rather than breaking the comic book story into traditional panels, the story flows straight down from one panel to another in an “infinite” scroll. It’s something that’s been tossed around and done for years, but the Big Two are fairly new in the game. I’m lukewarm on the format, if I’m being honest. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s rare that the creators actually use it to its utmost potential. Every so often you have an artist do something interesting or innovative with the format, or at the very least use it to do an extended panel (most often somebody falling or climbing down a great distance). For the most part, though, it’s just a less-convenient way to read a story. The worst is when they take a comic that was traditionally published and chop it up to rearrange it in the Infinity format. It’s like colorizing a movie – you take something that was perfectly good in the first place and make it worse.
That said, even when they don’t use the format to its greatest potential, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some really good stories told in the format.
However, This Internship is My Kryptonite is not one of them. The story here is that Jon Kent is getting an internship at the Daily Planet, and in this first issue, he meets his coworkers.
That’s…that’s it. That’s pretty much all that happens. And the thing is that those coworkers, and pretty much everybody else in the comic for that matter, are all the most annoying human beings ever put on a comic book page. Seriously, there is nobody likable in this comic book. Even Clark Kent, showing up briefly in a cameo, is just there for an “embarassing dad” joke.
Look, I give them credit for at least TRYING to do something with Jon. The character has been aimless for too long. But this is a poor fit. What they’re doing here is conceptually no different than a dozen other “young Superman” stories that were done with Clark. Furthermore, it doesn’t even appear to be canon, as in this story Lois Lane is NOT in charge of the Planet, as she is in the comics these days. So even if this WERE a good story (which, I must reiterate, it is not), it wouldn’t actually fix any of the problems we’re having with mainstream Jon Kent.
I don’t mind a little experimentation with comic book formats, but this particular experiment didn’t even make me want to read the second issue.
Sat. July 26
It truly was a Superfantastic July.
I just got back from taking my family to see Fantastic Four: First Steps. As I’ve made abundantly clear, my love for the Fantastic Four is second only to my devotion to Superman, and I’ve been waiting even longer for a good FF movie than I have for the rebirth of the Man of Steel. I also think it’s profoundly stupid, the way some people want to pit these movies against one another. There is room for both and I think that the success of one will only feed the other.
I don’t want to spend too much time talking about First Steps, as this isn’t the “Year of the Fantastic Four.” But I’ll definitely say this much: it is currently possible to go down to your local cinema and treat yourself to a double-feature of a great Superman movie followed by a great Fantastic Four movie. I never thought I’d see the day.
Comic Books:Superman Vol. 6 #28, Justice League Unlimited Vol. 2 #9, New History of the DC Universe #2.
Notes: After the movie, we rolled by the comic shop to pick up this week’s Superman-related titles. First up is Superman #28, the beginning of the “Darkseid’s Legion” story arc. Last year, in the DC All-In Special, we got a glimpse of a universe corrupted by Darkseid’s energy (the universe we’re seeing in the “Absolute” comics) and populated by a horrifying Legion of Super-Heroes. This issue promises to begin unravelling the mystery.
You know when you meet up with old friends that you haven’t seen in a while and they’ve all been transformed into acolytes of Darkseid?
The story, by Joshua Williamson and Dan Mora, picks up after the Validus attack from the Summer of Superman special. Worried about his friends in the future, Superman returns to Smallville to retrieve his Legion flight ring before he sets out to visit them. Before he can depart from Smallville, though, he finds himself face-to-face with a Saturn Girl who – much like the Absolute Universe – has been inspired not by Superman, but by Darkseid himself.
The issue is a hell of a start to this storyline, with an insidious version of the Legion acting as the bad guys even as Clark reflects on the REAL Legion, what it means to him, and how it pains him that the future is always somehow in flux. Perhaps DC is finally planning to address the ways they keep warping this history of the Legion? It would be nice to settle it once and for all.
Justice League Unlimited continues with its ninth issue, an epilogue to the recent “We Are Yesterday” storyline. The League is trying to cope with the dual problems of restoring the time-lost heroes to their respective proper eras and, in a storyline that mostly follows Mr. Terrific, trying to find and rescue the lost and duped Air Wave, who the heroes now know was conned into turning against them in the battle with Grodd. It’s more Mark Waid goodness, with the League finding mistakes it’s made and the heroes trying to compensate. We’re also starting to draw together a few different threads here, with the appearance of the Doomsday/Time Trapper hybrid that’s been popping up in Superman and the return of the World Forger, a Justice League frenemy from a couple of relaunches back who is responsible for the creation of our specific world in the multiverse.
Waid has so much on his plate right now – this title, World’s Finest, Action Comics, Batman and Robin: Year One, and the miniseries I’m going to talk about next. With all of these pieces combined it really feels as though he has become the primary architect of the modern DCU. At the very least, it seems that everybody else has to run their respective pieces by him to make sure they all fit.
MY history textbook had a picture of a bunch of bison on it. What a rip-off.
That other Waid project is New History of the DC Universe, the second issue of which hit this week. This issue starts with Kal-El’s spacecraft landing in Smallville and goes straight through to the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. Without spending hours recapping the specifics, it’s really impressive how Waid has managed to piece together the different continuities in ways that make sense. For example, he establishes that Victor Stone (aka Cyborg) WAS part of the team that fought back Darkseid and eventually became the Justice League, as seen in the New 52 version of the Justice League’s origin, but his injuries were so great that he had to be placed in suspended animation to heal. When he awoke years later, he joined the Teen Titans, as in his original origin. It’s a neat little workaround that manages to keep both of Cyborg’s “origins” mostly intact. The real test is going to come next issue, though. At the end of this one, Waid gives us the Great Crisis, including the death of both Barry Allen (who is narrating the series) and Supergirl. Explaining Barry will be simple enough – his resurrection story was part of the terribly inaccurately-named Final Crisis, but Supergirl? She never GOT a resurrection story. She died in Crisis, then the Man of Steel reboot happened and she never existed at all, then she came back in an updated version of her original origin. So I’m very eager to see what kind of slight-of-hand Waid intends to use to bring her back from the dead.
Sun. July 27
It’s back to Krypton today, folks!
Essays: “The Kryptonian Alphabet: A Real-World Historical Tale” (2006) by Al Turniansky, “Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes” (2006) by Mark Waid, “The Superman Mythology: Animal Planet-Legion of Super-Pets” (2006), “Al Plastino Interview” (2003) by Glen Cadigan, “The Superman Mythology: Krypton Meets Camelot” (2006), all from The Krypton Companion.
Notes: It is a busy and scorching Sunday here in southern Louisiana. Early this afternoon, my family and I went to see a performance of Willy Wonka Kids, a half-hour reduction of the stage play that happened to star my niece, Maggie, in her stage debut (as Grandma Josephina, an Oompa Loompa, and the best squirrel I’ve seen since the Superman movie). Afterwords, we went out for lunch and did some grocery shopping before we came home and I filmed my LitReel for the week. I then took my usual hour to edit all the takes down to a tight three and a half minutes and set it to upload. FINALLY, I had time to sit back and pull out the DC Universe app to look for a Superman comic to read today.
Naturally, that’s when the internet went out.
It’s still out as I write this. My reel still hasn’t uploaded. It’s irritating as hell.
So I had a few options here. I could wait for the internet to come back – which isn’t really an option, as when this happens (and it happens far too often) there’s really no way of telling how long it will take to come back on. Could be 30 seconds, could be Tuesday. I could try to read a comic on my phone, but I hate reading comics on my phone. The screen is too small. I could dip into my stack of unread comics, as I’ve already done twice in this pretty random week in the Year of Superman, but like I said, I already did that twice this week and I didn’t really want to do it again.
So I went with option four and I pulled out The Krypton Companion again, the excellent book of essays and interviews about the history of the Superman mythology. I’ve read essays from this book before this year but it’s been a few months, so let’s dig in again.
Al Turniansky gives us “The Kryptonian Alphabet,” an interesting little story about the creation of…well, it’s right there in the title. Back in the 50s, he said, they would frequently receive letters from readers (kids, usually) trying to submit their own Kryptonian alphabet, which usually just consisted of 26 different “squiggles” that corresponded exactly to the standard English alphabet, much like modern Interlac as has been used in DC Comics for quite some time. In an effort to put a rest to that practice, editor E. Nelson Bridwell replied in a letter column that the Kryptonian alphabet actually had 118 characters, thinking that this would stop the kids from trying to come up with them. E. Nelson Bridwell clearly did not understand the fanaticism of the average comic book fan.
Mark Waid himself chimes in with an essay regarding Superman’s history with the Legion of Super-Heroes. There’s nothing particularly revelatory in this piece, it’s mostly just a discussion of how the Legion contributes to the Superman mythos itself, but it’s nice to hear some of the details from such an expert. This essay, in fact, was actually originally published in 2006, when Waid was the writer of Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes, so he’s pretty much THE expert.
I also read through a nice short piece on the Legion of Super-Pets and an interview with classic artist Al Plastino, but the best thing I read today was “Krypton Meets Camelot,” a discussion of the famous story in which Superman works with President John F. Kennedy to promote his physical fitness program. Although it was written while Kennedy was still alive and scheduled for publication for Superman #168, it was promptly shelved upon Kennedy’s assassination. It didn’t actually see print until #170, at the request of the Johnson administration. The essay also briefly discusses some of the other appearances of Kennedy and other presidents (especially Abraham Lincoln) in comics. This reminds me that I haven’t actually re-read that Kennedy story for the Year of Superman, and I probably should.
I would check right now to see if it’s available on the DC Universe Infinite App but…well, you know. No internet.
But with summer coming to an end entirely too soon – I return to work to begin preparing for this new school year on Friday, August 1 – I suspect I may be turning to the Kryptonian Companion a bit more often when I’ve got a day where I’m short on time and I need a quick dose of Superman to keep my streak alive.
Mon. July 28
Friday is getting closer whether I like it or not. Today, the last Monday of my summer, my wife and I took Eddie down to the school where they helped me start putting my classroom together for the new school year. Rearranging furniture, unpacking and re-shelving books, putting up decorations, and most of all, getting together my Geek Corner. I think everybody needs something like my Geek Corner. It’s the little section of my classroom by my desk where I surround myself by my own nerdy stuff. Erin always puts together a collage of pictures – mostly comic book characters – that I’ve clipped out of Previews and other assorted catalogs and magazines over the past year. Then, on the bookshelf behind my desk, I put up a worthy collection of Superman stuff.
A collection so worthy it could lift Mjolnir.
There are, it’s safe to say, a couple of dozen Funko Pops of various sizes, other figures, figurines, and statues, a plush doll, some Hot Wheels and Corgi Cars, and probably other things that I’ve forgotten about but that you can enjoy in the pictures I’m sharing here. The prize addition to the collection this year, though, is the Daily Planet popcorn “bucket” I picked up the day we saw Superman in theaters. I’d hoped to squeeze in a second viewing of the film before school starts up, but it seems pretty unlikely that will happen, with our schedule for the next few days being what it is. But I hope the rest of you guys keep seeing it again and again, and you can be assured I’ll be preordering the Blu-Ray as soon as it’s available.
Getting home from school in the mid-afternoon, it’s time to find some Superman stuff to read today.
Comic Book: Superman #170
And you thought your family reunion was — wait, I already did that joke this week?
Notes: Still thinking about the essay I read yesterday regarding the Superman/Kennedy comic, I thought it would be interesting to go back and read that one again. The story, frankly, is kind of dull. Superman saves a group of international hikers trapped by an avalanche, upon which Lana Lang realizes the European survivors are peppy and ready to move, whereas the Americans are slow and sluggish. Superman meets with Kennedy about helping to promote the President’s physical fitness program, which turns into Perry White forcing the staff of the Daily Planet to join him in assorted exercise activities, which causes Clark to constantly have to find ways to fake feeling more exhausted than he actually does. The ultimate comes when the crew is caught by a cave-in. When Perry, Lois, and Jimmy see Clark lifting the boulder effortlessly, they realize he’s been fooling them for years and is, of course, secretly Superman.
Haha! Just kidding. No, Perry immediately assumes that his noodle-armed schlep of an employee has been so beefed up by the new Daily Planet fitness regimen that he has – in just a few days of exercise – gained the ability to heft an enormous chunk of rock. That is one hell of a program, Perry. Just…astonishing.
The story is of greater interest as a historical footnote than as an actual story, to be honest. The back-up story is a bit more entertaining: “If Lex Luthor Were Superman’s Father.” In this story Luthor comes up with what I think we can all agree is the greatest evil scheme in the history of evil schemes. Settle down, this one is a doozy:
Step One: Escape from jail.
Step Two: Travel back in time and journey to the planet Krypton BEFORE Jor-El and Lara get married.
Step Three: Pretend to be a hero, “Luthor the Noble.”
Step Four: Make Jor-El look bad and make Lara fall in love with and marry HIM instead.
Step Five: Sire Kal-El (why he would be named -El if Jor-El isn’t his father is beyond me) and then wait a few years for Krypton to blow up.
Step Six: Return to his own time where Superman, being a dutiful son, cannot arrest his own father, allowing Luthor free reign to commit crimes.
The wildest thing is that this plan almost WORKS. He makes it all the way up to Step Five and has Lara on the altar (which apparently was a giant wedding jewel on Krypton) before a special device he’s wearing to protect him from Krypton’s greater gravity suddenly runs out of power, pinning him to the floor. Before he can be rescued, he confesses that he’s actually from Earth. He manages to hop into his time machine and escape back to Earth before he can be thrown into the Phantom Zone, only to immediately be picked up by Superman and returned to jail.
This is a truly insane plan, even by Silver Age standards. And despite the fact that the cover calls it an “imaginary story,” the way it ends (with Jor-El and Lara reconciling) it still quite easily fits into the actual canon of the Silver Age comics. And if I may be a little crude, it’s ridiculous how funny it is that Luthor’s ultimate plot to render Superman ineffective forever boils down to being able to say “Hey, Kal-El, I banged your mom!”
Tues., July 29
It is a million and twelve degrees outside and I’ve got two days left before I go back to school. My drive, if I’m being perfectly honest, is absolutely drained. I want to read Superman, but I don’t want to dig into anything that’s going to take me all day either, because I’ve got to bring my son to the library and to a therapy appointment and then, right after that, I’m taking my wife out for one last dose of summer fun – a Weird Al Yankovic concert that we bought tickets to nearly a year ago. So I’m going to find something quick today. Ah – here we go!
Comic Book: Superman Vol. 2 #1
The first day is always rough, isn’t it Clark?
Notes: I, of course, wrote about John Byrne’s Man of Steel reboot back during “Origins Week,” and some of his other Superman stories have peppered the blog, but I have not, previously, taken the time to look at his first issue as the regular, ongoing Superman writer and artist. And as it’s a mostly self-contained story, and the fact that it’s got “First Issue” stamped on the cover in big, red letters, it feels like this would be a good quickie to dig into today.
Whereas Man of Steel took long gaps in-between issues, skipping years to get to the “present day” of the DC Universe, Byrne’s first issue of Superman picked up only weeks after the final issue of his miniseries. Superman has only recently discovered the truth of his Kryptonian heritage, and now he’s seeking the rocket that brought him to Earth, which was stolen from the Kent farm. He eventually tracks it down to an empty warehouse, where its sole inhabitant has been dead for weeks.
Later, as Clark meets Lois for a jogging date, they literally run into a bank robbery being committed by a towering bull of a man who introduces himself as Metallo, the man who will kill Superman thanks to his Kryptonite heart. Metallo, it turns out, was built by the dead man Superman had tracked down earlier and was powered by a chunk of Kryptonite that had hitched a ride on Kal-El’s rocket (which you can see strike the rocket on–panel in Man of Steel #1 – give Byrne credit for planning ahead). Metallo has Superman on the ropes before he’s picked up by a strange craft. Superman survives the encounter but is more nervous than ever about his unknown rescuer…as well he should be, as the readers are aware that Metallo has been taken by Lex Luthor, who has the attitude that nobody is allowed to kill Superman but him.
I’m reminding myself, as I read this, that this was the first issue of Superman following the relaunch, and there’s a fair possibility that a lot of people who picked it up hadn’t read the miniseries. So what if this was somebody’s first exposure to Superman? If that’s the case, there are some VERY interesting choices in here. First of all, let’s talk about Lois and Clark’s relationship. Lois is still bitter about Clark scooping her on the day Superman first arrived in Metropolis, but his persistence seems to have worn her down. She as much as admits she finds him attractive, but pushes back against his advances. Clark, to his credit, is adamant that he wants to win Lois’s heart, but he wants to do it as HIMSELF, not as Superman. If all you knew about Superman before reading this was Silver Age stories or the dynamic from the Christopher Reeve movies, you get a sharp change in what is expected. This is a dynamic that I greatly prefer, and Byrne is building up these two characters really nicely.
Metallo’s re-imagining is handled well. He’s constructed specifically to take out Superman, built by a man who has convinced himself that Superman is an alien invader. It’s the standard excuse for anti-Superman villains, of course, but I don’t think it was quite as overused in 1987 when this was published, so I won’t take points off for that. Even if it were cliched, it’s still a huge step up from Metallo’s original Silver Age origin, in which he was made into a cyborg by a well-meaning scientist who just happened to let it slip that Kryptonite was an element that could power his heart. Oh, and that Metallo himself was one of those ridiculously convenient dopplegangers of the era, somebody who just HAPPENED to look almost exactly like Superman. That happened inexcusably often in that period, and it frankly irritates the hell out of me every time I see that trope turn up.
The fight scene is really unexpected, if you think of it from a historical perspective. Once Metallo turns up the juice on his Kryptonite, it’s a curb-stomp battle, and it doesn’t look like Superman stands a chance. Byrne! What were you doing? It was Superman’s first issue and you had him get his ass handed to him by Metallo, only to be saved by LEX LUTHOR! It’s ridiculous! And impossible! Isn’t Superman ALWAYS supposed to be completely infallible and indestructible? He’s NEVER been hurt in nearly 90 years of his recorded history! He has absolutely NO vulnerabilities!
At least, that’s what those three guys still whining about the James Gunn movie would lead me to believe.
No, it IS surprising that Byrne starts off his series with an inarguable loss, but it fits into the arc he’s telling, which began in Man of Steel and continues on into the next issue. I considered reading issue #2 today as well, but I’m actually planning a Lex Luthor week at some point, and it’s just too good an issue not to include when that happens.
“Singin’ byyyye, byyyye Miss Kryptonian pie…”
I also returned to the DC app this week to read the first issue of another of the DC Go! comics, Taste of Justice. In this one, set in the early days of Lois and Clark’s relationship, it’s Clark Kent’s birthday (and they’re sticking with the Feb. 29 date, as in Alan Moore’s work), so Lois Lane decides she wants to do something special and cook his favorite meal, Beef Bourguignon. The only problem is, for all the things she’s great at, Lois Lane can’t cook, so she calls in Perry White to help her out.
This is a cute story. In large part, it’s about how to cook the specific dish, and I assume that’s going to be the format of this series: each issue showcasing a DC character cooking something for some reason. It’s a weird format, but it makes as much sense as the Superman Vs. Meshi manga series where he literally spends every issue talking about his favorite food at different Japanese chain restaurants. Anyway, while I wouldn’t necessarily try to cook the dish based on the instructions in this comic (Perry frequently neglects to mention things like the quantity of ingredients or cook times), I can definitely see myself looking up real recipes for foods I read about here. The story itself has a sweetness to it, with Lois trying to do something nice for the guy she’s falling in love with and being willing to reach out for help from someone she trusts when she needs help. There’s a vulnerability there that she doesn’t usually show, and it makes sense that Perry White is the one who would get to see it.
It was a low-key week, guys, but honestly, I kind of feel like that’s what I needed. I hope you enjoyed it anyway, and here’s hoping I’ve got something more exciting next Wednesday.
With the movie (you know which one) so fresh in my mind, I thought quite a bit about what to do this week. I don’t know what Superman stories would be best to follow it. Certainly, anything that would be capable of TOPPING it is likely something I’ve already read. So rather than any of that, I decided to go in the opposite direction: parody. Parody is a classic format for stories, something that’s been around almost as long as storytelling itself. I’m pretty sure that after the first caveman, Ug, finished regaling his tribe with the story of how he singlehandedly took down a wooly mammoth, when he walked away his buddy Og stood up and started doing a mocking impression of Ug getting impaled by a tusk.
In the nearly 90 years of his existence, Superman has been parodied many times, and we’re going to look at those this week. We’ll look at his parodies from comics and magazines like Mad and Cracked, check out spoofs from shows like Saturday Night Live, and even delve into the times that the Looney Tunes did their own take on the Man of Steel. So this week, friends, let’s laugh.
Notes: Everybody has heard of Mad Magazine, but if you’re not a hardcore comic book nerd like myself you may not know that Mad actually started out as a comic, published by EC Comics, the same company responsible for classics like Tales From the Crypt and Weird Science. When the anti-comic furor of the 50s led to the creation of the Comics Code of America, an organization that at times seemed intended solely to crush EC out of existence, they pivoted and made Mad a magazine instead, because evidently making the page size larger and switching to black-and-white was enough to exempt it from the Code. I didn’t say it made sense, people.
But anyway, the fourth issue of Mad (the comic book) brought us one of the first Superman parodies in print: “Superduperman” by Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood. Here we meet Clark Bent, assistant copy boy at the Daily Dirt, a pathetic creature who has spent the last ten years saving up his meager salary (seventy-five cents and a good bus token) in the hopes of buying a pearl necklace for “girl reporter” Lois Pain. The city of Cosmopolis is being plagued by an “Unknown Monster,” and Clark dives into a phone booth (then a second because the first was occupied) to change into Superduperman. To his shock, he discovers that the “Monster” is, in fact, Captain Marbles, who has gone rogue and decided he’s just in it for the money.
A few interesting things here: Mad #4 was published in 1953, just a few months before Fawcett Comics would throw in the towel in their years-long court battle against National Comics over their claim that Captain Marvel infringed on their Superman copyright. So there’s a meta level to having Superduperman slug it out with Captain Marbles that I find pretty amusing, but I have to wonder if the average kid in 1953 would have gotten that joke. The depiction of “Clark Bent” is pretty striking here, taking the “meek, mild” Clark Kent that we all know and love and making him even more pathetic, making Lois a cold, cruel harpy, and making Superduperman kind of a dunce.
I think the biggest draw is Wally Wood’s artwork. He was one of the greatest comedic artists of the time, probably of ALL time, and the level of energy and fun he puts on every page is outstanding. The man was a giant and I’m so glad I included this story in the Year of Superman.
In 1988, Marvel Comics decided to get back into the parody game with What The–?!, the Marvel Mag of Mirth and Mayhem. I was 10 years old when this series started, and it was pretty much tailor-made for me. The second issue, though, was something that was actually more special than I realized at the time: Superbman versus the Fantastical Four in “My Badguy, My Enemy!” by none other than John Byrne.
In 1988, Byrne was wrapping up his time on Superman for DC and returning to Marvel, where had previously done a legendary run on Fantastic Four, so I suppose the idea of having him parody his two greatest achievements in comics to date was a natural match. Byrne wrote and drew this story (with inks by another Superman laureate, Jerry Ordway), which has reporters Park Bench and Nosy Dame travel to New York from their home in Metropopolopolis to report on the newest bankruptcy of the Fantastical Four. When the Human Scorch carelessly causes Nosey’s hairdo to wilt, Superbman jumps into action.
I loved this incredibly goofy story as a kid and, as an adult, I appreciate it on an entirely different level. Byrne was doing something that I admire the hell out of: making fun of himself and having a grand time doing it. The story makes several references to the way Superman was changed in Byrne’s own reboot, including comments about how he’s not as powerful as he was previously, how he’s not as square as he used to be, and how his cape is no longer indestructible. The last one led to a joke that 10-year-old me thought was the funniest thing he’d ever read and, if I’m being honest, adult me still thinks is pretty hilarious:
Even a parody of Ben Grimm still sounds like Ben Grimm, and I think that’s beautiful.
But as the fight between our heroes rages, off to the side there’s a battle of wits between Doctor Bloom, sworn enemy of the Fantastical Four, and Rex Ruthless, sworn enemy of Superbman (the Keeper of the Comics Code actually has to step in at one point to tell them to cut down on the swearing). The two super-geniuses begin arguing over their plots, with Bloom revealing that he faked the FF’s bankruptcy to lure Park Bent to report on it, having deduced that Bent was Superbman. Ruthless finds this HILARIOUS, in a page that I now recognize as being the real pearl of this story. He gives Bloom a lecture on how impossible that would be, a page where Byrne is parodying his own treatment of Lex Luthor from Superman (Vol. 2) #2, in which Luthor rejected the same line of logic connecting Clark and Superman. Byrne even gets into making jokes about his own predilections in panel layout here, stuff that as a kid I didn’t catch on to at all. (I wasn’t reading Superman comics yet at that point, and even if I had been I don’t know if I would have caught on to all the nuances.)
But perhaps the greatest inside joke in the comic is the way Byrne draws Superbman’s s-shield. I remember reading an introduction Byrne once wrote for Man of Steel in which he discussed his history with Superman and how, as a child, he didn’t realize the symbol was supposed to be an “s.” To him, he said, the shapes looked like a pair of fish swimming at one another. So when he got the chance to do a parody, that’s what he drew. That’s a joke that I bet almost NOBODY got – I certainly didn’t get it at the time – but it’s one of my favorites now.
I wish Byrne had done more comedy comics like this one. He had a real flair for it.
Thur. July 17
Magazines: Mad #208, Cracked #160
Notes: When I was younger I read Mad and Cracked pretty regularly, although I drifted away as I got older. This happened with a lot of stuff, but unlike other things I dropped as being “for kids” like Disney and Archie comics, I never really went back to Mad on a regular basis. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I think my sense of humor just grew in a different direction than those publications specialize in. Still, I’ve got a lot of them from when I was younger and I’ve tracked down others over the years that either featured or reprinted specific Superman comics – plus there are some available (you know where this is going) on the DC Universe Infinite app. So during Parody Week, I’m going to try to go through some of the ones that I’ve got in roughly the order of publication.
First up is Mad #208, which recycled the title “Superduperman” for its parody of the first Christopher Reeve movie. I can’t find a writer credit, oddly enough, but Mort Drucker’s signature appears on the first page and – let’s be frank – it would be pretty clear it was his art even without it. Drucker was a phenomenal caricaturist, the characters in his Mad parodies immediately recognizable as the celebrities he was spoofing, even when exaggerating or mocking their features. He even nails the design of Glenn Ford and Phillis Thaxter as Jonathan and Martha Kent in their brief appearance.
I’m not going to bother to recap the story here, because as a parody it’s a fairly by-the-beat retelling of the story of the movie. How well, then, does it succeed as a comedy?
Eeeeeeeh.
I think this is why I never quite got back to Mad once I got older. The comedy in many of these stories is dependent on straw man jokes and easy targets: a crack about how improbable it is that Lois can afford such an opulent apartment on a reporter’s salary, gags about how outrageously out-of-proportion Marlon Brando’s paycheck for this movie was, and of course, a joke about the glasses. Probably the best joke in the entire parody comes at the very end, after Superduperman spins time back to save “Lotus Lain.” As in the movie, Supes gets a vision of his father reminding him he’s not supposed to interfere with human history. In this version, though, there’s a second voice telling him to do it – it turns out to be the executives at Warner Bros. recognizing that they need Lotus alive for Superduperman II.
The same month that Mad’s parody came out, rival magazine Cracked gave us “Suped-Upman: The Satire.” Once again, there’s no credited creative team, but the artwork to me looks a hell of a lot like the great John Severin, who did stories for Cracked for decades.
The Cracked story isn’t specifically parodying the movie, but rather just giving us a goofy look at a Superman-type character, and honestly, I think it’s better for it. Freed from trying to draw the actors, Severin’s characters have a life and expressiveness where other parodies sometimes fall short. Cluck Clone doesn’t leave his parents’ farm to become a reporter, but rather gets a job at a delicatessen called the Deli Planet where he meets a lovely girl named Lewis Paine – whose safety takes top priority over gunshot victims when Suped-Upman goes into action a few pages later.
After reading just these two parodies, I feel like I’m already starting to gel a sort of theory of satire, at least how I see it. Of the two, the Cracked story is honestly much funnier and a lot of fun to read, and I think the reason for that is because whoever wrote it wasn’t simply retelling the story of the movie. He took the broad strokes of the Superman legend, tweaked them in a humorous way, and then told his own story rather than just filling in the blanks of the existing plotline like a complicated Mad Lib. Cracked is doing its own thing, and it’s a better story for it.
And you know, the same is true for all the great satires out there. Compare something like Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs to a Friedberg/Seltzer movie such as Epic Movie. Brooks simply uses the CONCEPTS of science fiction (especially, but not exclusively Star Wars) to tell a funny story, whereas Friedberg and Seltzer rip out chunks of existing stories and patch them together like some horrific Frankenquilt that seems to think that simply REFERRING to another movie is enough to qualify as a joke. All of this is building my brain up to what I think I’m going to refer to as Petit’s Law of Satire: Satire is funnier in broad strokes than in specifics. The two stories I read yesterday, from Mad #4 and What The–?! #2, were both really funny, and neither of them was parodying a specific story. The Cracked satire is funnier than the Mad by-the-beat parody.
I think I’m on to something here.
Let’s see if it holds up over the next few days.
Comic Books: New Gods Vol. 5 #7 (Guest Appearance), Green Lantern Vol. 8 #23 (Guest Appearance, Conner Kent)
Fri., July 18
Short Films: Super-Rabbit (1943), Stupor Duck (1956), Superior Duck (1996)
Notes: Today I decided to peek in on the second greatest collection of characters in the Warner Bros. catalogue, after the DC superheroes. I’m talking, of course, of the Looney Tunes. I have a deep, abiding love of the likes of Bugs and Daffy, and as each of those stalwarts took their turns poking fun at Superman, I wanted to include them here in Parody Week, starting with Bugs Bunny in Super-Rabbit.
Directed by Chuck Jones, this cartoon starts off with a spoof of the Flesicher shorts, parodying the old “faster than a speeding bullet” intro before bringing us to Super-Rabbit’s origin. Bugs Bunny is a lab animal in this one, given some super-powered carrots that give him incredible powers. He decides the best way to use these powers is to head to Texas and take on a hunter called Cottontail Smith who has dedicated himself to wiping out all rabbits. Bugs does his usual number on Smith and his horse until a midair mishap causes him to lose his power carrots, which Smith and the horse gobble them up. Just before he’s about to be pummeled, Bugs declares, “This looks like a job for a REAL Superman!” Then, in a bit of standard-for-the-time patriotism, he ducks into a phone booth, joins the army, and marches off in the direction of a road sign that inexplicably points to both Berlin AND Tokyo.
The superhero stuff in this cartoon is almost incidental. The opening sequence is where most of the tropes come in, with the Fleischer-specific parody, but once Bugs gets to Texas and comes to loggerheads with Smith the antics he pulls off are pretty standard for him. Could catching a cannonball and using it to play an impromptu game of basketball count as a feat of super-strength? Sure, but this is also BUGS BUNNY we’re talking about, a cosmic trickster with the ability to warp reality in any manner he deems the most amusing at the time, so I’m not convinced that the magic carrots are strictly necessary here. The only parts of the cartoon that seem specifically dedicated to a Superman parody, other than Bugs’s outfit, are the bits where he’s flying. That does, of course, give us the best joke in the entire short, as Bugs flies into the stratosphere and whips past a horse who is astonished to see a rabbit flying at 30,000 feet.
Think about that for a minute.
Anyway, it’s a good cartoon. Perhaps not the greatest parody in history, but it IS the cartoon that led to the awesome Super-Rabbit figure that adorns one of my Superman shelves, and it’s worth it for that alone.
Next up, in 1956 Robert McKimson drafted Daffy Duck for another poke at the man of steel in Stupor Duck. This one is a much more direct parody of Superman than Super-Rabbit, beginning with Daffy in disguise as “mild-mannered reporter Cluck Trent.” Daffy overhears his editor watching TV but, true to form, mistakes the broadcast for the braggadocio of a supervillain and sets out to thwart him, only to get thwarted himself over and over.
Bugs is a classic character, but in terms of parody, I think Daffy is actually more effective. A lot of the humor in this short comes from Daffy making a fool of himself in ways that just wouldn’t happen to Bugs. He saves a building from collapsing, for example, only to wind up getting punched out by the head of the demolition crew that was TRYING to demolish it. He saves a “sinking” ship and gets blasted by the cannon of the submarine he just pulled out of the water. It’s great, goofy stuff that is perfectly in keeping with Daffy Duck, but wouldn’t have worked with Bugs. I think I have to conclude, oddly enough, that although Super-Rabbit is a funnier cartoon, Stupor Duck is a better parody.
Director Chuck Jones would take one more swing at superheroes more than five decades after Super-Rabbit, teaming up with Daffy for the 1996 short Superior Duck. This time out, Daffy is a sort of mashup between Superman and Duck Dodgers, setting out to save the day only to be constantly thwarted by…his narrator.
Seriously, that’s the entire cartoon. Daffy is out to do some superheroics, but the narrator (voiced by the immortal Thurl Ravenscroft) cannot get his lines right, forcing Daffy into one increasingly-preposterous situation after another. It’s a less direct Superman parody than some of the others, but they make up for it with a last-act cameo that left me in stitches.
With Mel Blanc having left us by this point, we’re left with different voice actors, some of which work and others don’t. Frank Gorshin, TV’s Riddler, absolutely knocks it out of the park as Daffy and Foghorn Leghorn. Eric Goldberg does a good Porky and Marvin the Martian, but his Tweety left something to be desired. But this still feels like the same Chuck Jones who gave us the likes of Duck Amuck and One Froggy Evening. It’s a hoot.
TV Episode: The Looney Tunes Show, Season 2, Episode 26: “SuperRabbit.”
Notes: But we’re not done yet! In 2011, the Cartoon Network brought us the highly-underrated cartoon The Looney Tunes Show. I loved this show – rather than simply aping the classic Looney Tunes shorts, they merged those sensibilities with a TV sitcom, casting Bugs and Daffy as roommates in a kind of Odd Couple situation, with Bugs playing the more sensible, straightlaced one to Daffy’s aimless vagabond. If I had heard the show described as such before I watched it, I probably would have dismissed it outright, but I really grew to love the series and to this day wish it had lasted longer than two seasons.
The episode I’m focusing on was the season two finale (which, sadly, turned out to be the series finale as well), “SuperRabbit.” In this one, as Daffy starts scrounging through Bugs’s belongings looking for stuff to sell (did I mention he was a vagabond?) he comes across a strange crystal carrot. Bugs tries to divert Daffy’s attention from the carrot with a tale of his “true” origins. He isn’t REALLY Bugs Bunny, he claims, but an alien from the planet Crypton. (With a “C.” Because Daffy is WAAAAY too smart to fall for Bugs ripping off Superman’s origin by spelling it with a “K”.”) From there, we actually get an adventure of Bugs as SuperRabbit facing off against some of his greatest enemies: Brainiac (aka Marvin the Martian)! Lex Luthor! (Elmer Fudd, naturally)! And General Zod (Daffy himself)!
I hate to say it, but this was actually one of the weaker episodes of The Looney Tunes Show. The strength of the cartoon came from putting Bugs and Daffy into very sitcom-esque tropes and then spinning them wildly out of control. This episode mostly avoids that, electing instead to do a full-episode parody of what could have been a fairly standard Superman story with a few added jokes (such as Elmer’s Lex Luthor telling people “I’m hunting SuperWabbits”). It’s an okay parody, but it’s nowhere near the level of entertainment that this show was usually capable of, and it makes me sad that the show ended on this note.
Sat. July 19
Magazines: Mad #225, Cracked #183
Notes: Mad returned to the world of “Superduperman” with a parody of Superman II, with Mort Drucker once again providing artwork and Frank Jacobs writing it. For all I know, Jacobs wrote the first one as well, but as I said a couple of days ago, I couldn’t find a credit for that one. It certainly reads like it was written by the same author. Like the first one, “Superduperman II” is, in essence, a beat-for-beat retelling of the plot of the movie with added puns. Some of them, of course, land better than others. We have a very standard formula for a Mad parody: Jacobs and Drucker essentially break the movie down into single-panel moments; in each panel, the characters make wry observations about the situation they are currently in; and it ends with a punchline. Once you get used to it, the humor comes across as very staccato, with a rhythm that’s predictable, but not in a soothing way, so it’s not surprising that the funniest moments in the story are all things that are original to the comic. There’s a funny bit at the beginning, for example, where they mock the movie for opening up with flashbacks to the first film. Later, during the fight with the Phantom Zone criminals, Rocky Balboa randomly shows up for a panel to punch the Non parody, telling Superduperman that he’s there to get in shape for his own upcoming sequel. The funniest wholly original gag comes in a couplet where Superduperman is rushing off to Paris to save Lotus Lain, only to have to whip around because he forgot France is eastward.
Really effective comedy is based on surprise, and I think that’s pretty indicative of why I fell out of love with Mad parodies as I got older – they’re all pretty much the same, pretty predictable. Even at this point, in 1981, the good parts of the magazine were the things that didn’t parody a specific story, like Don Martin’s strips, Sergio Aragones’ marginals, and of course, “Spy Vs. Spy.”
Cracked, meanwhile, again chose not to do a direct parody of Superman II, instead choosing to run a three-page gag piece called “What Christopher Reeve (That Super Man) Will Be Like When He Gets Old.” The joke here is that, with Superman II being a huge hit, they assumed that they would go on to make dozens and dozens of sequels for decades to come, and the comic jokes about what an “old” Superman would be like: his powers being less impressive, using his strength to break a pound of spaghetti rather than bend steel, for example. The jokes were fair for the time – this was the era where movie sequels were just starting to get out of hand, and once popular movie franchise hit a certain point, there was an assumption that it would go on forever. (Remember the bit in Back to the Future Part II where Marty cringes from the holographic shark advertising Jaws 19, or the quick joke in Spaceballs in which a movie reviewer is about to talk about Rocky 5,000?) The problem here is obvious, and not at all the fault of anybody who worked on this comic: no matter how good the jokes may have seemed at the time, given what happened to Christopher Reeve, they’re just not funny anymore.
I want to note, briefly, that I’m going to try to cover as many Superman parodies as I can before this week is up, but that number is dependent on what’s actually available to me in my personal collection or the DC app, and also on my ability to locate them. I’ve scrouged up quite a few, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve identified them all. I bring that up because if Cracked did parodies of movies past Superman II, I either don’t have them or can’t find them. From here on out, the remaining print parodies on my list are all Mad.
Mad #243, for example, teamed Drucker with writer Stan Hart for “Stuporman ZZZ.” Changing up the writer didn’t change up the formula, though – it’s still your average beat-for-beat Mad parody. Each panel has that same ol’ rhythm, the same ol’ cadence, the same ol’ delivery. And once again, the funniest part is the stuff that’s NOT directly taken from the film: this time around, it’s a sequence after the “Kraptonite” makes Stuporman go bad, where he demonstrates this by using a joy buzzer to shake the Pope’s hand, giving a whoopee cushion to the UN Secretary-General, and mooning Ronald and Nancy Reagan at the White House. Reading these stories actually makes me feel sorry for Mort Drucker – he’s such a fantastic cartoonist and caricaturist, and I wish he’d been given better material to illustrate. Even the two-page “Don Martin’s Superman III Outtakes” strip is funnier than the main story.
I’m starting to get a little burned out on the Mad formula now, to the point where I’m looking forward to the point where I get to the parodies that came out after I fell off as a reader. Hopefully by that point, they’ll have discovered a second way to tell a joke.
Comics: Superman Unlimited #3, Krypto: The Last Dog of Krypton #2, Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #41
Notes: It ain’t all parodies, though, friends. There are still new Superman comics this week, and I’m getting into those today too, starting with Dan Slott and Rafael Albuqueque’s Superman Unlimited #3. Told largely through Krypto’s eyes, in this issue we see our best boy catch some bad guys, get taken for a walk by Jon, and then catch scent of an old foe of Superman’s that he decides to track down.
At first, the story seems like a charming but inconsequential chapter of the Unlimited storyline. The first two issues largely dealt with the enormous Kryptonite meteor that fell to Earth and the havoc it’s wreaking everywhere, but that plotline doesn’t show up here for quite some time. The Krypto story is lovely, and there’s a great scene where Lois and Clark ask Jon what exactly he’s doing with himself these days (a question a lot of the readers are asking too – the character has been painfully aimless for entirely too long, and I’m not shy about laying the blame for that on the stupid age-up foisted on him during the Bendis run). In the last third of the book, though, there’s a nice reveal where we come to understand how the Krypto story is fitting in. Some new wrinkles to the Kryptonite story are added and a new player is added to the game, and that makes this book – which was already fun to read – feel much more significant.
Ryan North and Mike Norton are back for Krypto: The Last Dog of Krypton #2. I have no doubt that this miniseries owes its existence to the fact that Krypto has such a big role in the movie, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if DC didn’t even have any intention of publishing a Krypto series until after he showed up in the trailer last December and got such a huge response. If that’s true, then that trailer has given us one of the best comics of the year.
In this second issue, Krypto has been taken in by – of all people – a young Lex Luthor. Having left his original home of Smallville, Lex is living with relatives he clearly despises and for some reason, decides to take in this stray dog he’s found. The ambition that will mark the adult Lex Luthor is already there, but in this early incarnation, he’s struggling with his morality. This would be a fascinating book even if it weren’t for Krypto. We’re seeing the kind of internal conflict that kind of determines who a character will eventually be – if given the chance for greatness at the expense of having to do something horrific, will they do it? Adult Lex, we know, wouldn’t hesitate, but seeing him at a young enough developmental stage where there’s still a last lingering shred of conscience is fascinating.
People who pick up this comic expecting to see the bounding, joyful Krypto of the movie might be a little put off, but if that’s not all you’re looking for, this comic is really phenomenal.
Finally, in Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #41, we start with Batman, Robin, and Superman inexplicably transported to Bizarro World. Bizarro World is actually kind of an appropriate element to bring in here in Parody Week, because bad Bizarro stories are kind of like a bad Mad satire: by-the-book tellings of an oaf doing things backwards. The good ones find new twists to put on it, and this one is pretty good. We start off with Robin as the point of view character, which is nice, as he’s never been to Bizarro World before and the sheer panic he goes through uses a normally unflappable character to show just how crazy it is. Then we get to the twist – there’s some sort of pandemic going through the Bizarros that warps their brains and makes them the worst thing a Bizarro can be: normal. Waid finds some fun ways to play with the Bizarro’s backwards nature in this issue, promising a fun story arc.
Sun. July 20
Comedy Sketches: “Bicycle Repairman” from Monty Python’s Flying Circus Season One, Episode Three, Assorted Saturday Night Live sketches
Notes: Okay, so we’ve taken a look at Superman parodies in comics and cartoons, but what about live action? These, I think, can give us a broader view of how pop culture views the Man of Steel, at least at the time each parody was made. We’ll start off with Monty Python’s “Bicycle Repairman” sketch from 1969. In this bit, we peek in on an inverted world in which everyone is Superman. At least, everyone wears a Superman costume and has padded muscles – we never actually witness any of these Supermen doing anything super. But when trouble happens, in the form of Terry Jones Superman falling off his bicycle, another Superman (Michael Palin) makes a quick change and rushes to save the day as…BICYCLE REPAIRMAN!
The Pythons, of course, were masters of surreal comedy. It doesn’t matter if the sketch makes no logical sense, it’s about the gags and about the underlying subversion that they’re sneaking in. And while this particular sketch doesn’t make any grand political statements, it IS interesting in what it shows us about how superheroes were viewed in 1969. First of all, there’s no particular reason for this sketch to be about Superman. They could have put virtually any superhero costume on the cast and the joke would have been exactly the same. But in 1969, Superman was viewed as the default superhero among most people. It’s who you automatically thought of when you said the word, and so that’s what they went with.
The sketch is also intriguing in how it reflects on one other non-Superman element. In the bit where Bicycle Repairman is (spoiler) repairing the bicycle, we get treated to nonsensical “sound effects” such as “Clink!”, “Inflate!” and “Alter Saddle!” They’re done in the style of the “Bow! Bam!” shots from the 1966 Batman TV show. Between these two things, I think it gives us a fairly accurate depiction of just how the general public viewed superheroes at the end of the 60s.
The rest of the sketches I’ve found all come from Saturday Night Live, although thankfully, they’re sometimes decades apart, so I think that gives us an interesting overview of the topic. We’re starting with the “Superhero Party” sketch from 1979, starring Margot Kidder herself as Lois Lane and Bill Murray as Superman, hosting their first party together.
We get an all-star roundup of comedians playing comic book characters in this one: Dan Akroyd as the Flash, John Belushi as the Hulk (who rotates being Grand Marshall of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade with Green Lantern) and Jane Curtain popping in as a delightfully catty Lana Lang who tries to convince Lois that Clark Kent is secretly the Flash (apparently Superman still hasn’t told her his secret identity, despite having been married for some time). Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, and the Thing all show up in off-the-rack costumes that conceal the presumed extras wearing them. The gem here is Garrett Morris as Ant-Man, a character who, at the time, was as D-list as you could get. I’m sure most of the audience watching this when it aired in 1979 assumed it was a fake character the SNL writers made up. Murray ducks out at one point and returns as “Clark Kent,” where Lois starts confiding to her old pal that life with Superman has become stiflingly dull. What really crushes his spirit, though, is finding out that Lois used to date the Hulk.
This sketch is full of hilarious, little moments. Murray prances around, “flying” from one spot in the room to another. Lois briefly admonishes him to allow her to open a housewarming gift because “not all of us have X-Ray vision,” and so forth. Unlike the Monty Python example, which just uses a surface level awareness of Superman, the writers of this sketch pull some deep cuts that I’m sure would zip past a lot of people, especially the Ant-Man reference (which nonetheless was so memorable that it got Morris a cameo in the first Ant-Man movie). The ending of the sketch, I confess, is a little weak, but at least it HAS an ending, which is more than you can say for most SNL segments of the past 20 years or so.
In 1985, Christopher Reeve hosted the show. Rather than actually parody Superman himself, though, they took the clever approach of telling the story of the “Superman Auditions.” Jim Belushi plays Richard Donner, auditioning the last three potential actors for the role of his Superman movie, including (of course) Christopher Reeve as himself. The three of them read sides opposite Donner’s assistant (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss). When they run the scene where Clark stops a mugger, Belushi suddenly fires a gun at Reeve. He’s angry when the bullet, rather than bouncing off his chest harmlessly, keeps bouncing off his chin and teeth and breaking windows. Reeve turns out to be at a serious disadvantage compared to the other two auditioners, one of whom catches the bullet in his teeth and the other of which is promptly shot dead.
The concept is so utterly absurd that it’s actually kind of delightful, and while nothing about it makes the slightest bit of sense, I keep laughing every time I see it. In terms of mannerisms, Reeve plays his Superman lines just the way he always does, but he keeps bumbling the use of his authentic super powers in a way that seems appropriate for his Clark Kent. And this time the punchline at the end of the sketch lands nicely.
The next sketch is VERY much of its time, “Superman’s Funeral” from 1992. As I mentioned waaaay back when I did my reread of the Death of Superman for this blog, it was big news – so big that it even inspired an SNL sketch. You have to understand, the “Superhero Party” and “Superman Auditions” sketches were 100 percent done just because they had Kidder and Reeve hosting the show, and when that happens, they tend to play off of some of the actor’s best-known characters. But that doesn’t apply to “Superman’s Funeral.” They did this bit just because it was such an enormous part of the cultural zeitgeist at just that moment. (Also in the zeitgeist: that episode’s host, comedian Sinbad.)
Superman, as you may expect, doesn’t actually appear in this bit. We instead have Rob Schneider as Jimmy Olsen acting as host for Superman’s funeral. He talks to the other heroes as they arrive: Aquaman (David Spade), Adam Sandler (the Flash), Tim Meadows (Green Lantern). Dana Carvey’s Batman breaks down in tears during the eulogy, leading to Robin (Chris Rock) trying to comfort him on the dais. Lex Luthor (Al Franken) ultimately has to confess that he’s actually pretty happy about the whole thing. Perry White (the immortal Phil Hartman) gives a speech where he can do little more than burble “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” over and over again. Chris Farley as the Hulk (some people from Marvel Comics came by to pay their respects) hilariously switches from incoherent Hulk-speech to being an erudite speaker when he switches to his notecards. And then at the end, Jimmy rushes in and reports that the Legion of Doom is attacking the Metropolis Arena. Batman quickly mobilizes the rest of the heroes to rush off and thwart them. The surprisingly touching moment (“Let’s do it for Superman!”) is slightly undercut – in traditional SNL style – by showing Black Lightning (Sinbad) swiping food from the catering table.
Again, I’m impressed by some of the details in this bit. Tim Meadows, for instance, wears a costume that’s actually accurate to what John Stewart was wearing in the comics at the time, as opposed to the standard GL uniform. And Sinbad’s Black Lightning is incensed at the fact that nobody at the funeral seems to know who he is. (This was funnier in 1992, before the character had his own television series.)
On the other hand, they weren’t married to modern continuity either. Lois Lane (Julia Sweeney) is confused that Clark Kent hasn’t shown up for the funeral. Given that most of the public, at this point, probably weren’t aware that Lois was in on the secret by now or that she and Clark were engaged, it’s a forgivable omission. I love this sketch. I remember watching it when it originally aired, being dumbfounded by the fact that stuff from comic books – from my comics, that I was reading – were actually being spoofed by SNL. And to be frank, this is what I consider their Golden Age, the era of Hartman, Carvey, Mike Myers and so forth. Once those guys left, the show fell off, and I’ve honestly never found it to be consistently funny ever since then. Does that make me sound like a grumpy old man? Well, what can I say? When you’re right, you’re right.
Future Black Adam Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson took on the Man of Steel in 2000 in a sketch called “Clark Kent.” (Oddly enough, unlike the other sketches, this one doesn’t appear to be available on YouTube. We’ll have to content ourselves with a random TikTok capture of it.) In this one, after Superman zips away from the Daily Planet, the newspaper staff (featuring Molly Shannon as Lois Lane, Jimmy Fallon as Jimmy Olsen, and Chris Parnell as Perry White) begrudgingly wait for Johnson’s Clark Kent to appear, like he always does. As he walks onto the scene, his Superman costume ridiculously poking out from beneath his suit, the others all crack up over how his pathetic attempts to conceal his secret identity.
That’s the whole joke in this sketch – the rest of the Planet staffers are painfully aware that Superman and Clark are the same person and constantly mock him behind his back. It’s a funny bit, too – while I think people don’t give the character enough credit for how he pulls off the masquerade (shown most effectively by Christopher Reeve and in the All Star Superman series), the joke is actually kind of funny at first. It does lapse into being a little mean-spirited as the three of them delight in screwing with him, not to mention some seriously dated jokes where they try to rile “Clark” by claiming “Superman” might be gay. This whole sketch is kind of endemic of SNL, though – a premise that has some potential, but that quickly spirals into jokes that tend to be more nasty than funny, then falling short at the end.
Finally, late last year, SNL dropped a sketch on YouTube that had apparently been cut for time earlier in the season, John Mulaney and Sarah Sherman as Superman and Lois, in an “alternate version” of the famous interview from the 1978 film. The bit starts off the same as the scene from the film, with Superman arriving at Lois’s apartment in the hopes of answering some of the questions the public may have about him, only to be interrupted by the sudden appearance of Lois’s heretofore unmentioned roommate Glenn (Chloe Fineman). Fineman shows up wearing an awful wig and an oversized bikini t-shirt, then stumbles into mispronouncing “Superman” as though it were a last name. From there Fineman just gets more and more debauched and inappropriate as Superman and Lois desperately attempt to conduct the interview.
I’m a big fan of John Mulaney. He’s one of the best stand-up performers in the public eye these days, he’s a GREAT voice actor (I loved him as Spider-Ham in Into the Spider-Verse), and if you’ve never seen his routine about the fun he and a friend had with a jukebox when they were kids, stop right now and watch it on YouTube. But the sketch just doesn’t work. The joke – the ONLY joke – is that Lois’s roommate is a debaucherous idiot. Not a FUNNY idiot, just an idiot. The only thing resembling humor comes towards the end when Superman tries to fly Lois away and is surprised to find her heavier than he expected. (It’s funny, you see, because she’s seen him lift a tank with his little finger.) The rest of it…John Mulaney deserves better. Hell, everyone in this sketch deserves better. I don’t know who wrote this sketch or who approved it, but the only person at SNL who was doing their job that week is the person who decided to cut it for time.
Animated Short: She-Sick Sailors (1944)
Notes: There’s one more cartoon I forgot to cover the other day, and as I doubt I’ll have a chance before this week ends, I’m gonna squeeze it in now. Seymour Kneitel, who directed several of the Fleischer Superman shorts, had one more shot at the character in 1944, in the Popeye cartoon She-Sick Sailors. When Popeye discovers that Olive Oyl is enamored of the Superman comic books (delightfully, complete with the Fleischer Superman anthem), Bluto decides to cut in on Popeye’s action by putting on a Superman costume, shaving his beard off, and impersonating the Man of Steel. From there, we get your average Popeye short, with the sailor and Bluto sparring over Olive’s affections, but with an added Superman element.
I love this short. It’s a perfect Popeye cartoon, using the formula to a tee, but at the same time it still manages to crack jokes about Superman himself and the expectations of the character, largely informed by the cartoons that the same studio had recently finished making. And it’s all worth it all just to hear Popeye deliver the line “Listen here, Stupidman! Ya still has ta proves ta ME that you’re a better man than I am!”
Mon., July 21
Magazines: Mad #415, Mad #468, #524
Notes: I’m jumping ahead now to 2002, and a Mad parody of a piece of Superman lore we’ve only briefly touched upon here so far: Smallville. Their “Smellville” parody (with art, once more, by the great Mort Drucker, written by Dick Debartolo), starts with the usual Mad Magazine double-page spread where we get a Mousketeer Roll Call of the cast, each giving us a brief description of who they are, their function on the show, and the only joke that the magazine seems to think the character is capable of providing.
It’s funny to notice some of the assumptions that this parody made about the show, which was still very early in its run when it was published. That opening double-paged spread, for instance, features caricatures of Margot Kidder and Teri Hatcher, each claiming they’re planning to be Lois Lane when they graduate. It feels like the writer is leaning on a prediction that Lois would eventually be revealed to be a Smallville High Student, but that of course didn’t happen. On the other hand, wondering what the impetus was behind that specific gag is more satisfying than reading the “satire” actually is.
The parody is only five pages long and utterly bereft of story. We get assorted vignettes that show bits and pieces of scenes from the show’s first season, a running gag about “weird stuff” happening in Smellville on Tuesday nights between 9 and 10 pm (which admittedly is amusing the first time they do it, but less funny each subsequent time), and then the whole thing ends abruptly with the iconic scene of Clark lashed to a scarecrow. This reads like a parody written by someone who hasn’t watched any of Smallville except for the commercials, taking a wild shot at what probably happens. This is arguably the weakest Mad parody we’ve seen yet.
Mad took a swipe at Superman Returns in 2006. Dick Debartolo returns for this one, with art by Tom Richmond. Here we have “Spider-Sham” recruited to narrate “Stuporman Returns,” the joke being that Mad wanted a hero who actually had a movie come out in this century to get people’s attention. (I’ll concede, that’s actually pretty funny.) From there, we get a quick recap of the original Superman (or at least the parts of it that were pertinent to Superman Returns), then we land on the joke the magazine has settled on for this one: Returns is just a retread of elements from the original movie. Which honestly is pretty fair for a satire of Superman Returns, but also pretty goddamn hypocritical for Mad Magazine, which from what I can tell abandoned its quest to develop a second joke somewhere around 1987.
There are good things to say. This one, unlike Smellville, actually has a story to it, although it is buoyed by the fact that it simply has to do the cut-and-paste, beat-by-beat recreation of the movie, so actually having a plot is no mean feat. Richmond’s art is pretty good as well, showing skills at caricature that match Drucker’s. Also, apparently Mad switched from black and white to full color some time between 2002 and 2006, which is earlier than I thought, and the color actually looks very good.
The last two panels are probably the funniest in the comic. There’s a good joke about the show House (which was a hit at the time), and a final panel playing on the weird ambiguity of Lois’s son, complete with a visual reference to Action Comics #1, which I’m sure will make certain collectors I know scramble to find a copy of this issue once they realize it.
It’s not great. It’s not particularly funny. But at least it’s better than “Smellville.”
The last issue of Mad I’m going to subject myself to before their reboot is their Man of Steel parody from issue #524 in 2013. In “Man of Veal” (because puns don’t actually have to be funny, they just have to rhyme), we get the by-the-book recap of the feature film that it’s satirizing, as is to be expected. However, I’ve got something surprising to say:
Some of the jokes in this one are actually pretty good.
However, not enough to make up for the ones that are absolutely horrific.
For example, there are some truly tasteless, vulgar jokes in here about Taylor Swift (and I don’t even care if you’re making fun of Taylor Swift, I care that the joke ISN’T FUNNY). Another panel about the sexual proclivities of Kryptonians (Kraptonians? Oh, who cares?) that isn’t even close to amusing enough to justify how gross it is. Digs at comic book readers that come out of nowhere. And when their Lois Lane shows up (I can’t even be bothered to flip back to see what pseudonym they used), she’s a painful straw feminist stereotype, prancing around and talking about femininity in terms that feel like they could have come from one of the Spice Girls at their most annoying. Is that what they thought Amy Adams was doing? It boggles the mind.
Despite the enthusiasm I had for Parody Week when I started, subjecting myself to one painful Mad garbagefest after another has made me start to regret the whole thing.
Tues. July 22
Magazines: Mad Magazine Vol. 2 #15, #44
Notes: At some point in their long history, the parent company of Mad Magazine was sold to Warner Bros, which of course also owns DC Comics, and the stewardship of Mad was handed over to them. In 2018, they decided to relaunch the magazine with a new first issue, because somehow there are still people who think that’s a positive thing. I’ve actually never read an issue of the “new” Mad before today, but as I started to look for entries for Parody Week, I discovered that the current state of the magazine seems to be a mixture of classic features and reprints, which I find surprisingly sad. Maybe because I don’t have a ton of faith in the reprints they have to choose from. But after some sifting around, I managed to find a couple of issues of the current Mad on the DC appthat have Superman-centric spoofs.
And may Rao have mercy on my soul.
Mad Vol. 2 #15, from 2020, has several superhero-centric reprints, including spoofs of the X-Men, Spider-Man, and others. There are a few Superman shorts in here, including a Sergio Aragones classic where Superman proves, to his chagrin, that he is in fact more powerful than a locomotive. The highlight of the issue, without question, is Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood’s “Bat Boy and Rubin” parody from 1953 – the same era and creative team that gave us the original “Superduperman” (which is also included as a “digital extra” in this issue). Then, just last month, issue #44 of the magazine gave us a mostly-Superman issue, with reprints of their parodies of the original Superman, Superman Returns, and Supergirl (which I didn’t read before). There are also a few new Superman strips, the best of which is “The Further Adventures of That Guy From the Cover of Action Comics #1.” The gag there is simply photoshopping “that guy” into various other comic book covers, but it’s actually pretty inventive. Or maybe I’ve just been desensitized.
This last issue that I’m going to cover this week makes a few things very clear, though. “Petit’s Law of Satire: Satire is funnier in broad strokes than in specifics,” is absolutely true. The funniest strips and shorts are invariably the ones that aren’t trying to zero in on a retelling of a specific story, but just use the tropes and concepts of what they’re mocking to do something original.
Look at the greats: Mel Brooks and the Zuckers did their greatest work parodying an entire genre like sci-fi (Spaceballs), westerns (Blazing Saddles) and disaster movies (Airplane). Even Young Frankenstein wasn’t a retelling of the original story, but a new one that built upon it. The same holds true in literature. Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy parodies sci-fi, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld uses fantasy tropes as a launchpad to parody any number of topics. If Adams had just tried to do a retelling of Star Trek or Pratchett had tried to copy Lord of the Rings, I doubt we’d still be reading either of their works today. Does anyone remember Star Wreck, a series of very Trek-specific parody books that came out in the 80s and 90s? No, just me? Thought so.
What’s more, I think that something else that’s pretty true has become evident to me: parody is also funnier if it’s loving. (Satire does NOT have to be loving, but parody and satire aren’t exactly the same thing.) The funniest things I’ve read this week were “Superduperman” and John Byrne’s “Superbman Vs. the Fantastical Four,” neither of which gave me the impression that they were being made by someone who disliked their target. They loved them enough, in fact, to have a deeper understanding of them that made the humor ring true. The worst of the Mad parodies, on the other hand, are nasty, mean-spirited hit pieces that seem to have been written by somebody who resents the original material for the crime of existing. Similarly, the best SNL sketches are the earlier ones. The ones with Margot Kidder and Christopher Reeve both show some affection, and the “Superman’s Funeral” bit feels like there’s actual love behind it.
I’m sorry, folks – of all the theme weeks I planned out for this year, I was terribly unprepared how much of a dud this one would turn out to be. There have to be better Superman parodies out there that I’m not aware of. If you know of any, please let me know. I’d be happy to return to this topic in the future, as soon as we stumble across some parodies that are actually…you know…funny.
Last Sunday I was out to lunch with the family (as we often do on Sundays) when I got an alert from the AMC Theater app on my phone. “Yo Blake!” the app said (I paraphrase). “We’re showing Minions: The Rise of Gru on Wednesday! Tickets are only three bucks for AMC Stubbs members! You want in?”
I looked over at my son, he and I both off from school for the summer, and said, “Hey Eddie, do you want to see a Minions movie on Wednesday?”
He did.
He posed like at least three of the characters in this image.
I’ve written before – extensively – about my love affair with movies, and more importantly, with movie theaters. Yeah, ticket prices have gone up. Yeah, the theaters can sometimes be filled with rude, obnoxious people. Yeah, I can’t pause the movie to go to the bathroom. Yeah, they show an obscene number of commercials before the movie actually starts. (I do not include movie trailers in the “obscene number of commercials.” I adore movie trailers – they can show as many of those as they want.) And if the movie I want to see isn’t one that I can bring a seven-year-old to watch, that means my wife and I have to arrange for somebody to babysit him, an operation that at times seems to require a level of planning and strategy that could have won the American revolution. But despite all of the problems associated with a visit to the theater, I still wholeheartedly believe that the best way to watch a movie is to do it in a darkened theater with an excited crowd.
Pictured: optimum movie excitement.
When we took Eddie for his first movie theater experience a little more than two years ago (I wrote about it here) I was nervous. I didn’t know if he would like it. Would it be too loud for him? Would he lose interest? Could he possibly stay in his seat that long? Even though we were taking him to see Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, would the movie itself simply fail to engage him? I imagine these are fairly common worries when a parent takes a kid to the movies for the first time, but I also know that I personally have a deeper love for the movie theater experience than the average parent does in this day and age. It was a real concern for me, that the kid I love so dang much would turn out to hate an EXPERIENCE I love so dang much. But I was delighted that the boy enjoyed himself. In the two years since then, we’ve brought him to the movies several times, and only once did we wind up having to leave because he couldn’t sit still. (I do not blame him – he was five years old and it was before his doctor and we managed to find an ADHD medication that really worked for him.) Last summer was the first time he actually ASKED us to take him to a specific movie, and while I may not have necessarily chosen The Garfield Movie as one of my all-too-rare cinematic excursions these days, he wanted to go to the movies! I was happy to oblige.
This summer – this month, in fact – is going to be the big one. The first time he sees a movie that’s not targeted precisely at kids. Next Friday Erin and I are taking him to see Superman. And again, I have felt pangs of nerves concerning this. Yeah, we’ve gone to the movies with him several times, but almost all of them have been animated movies. And the only one that WASN’T – Sonic the Hedgehog 3 – has a cast made up of 75 percent CGI characters, and TWO villains played by Jim Carrey, who is essentially a Looney Tune in human form. (Aside: It’s a shame they never made a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with him in it – it could have been a masterpiece.)
In my younger days, when I had the time to go to the movies two or three times in a week, it was a different experience. My friends and I would arrive at a theater sometimes not even knowing what we were going to see – we’d look at the schedule when we arrived and pick a film that was starting soon. Then after the first movie ended, we’d go out and look at the schedule and do it again. We would each pay for our tickets independent of one another, then go into the theater and sit wherever we wanted. We would get snacks, popcorn, or drinks, and that was the limit of what we could spend money on in a movie theater.
When I brought Eddie to the theater on Wednesday, I had purchased our tickets three days prior. I knew specifically that we were to be seated in Row G, seats 7 and 8. And nearly half the lobby had been given up to merchandise: not just candy and snacks, but toys, collectibles, t-shirts, and the ubiquitous popcorn buckets and drink cups that have become almost required for any tentpole film. I have mixed feelings about a lot of these changes. I don’t really object to the merchandise sales – if it’s good enough for concerts to help keep touring bands afloat, there’s nothing wrong with a movie theater selling stuff to remind people of their favorite films, after all. But like any sort of collectible market, it’s spun off a rather distasteful secondary market of people who swoop in without any particular love of a movie, buy up all the merch they can, and sell it on eBay at a markup. I hate flippers, people who take advantage of the care and affection others have for a film, a comic book, a creator. Although I didn’t have any intention of spending the eighty bucks AMC wants for a Galactus Popcorn Bucket when Fantastic Four comes out, it rankles me that if I WANTED to it would likely be sold out before I could get there, but I could score one for $200 online.
“I AM GALACTUS! DEVOURER OF SNACKS!”
As for the assigned seating – I actually like this particular innovation. It takes off a little of the pressure of having to get to a movie early to get a good seat, which can sometimes be invaluable when you’re toting a little chaos gremlin like a child with you. Sure, there was a fun sense of camaraderie that developed in those days when we would stand in line for hours waiting to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (let’s not debate the movie itself, guys, I’m talking about the fun of spending the day amongst like minded fans, which is undeniable). But if I’m being perfectly frank, I’m not 20 years old anymore. The idea of standing in any line for two or three hours makes my spinal column start to itch in anticipation of the aches that are soon to come.
So I don’t mind at all knowing that I can buy tickets ahead of time (as I’ve already done for Superman) and be guaranteed a seat in a relatively low row, right in the middle, where I like it. The only problem with purchasing tickets ahead of time is when you’re getting a large group together, trying to coordinate it so that you all buy tickets in the same row. Either you all have to have a text chain to ensure everyone is buying the right tickets in the right place before some stranger winds up between you and your girlfriend, or you have to assign one person to buy the tickets all at once and then you pay that person back. In either case, it’s an added degree of hassle. But considering how long it’s been since I went to a movie with anybody other than my wife and son, it hasn’t been an issue for me in quite some time.
But man, I love these summer bargain matinees. It’s not a new thing, mind you. Movie theaters have long pulled kids’ movies from past years back into theaters for mid-week screenings in the summer: hits from the past few years that are now easily available on a billion streaming services. Perhaps movies that the kids in question have already seen a dozen times. Movies that you don’t actually have to see in a theater, if all you want is to see the movie. That doesn’t matter to them. They get to go to the movies. Eddie loves the Minions. He’s seen all four Despicable Me movies as well as the first Minions film. As it happens, the only movie in the Minionverse he HADN’T watched yet was the second Minions film, The Rise of Gru, which also just happened to be the one AMC told me was coming back to the screen this week. So I bought tickets for the two of us for just $3 each and took him down there. And if you ask him right now, he could tell you all the things he loved about going.
He loves that it’s “like nighttime” in the theater, even in the middle of the day.
He loves getting to pick out snacks (it was Gummy Bears this time) and share a bucket of popcorn with his dad.
He gets CRAZY excited when Superman shows up on the screen. (There wasn’t, technically, a Superman movie trailer on Wednesday, but we DID see commercials which used clips from Superman to promote Toyota, Dairy Queen, Progressive Insurance, and Milk-Bone Dog Biscuits, and that made Eddie happy).
He liked the end of the movie, which happens at a Chinese New Year parade, complete with an impressive CGI fireworks display – and this kid loves fireworks.
And ever since that one “bad movie” – the time when he couldn’t handle it and we had to leave – he gets very proud of himself for making it through a movie. He was beaming and smiling as we walked out of The Rise of Gru, terribly pleased that he’s grown up enough to go through a whole movie without having to leave. As we walked through the lobby towards the parking lot, he waved back and said, “Bye, AMC! See you next week for Superman!”
You’re ding-dang right, we will.
This doesn’t happen when we watch a movie at home. And I’ll never get tired of it.
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’s all a-tingle waiting for next Friday, and if Eddie wants to, he wants to take him to see Fantastic Four: First Steps, too.
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.]
This column is NOT going to be about Superman, although I’m going to mention him briefly here in the beginning.
If you follow this blog all week and not just on Fridays when I throw Geek Punditry at you, you’ve probably noticed my Year of Superman posts on Wednesdays. I started the Year of Superman because December was rough and I thought immersing myself in Superman would make 2025 a great year. And I’m enjoying the hell out of having a taste of Superman every day. But aside from that, 2025 has kind of been an asshole, and I’m starting to take it personally. But now it’s May, and by the time you read this my semester will be over and I’ll be off for the summer. So the question is, can I find enough stuff – in addition to the new Superman Unlimited comic, Mark Waid taking over Action Comics, new series for Supergirl and Krypto, a miniseries all about different shades of Kryptonite, and (oh yeah) the new Superman movie – to have summer start to make up for a craptacular first half of the year?
This legit might not be enough.
Because the truth is, Superman isn’t the ONLY thing I’m excited for. In fact, there are several things coming out this summer that I’m very excited about and I can’t wait to read, watch, and otherwise explore. So today I’m going to talk about some of the things I’m MOST excited for, things that I hope will perk me up even more, and bring the year around.
Vin Diesel is still pissed they didn’t cast him for this one on general principle.
Superman is my favorite superhero (that’s probably the last time I’ll mention him), but most people who know me know that my #2 is Benjamin J. Grimm, the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, and I am very excited to see him hit the screen in a couple of months. But for all the comic book greatness, there hasn’t really been a Fantastic Four MOVIE that has worked. There was a movie in the 90s made only to retain the movie rights with no intention of ever seeing wide release, and ironically, despite its shoestring budget it had some earnestness to it…but it looked like it was made on a shoestring. In the 00s, we got a pair of movies that were…okay. And in 2015 there was a movie that should never again be mentioned in polite society. After four previous tries, director Matt Shakman’s Fantastic Four: First Steps finally looks like a movie that’s going to give us an FF that delivers.
There have been two trailers so far (well, a teaser and a full trailer), trailers that have shown us a Fantastic Four in a very 60s sci-fi pop environment, something that’s absolutely perfect for these characters. The thing to remember about the Fantastic Four is that – although they are technically superheroes – the flavor is less like the Justice League and more similar to the classic sci-fi heroes like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. The Fantastic Four are explorers, inventors, and innovators before anything else, and the previous iterations have never quite captured that. In this movie, we’ve got costumes that actually look like space suits. Characters who are clearly known and beloved around the world. And as this is, in fact, part of the MCU’s “Multiverse Saga,” these are the characters who fit that concept the most.
This is a picture that says “suit us up, we’re going to space.”
I know a lot of fans who keep trying to turn the FF Vs. Superman (okay I lied) into some sort of competition – they both come out in July, so who’s movie is going to do better? What an incredibly short-sighted notion. It drives me crazy when people insist on taking sides. You can love two things, IT’S ALLOWED, and I’ve got no doubt that Clark would be in the front row when First Steps premieres on July 15, just two weeks after his movie comes out.
But I don’t get to the movie theaters that often these days – if I actually make it twice in July, it will be a record in a post-Eddie world. So I’m going to be turning to the television for some of this entertainment serotonin as well, and thank goodness, there are two shows returning to the airwaves this ye– wait, they’re on streaming services, not over the air. It doesn’t matter, the principle applies anyway. First up, coming to Disney+ in a few weeks, is a revival of the classic animated series Phineas and Ferb. The original series, which ended nearly ten years ago, was one of the funniest cartoons of the century so far, and like all brilliant ideas, it’s remarkably simple. Two step-brothers spend their summer vacation building absurdly improbable contraptions and inventions as their sister desperately tries and fails to get their mother to catch them in the act while, simultaneously, their pet platypus who is really a secret agent has to stop a mad scientist in his constant efforts to take over the Tri-State area. What could be simpler?
Legally, summer belongs to these guys, but I’m pretty sure they’ll let me borrow it if I ask nicely and promise to fill up the tank before I give it back.
In all honesty, though, the original series was delightful, charming, and unfailingly funny. When Disney announced they were bringing it back, I was unashamedly thrilled. The same creators are back, along with most of the original cast, and they’re picking it back up again the next summer. More adventures, more music, more -inators, and there’s even a preview available of the first few minutes right now. If watching these few minutes of greatness doesn’t get you excited for the return, then you clearly just hate joy. June 5 is the target date for this one.
My one question – my ONLY question – is about the Danville school system. 104 days of summer vacation? ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR? I’ve never even made it to SEVENTY.
The other show I’m super psyched for this week is the return of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with a two-episode drop on July 17. While the modern versions of Trek have been hit or miss for a lot of fans, Strange New Worlds is perhaps the most universally acclaimed of the series. Set aboard the original Enterprise in the years before James T. Kirk became the captain, Strange New Worlds has the most classically “Trek” feeling of any of the other live-action shows of the modern era, living up to its name with exploration of planets and civilizations we’ve never seen before. It also is far more successful than some of these other versions at attacking the sort of high-minded sci-fi concepts the original brought in without being too heavy-handed or on-the-nose like certain others I could mention.
Thank God, a Star Trek that remembers what “allegory” means again.
The wait for a new season of Strange New Worlds hasn’t been as long as the wait for Phineas and Ferb – a mere two years instead of ten – but Strange New Worlds’s last season ended on a cliffhanger. The wait was exacerbated by the Hollywood writers and actors going on strike in 2023, and now we’re finally going to find out what happened after Captain Pike and the crew of the Enterprise…
…uh…
…crap, it’s been two years, guys. I guess I really need to watch the last season again.
But you know, that’s okay. Summer is just starting, and I’ll need stuff to make it worthwhile. So I’ll re-watch the first two seasons of Strange New Worlds. And I’ll watch classic Phineas and Ferb. And I’ll read more Fantastic Four and Superman comics (hell with it). Because these are the things that make me happy, and when the world does whatever it can to make the summer seem long, hot, and unbearable, these are the things I’ll be turning to, making it a little bit better.
Oh, and also the love of family and friends and all that stuff.
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. If you’ve got more summer greatness that you’re looking forward to, let him know. He’s actually quite concerned that the stuff he’s listed isn’t going to be enough to fill the tank.
As I approach the end of January, having finished up my first theme week, I find myself in a bit of a pickle in regards to what Superman content I want to read today. I’m not ready to kick off another theme week yet, but as I look over my (prodigious) list, I find that most of the stuff I’m particularly excited for is all suited for one of the theme weeks I’ve got planned for later in the year. So what, then, should I read on this random Wednesday? Never let it be said that I make things easy on myself. After some brief deliberation, I just scroll through the offerings on DC Universe Infinite until I settle, fairly randomly, on my first read for the week.
Wed., Jan. 29
Comics:Legends of the DC Universe #39, Superman Vs. Meshi #1
Notes: DC once published a title called Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, which featured a different creative team on every story arc telling stories that were not necessarily constrained by any particular continuity. There were some amazing stories told in this series, and they eventually spun the idea off into Legends of the DC Universe, a series which not only switched out the creative team with every story, but also the main character. This issue, a one-off by Danny Fingeroth and Randy Green, is called “Sole Survivor of Earth.”
Which, let’s face it, sounds like a depressing idea even if you WERE that sole survivor.
The issue begins with a very familiar scene – a scientist and his wife concerned about an upcoming disaster that could mean the end of life on their planet, a fear made even more prescient due to their infant son. But we aren’t on Krypton this time – we’re in Washington state. Superman, meanwhile, is at the Fortress of Solitude, building a memorial to his Kryptonian parents, when he gets a notification of a disturbance at the Earth’s core. The scientist, Dr. Balboa, has been studying the tremors and trying to stabilize them, only to accidentally trigger a sequence that could destroy the Earth. In desperation, he and his wife drop their son into a spaceship and blast him to another inhabited system. Why not? It worked for the last guy.
Except in this case, the “last guy” manages to save the world, stopping the destruction Balboa’s experiments caused but sapping a lot of his power anyway. When he tracks down Dr. Balboa, he learns about the child in the rocket and sets off to space, despite his own power loss, to find him.
This is a good issue. It’s never going to make a boxed set of the Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told (that reminds me, I’ve got to find and read my copy of The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told), but it’s a fun story that nicely turns the traditional Superman origin story backwards. There’s not a lot of tension, to be honest, because the outcome is never in any doubt. Nobody thinks that Balboa is actually going to blow up the Earth, and there’s no such thing as an infant in danger once Superman finds out that they need help. Their survival is pretty much guaranteed. But that doesn’t make it any less fun to look at things from a different point of view once in a while.
I also, somewhat randomly, went back and read Superman Vs. Meshi #1. This manga series was a part of a line of books that DC co-produced with Kodansha Comics. Joker: One Operation Joker was another, and the third, Batman: Justice Buster is still running. I always considered this the most bizarre of the three, though, because…well… it’s about Superman eating at Japanese chain restaurants.
You will believe a man can fry…rice. I’m sorry, that was terrible.
No. Really. That’s what this entire series is about. And it ran for 23 issues.
In this first issue, having been turned down by Lois for a lunch date, Clark whips over to Japan to indulge at an all-you-can eat yakitori joint. (For people, like myself, who have no idea what yakitori is, I Googled it – chicken skewers.) There’s a brief fight scene – a flashback as he remembers the villain he fought who on the day he first discovered the restaurant, but the bulk of the story is him ordering various meat skewers and gushing over how delicious they are. The writer, Satoshi Miyagawa, lovingly describes the food in a way that makes you wonder whether you’re reading a superhero comic book or a restaurant review, and at one point he’s so “overwhelmed by flavor” that the food literally activates his heat vision. He even goes on about how well the yakitori pairs with the soda he ordered.
Perhaps the weirdest thing is that none of this ever feels out of character. Would Superman pop over to Japan just for lunch? Yeah, I think he would. Would he have a running inner monologue about how good the food is and how it all comes together? People forget that Clark Kent is a writer, and like most writers I know, he probably has an inner monologue that never shuts the hell up. The only difference is that this is a scene that they would almost never write in an American comic because it’s too important that we get to the scene where he has to beat the crap out of Terra-Man or something.
This book is so WEIRD. But for some reason, I like it.
Thur., Jan. 30
TV Episodes: Superman and Lois Season 2, Ep. 1, “What Lies Beneath”
The “V” season, apparently.
Notes: The second season starts off right where season one ended – the rescue of Natasha Irons from John Henry’s original universe…but in her universe, this Natasha is the daughter of Lois Lane, something that causes issues for the both of them. Meanwhile, both Jordan and Jonathan are facing issues with their respective girlfriends, and the teenagers acting like teenagers have Lois and Clark butting heads with each other.
In my notes on the season one finale, I mentioned that this show was cut from a different cloth than other CW shows. As season two begins, though, it feels a bit more CW than ever. The clash between Lois and Clark over Jonathan’s behavior feels really forced – Lois is taking her frustrations out on Clark and he’s not acting with the degree of empathy one would expect from Superman. I’m actually starting to feel a little vibe from the Lois Lane miniseries that I read last week, where Lois acted inexplicably angry towards everyone. Eventually, she explains this as anger over her own mother leaving her family when she was young, and thinking she’s like that because she doesn’t feel anything motherly for Natasha…who, we have to stress here, is NOT her daughter. It doesn’t really make that much sense.
Natasha, meanwhile, is behaving even more irrational, taking her frustrations out on her father and somehow blaming him for the fact that the people who were her friends in her home dimension don’t know her here. Huh? In her case, at least, the frustration is more understandable, but the show skips over showing us why Natasha can’t seem to fit in. There’s an undercurrent of rage to this episode that’s baffling me.
Superheroes? Oh yeah, there’s a little of that. Superman learns that Sam Lane’s replacement at the DOD is using the X-Kryptonite recovered in season one to create his own little army, complete with his shield, which Superman isn’t happy about. I sense this is going to be the undercurrent for this season.
Comics: Superman: Lex Luthor Special #1, DC’s Lex and the City #1
I mean, not so’s you would notice, Lex.
Notes: I also read a couple of this weeks’ new comics today, one of which is more relevant than the others. The Superman: Lex Luthor Special is continuing the ongoing storyline from the main Superman comic and, in fact, is written by regular writer Joshua Williamson. In last fall’s DC All In Special, Darkseid was (seemingly) killed, but a new, alternate universe was forged, infused by Darkseid’s negative energy, as opposed to the more hopeful environment of the main DCU. In this issue, Mr. Terrific is trying to crack the secret of this other world (which readers will know is the setting of DC’s Absolute Superman and other titles), but the inherent darkness is too much. There’s only one man brilliant enough to understand this but with a mind that won’t be corrupted by it…unfortunately, Lex Luthor has had amnesia for some time, and has been trying to live down the dark deeds of his previous self.
This is hardly the first time we’ve seen Lex try to be a good guy, but much like we’ve seen Lois become Superwoman before, this series has been handling it well. It’s such a tight balancing act with Lex, as we see there is a goodness in him, but it’s usually overshadowed by his darker, more selfish nature. This issue seems to promise that story is moving forward now, with a final revelation that’s going to change things. I’m more interested in the flashbacks to Lex’s childhood that help paint who he really is. Good issue.
This week also gave us DC’s annual Valentine’s Day special this year titled DC’s Lex and the City. Luthor is the star of the title story in this anthology, in which a gossip columnist gets tangled in his web. It seems a little farfetched that Lex would be smitten with this woman, to be honest, but despite that It’s an okay story. It’s an okay anthology, with some stories being better than others, as is usually the case. If you’re planning to read this, the Mr. Freeze story is the prize of the bunch. Really, though, the main reason I’m even taking any notes about it is to point out that whoever is giving titles to DC’s holiday specials deserves a raise. Lex and the City is hilarious, and it goes right up there with the Christmas special Grifter Got Run Over By a Reindeer and the Halloween haunt Are You Afraid of Darkseid?, among others. I love it.
Fri., Jan. 31st
Comics: Day of the Krypton Man from Superman Vol. 2 #41, Adventures of Superman #464, Action Comics #651, Superman Vol. 2 #42, Adventures of Superman #465, Action Comics #652; Return of the Krypton Man from Superman: The Man of Steel #1, Superman Vol. 2 #57, Adventures of Superman #480, Action Comics #667
It’s so embarrassing when they mix up your suits at the cleaners.
Notes: Today I (again, randomly) decided to read the two storylines that most contributed to the creation of the Eradicator, one of the best concepts of the late 80s before he got a little watered down (as happens to a lot of great villains, am I right Venom, Carnage, Sabretooth, the Joker, and Doomsday?) I considered starting with the storyline that where he first showed up, but the Exile arc is pretty long and I’ve already decided to restrict myself to only two long story arcs this year, lest I have no room for anything else. So here’s the short version: while exiled in space, Superman found a Kryptonian artifact called the Eradicator which he brought back to Earth, where it constructed a citadel in the antarctic, which eventually became this continuity’s version of the Fortress of Solitude. As Day of the Krypton Man begins Draaga, an alien Superman encountered during that arc, is coming to Earth to get his revenge on the big guy. At the same time, that cosmic bruiser Lobo is heading to Earth to prove how tough HE is by throwing down with Supes. Also, Maxima of Almerac is once again zipping to Metropolis to convince Superman to become her mate. And if that wasn’t enough, when they get to Earth they all find a Superman that is becoming cold and aloof, ignoring his family and friends and approaching his task as Earth’s protector with stark logic rather than his trademark compassion. He’s firing people from his new job as editor at Newstime magazine, forgetting Lana Lang’s birthday, and spurning Lois when she tries to ask him out. This is, simply, neither the Superman nor the Clark Kent any of us know.
The Eradicator’s doing, as it turns out. The device is manipulating Superman, transforming him both mentally and physically into the “ideal” Kryptonian. His encounters with the three alien menaces all end in ways that would be out of character for Superman when he’s in his right mind, the fight with Draaga even transporting the top half of the Statue of Liberty to the moon. (Professor Hamilton’s fault – he was trying to help, but if Superman was himself he’d never have allowed the fight to happen at such a popular tourist attraction in the first place.) Eventually he makes the decision to abandon both of his identities, Superman AND Clark Kent, and live merely as Kal-El, a Kryptonian trying to bring Krypton to Earth.
I love the ending of this one. What ultimately snaps him out of it and allows him to break free of the Eradicator’s influence is concern for his parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. When the Eradicator endangers the two of them, his reprogramming of Clark’s brain starts to break down and the real Superman comes back. Over the nearly 90 years that this character has existed, the degree to which he identifies as a Kryptonian has always varied wildly from one incarnation to another. This is the way I see him: he’s a human, a resident of the planet Earth, who happens to have a Kryptonian heritage. And when the two clash, it’s Clark Kent that wins out over Kal-El.
At the end of this story, Superman balls up the Eradicator and chucks it into the sun, thinking that’ll be the end of it, but about 15 months (and one engagement) later, he shows up again in the appropriately-titled Return of the Krypton Man storyline. The Eradicator returns, this time in a humanoid form, having used his time in the sun to begin the process of transforming it into a red dwarf to mimic the sun of Krypton. The next step in his plan is to terraform Earth itself into a replica of his dead planet. I may have mentioned a few weeks ago how tired I am of the “Kryptonian villain tries to turn Earth into Krypton” trope…well, I first read this story when it was originally published, long BEFORE I got tired of it, so it doesn’t bother me quite as much.
“And take THAT!”
Although this one is four issues instead of six, each of those four issues was giant-sized, so the page count works out about the same. Despite that, this one feels like a much quicker read. This storyline started with Superman: The Man of Steel #1, the book which gave the “Triangle Era” of Superman four titles and essentially making his adventures a weekly rather than a bunch of semi-related monthlies. With this storyline the creative teams were slightly shuffled as well. The Superman/Eradicator fight is ongoing, beginning at the end of Man of Steel #1 and continuing more or less uninterrupted throughout the other three issues, while a number of subplots are established or developed throughout the four issues. Among them we’ve got Perry White, on leave from the Daily Planet, trying to save his marriage; his temporary replacement laying off 10 percent of the newspaper staff, including Jimmy Olsen; Cat Grant finding herself the target of harassment from her boss while Jose Delgado (aka Gangbuster) looks after her son; and a terrorist group called Cerberus making attacks across Metropolis. All of these stories play out and develop as Superman and the Eradicator fight on Earth, off in space, and back to Earth again.
Superman wins, of course, with the help of Emil Hamilton. This is a decent story that eventually turns out to be setup for the Death and Return of Superman story, which I’ll probably be getting to in just a couple of weeks. I do wonder, though, if they were already planning that when this storyline was put to press or if it was just one of those moments of serendipity.
Sat., Feb. 1
TV Episode: Superman and Lois Season 2, Ep. 2, “The Ties That Bind”, Ep. 3, “The Thing in the Mines”, Ep. 4, “The Inverse Method”
Notes: It’s been a rough 24 hours for me, and I have to confess, I wasn’t certain I’d get around to Superman today. But I’ve gone this far and I don’t want to break the streak so early in the year, so I’m jumping into the next few episodes of Superman and Lois.
There’s a LOT going on in these few episodes. Clark is being plagued by strange visions and emotional outbursts that are making him dangerous. Trying to figure out what’s going on, he discovers that his newly-found brother has somehow regained his powers. Lois is being targeted by a podcast host who’s getting sources of hers from an old story about a cult to recant their testimonies to her. Jonathan suspects a kid at school is taking some sort of super-steroid. Jordan finds out his girlfriend had a fling at camp. Lana decides to run for mayor. John Henry and Natasha try to settle in on the Kent farm. This is the Dagwood Sandwich of CW superhero shows.
Not to say that it’s bad. There’s a lot of stuff going on, but the show doesn’t really have difficulty keeping everything straight. And it’s likely that, before the season is over, everything will come together like an episode of Seinfeld. It’s just weird to have so many different plots running at the same time, moving in and out of each other as the focus switches around the various characters involved.
The Lois plot, involving the cult, is the one that’s bothering me at the moment, mostly because once again we see Lucy Lane turning up as a punching bag. I don’t think we’ve seen Lucy before in this continuity (someone correct me if I’m wrong) but I immediately think of all the stuff that’s happened to the character in the comics over the years. She was blind for a while, she was a villain for a while, she gets dumped by Jimmy Olsen, she marries Ron Troupe and has a baby, but if I’m being perfectly honest I haven’t got the foggiest notion if that kid even still exists in the current DC Universe. And here she is, a former cult member who seems to be disavowing the sister that tried to save her. This isn’t really a knock on the show, it’s just telling a story, but I really dislike the trope of making a character the universe’s punching bag. (I know I’ve said it before, but it’s the reason I don’t enjoy most modern Spider-Man comics anymore.) I guess I’m just saying that I wish Lucy would get a break. Everybody needs one once in a while.
Nice little surprise towards the end of episode three, though: Superman battles the “Thing in the Mines” from the title, a powerful enemy in a suit of armor. When Superman cracks the armor open, though, he finds a distorted version of his own face staring back at him. Is this their version of Bizarro? And have they found a way to do the character that actually makes him menacing? Unlike Lucy, Bizarro is a character I can take either way, either as the ultra-powerful menace OR as the misunderstood giant who’s not actually out to HURT anyone, but is dangerous just by virtue of his power. If he’s a pure bad guy this time around, I’m okay with that.
Last thing I’ll point out is the increased focus on Natasha. I like how she’s turning around. She felt kind of whiny in that first episode this season, but she’s come back and shows a lot of wit and intelligence in these. I’m willing to chalk that first appearance to growing pains as the writers tried to figure out the character. I’m already liking her much more.
Episode four (I’m writing this as I watch and not going back to edit, just for clarity) seems to prove that I’m right. The Mine Guy looks about as Bizarro as you could get in live-action without getting goofy.
Sun., Feb. 2
Comic: DC Speechless #3
Silent but delightful.
Notes:DC Speechless was a short digital-first series by Gustavo Duarte. Each issue placed a different character in a wordless, comedic adventure of some sort. In this issue, Superman is forced to face down a couple of giant bugs attacking not only Metropolis, but also his wardrobe.
These silent issues are always a neat challenge for storytellers. Getting everything across through pictures only is a mark of a great artist, and Duarte is really good at telling a funny story. I enjoyed this quickie for what it is – simple, a little silly, and beautifully drawn.
Mon., Feb. 3
Comic Book: Superman #123
A psychologist could have a field day with this.
Notes: It’s time for a little more Silver Age silliness. Before the first appearance of Kara Zor-El, the Supergirl we all know and love, there was a proto “Super-Girl” that first appeared in this comic. An archeologist gives Jimmy Olsen a souvenir – an ancient totem that can ostensibly grant three wishes once a century. Jimmy, having earlier overheard Superman tell Lois that he could only ever marry a “super girl” who wouldn’t be in danger from his lifestyle, decides to wish up a prospective wife for him. This, friends, is why he’s called “Superman’s pal.”
Of course, things go wrong as the girl keeps blundering into things and screwing them up, because that’s apparently what super powered women do, until she finally sacrifices herself to save Superman from some Kryptonite. The funniest part is the panel where Jimmy uses the totem to wish her away before she dies, where he chokes and says, “We’ll never forget you,” then everbody promptly proceeded to never mention her again, not even a few months later when Superman met his cousin from Krypton who looked virtually identical to the girl that his best friend conjured up or him to marry. Wild time.
Ah, but the fun wasn’t over. Jimmy got THREE wishes from the totem, remember, so this is a full-length three-parter! In the second part of the story some crooks read the Daily Planet story outlining how Jimmy used the totem to create Super-Girl, then break into his apartment to steal the magic artifact and use it to take away Superman’s powers. That’s it. Not for powers of their own. Not to, I dunno, kill Superman. Not even just for a mountain of money so that the criminals don’t have to crime anymore. The underworld of Metropolis was really short-sighted at the time, weren’t they? Anyway, Superman and Jimmy use some stunts to mimic his powers and make the crooks think the wish didn’t worry so they’ll retrieve the totem, at which point he shows up, captures them, and has Jimmy cancel the wish.
With just one wish left, Jimmy wants to make it a great one to make up for how the first two screwed up. (Jimmy, for heaven’s sake, just wish for a winning lottery ticket like a normal person.) This time he decides it’d be swell if he could send Superman back in time to meet his parents, but since he doesn’t want Superman to hear him MAKING his wish, he types it up. And apparently he’s as bad at spelling as Lois legendarily is, because he accidentally types “I wish for Superman to MATE his parents on Krypton.” Supes is whisked back in time to an era before his parents married. One might expect him to have to play Cupid here, based on how Jimmy’s typo was phrased, but Jor-El and Lara are already a couple. They just can’t get married yet because they’re accused of being part of a terrorist plot to overthrow the government and they wind up needing their son’s help to clear their names. This includes tricking a villain into accidentally creating Kryptonite, which seems kind of counter to the whole “no killing” thing, but I digress.
It’s another case of insane Silver Age storytelling – all three parts of this “novel” (which they loved to call these stories on the cover) are predicated on wild misunderstandings, incredible cases of jumping to conclusions, and just plain bafflingly stupid choices on the parts of the heroes and villains alike. I’m a teacher, and I’m constantly telling my students that it isn’t fair to use the standards of the modern day to judge the citizens of an earlier time, but stories like this make it pretty dang tempting sometimes.
Tues., Feb. 4
Short:The Bulleteers
Notes: After a very random and, frankly, pretty harsh week for me outside of the Superman blogosphere, I decided to close things off with another of the classic Fleischer shorts. Next up is The Bulleteers from 1942. In this one, the bad guys (you can tell they’re bad guys because they’re all wearing the same cowl with a point in the front but no mask) create a bullet-shaped rocket car they intend to use to rob the Metropolis treasury.
The very faces of evil.
I do not understand the motivations of villains like these. They want money? They have invented a flying car that turns into a giant bullet. They can afford to construct a secret base in the core of a mountain, complete with turning one side of that mountain into a hidden drawbridge-style door. I don’t know exactly what the overhead on any of this stuff is, but it seems to me that patents on this kind of technology alone have to be far more than the city of Metropolis could possibly be able to cough up.
Anyway, after the Bulleteers crash into the Treasury building, which conveniently seems to keep all of the money in the city in one enormous vault, Superman gets his hand on it and rips it apart in midair, saving the day. Good for him.
Tangent: This isn’t directly Superman-related, but I think it’s something worth addressing. Today, the trailer for the new Marvel movie Fantastic Four: First Steps was released. You may not know this, but my love for the Fantastic Four is almost – not quite, but ALMOST – up there with my love of Superman. The Thing is my second-favorite character in all of comics, and I firmly believe he’s the best thing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby ever did. I saw the trailer and I enjoyed it immensely. I even made an incredibly dorky TikTok video about it, in my own inimitable style.
The reason I’m bringing it up here, though, is because in some of the Superman groups I follow, I saw people posting the video and saying they don’t think it will be competition for James Gunn’s Superman. And I have to ask this question, guys.
Why does it NEED to be?
Seriously, where is it written that every film has to be a direct rival of every other? Or every studio? Is it because they come out in the same month, Superman on July 11th and Fantastic Four two weeks later on the 25th? Or is it just because Marvel and DC fans have some sort of deep-seated need in their very souls to somehow prove their dominance over the other?
It makes no sense to me. I am looking forward to Superman. Hell, I decided to devote this entire YEAR to how much I’m looking forward to it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to look forward to Fantastic Four. It doesn’t mean if I like one, I am not allowed to like the other. It’s said that a rising tide raises all ships, and I sincerely believe that – a great superhero movie will make people thirst for MORE great superhero movies, and hopefully the studios will learn the right lessons from one another about what MAKES a great superhero movie. Judging by the trailers from these two films, I feel as though they have.
And if there’s no other reason to ask why they have to be opposed to one another, just ask yourself this: would Superman want it that way? Would he want to be rivals? Or would he be in the front row of the cinema on July 25th, cheering for the adventures of Marvel’s first family with the rest of us.
I rather suspect that would be the case, don’t you?
Here we are, my friends, 100 Fridays later. In the first week of January 2023, I was thinking of how much I missed the days of writing for Comixtreme and recording my podcast, and I wanted to find a regular way to get my voice back out there in the world. How could I do it? I asked myself. How can I reach out and gift humanity with my invaluable thoughts, insights,and trademark witticisms, in this era where the world clearly needs me more than ever before?
Then I remembered I had a blog that I was barely using, and maybe it would be a nice little challenge for me to find something – once a week, just find SOMETHING – that I liked enough to write a few paragraphs about.
And of course, it has become the global phenomenon and world-altering sensation you see before you today.
As I approached the 100th installment of the column hundreds of voracious readers have called “on the internet somewhere,” I tried really hard to decide what to write about. What, in the enormous global marketplace of popular culture that I had made my home, was worthy of dedicating the landmark 100th column to? Star Trek? Stephen King? Superman? Bluey? I feel like I’ve kind of talked about those various topics…well, “extensively” seems in some ways to be too mild a term, but we’ll roll with that right now. No, I needed something a little bit different.
Then I remembered an idea I’d had some time ago, but that I had pushed aside. Something I thought needed to percolate a little more. Something that the world would HAVE to sit up and take notice of. And it seemed perfect. So this week, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to explain to you what exactly I would do if I were in charge of comic books.
You all know I’m a comic book geek, and I have been since I was a small child. Not to discount my love of movies, TV, or novels…I’m a fan of storytelling in general. But comics are in many ways my medium of choice. I’m a regular Wednesday visitor at my local comic shop, I know all the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and I can tell you – in order – every publisher that has ever had the Star Trek license. (Gold Key, Marvel, DC, Malibu but only Deep Space Nine, back to Marvel, Wildstorm – which was by then a DC imprint – and currently IDW. Sorry, ladies. I’m taken.)
As much as I love comic books, though, there are certain practices in the industry that I’m not a fan of, certain things that I think could be done better. In this era, where there’s so much competition for the attention of an audience coming from virtually every region of our culture, it’s imperative that comic book publishers find ways to draw in new readers and retain existing ones. Ways to make the sometimes complex mythologies of American comic books a little less of a roadblock, and make the space a little more welcoming. For the 100th Geek Punditry, guys, here are some rules that would be implemented if I were King of Comics.
Numbering
As most people know, comic book series are numbered, and for many decades the numbering convention was simple. You started with issue #1, proceeded to #2, and so forth. You just put the numbers in order. Seemed like a simple idea. But at some point things started to get a little more convoluted. After World War II, many of the existing superhero comics had been cancelled. But in the 50s, looking for a new hit after public favor turned against things like horror comics, DC decided to bring back some of their defunct characters with a new incarnation. A new Flash was created – Barry Allen – and after a few tryout issues in the pages of Showcase, they gave him his own title. Barry took over the numbering of the Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick, and his first issue was #104. Here’s where it gets confusing: they then did they same thing with Green Lantern. But in this case the new guy – Hal Jordan – did NOT pick up from Alan Scott’s title with issue #39, but instead got his own first issue, Green Lantern Vol. 2 #1.
Make it make sense.
It would not be the last time this happened. In the 80s they gave new first issues to Superman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash, and in those cases, the lapse in publishing between the previous volume and the new was not nearly as long as it had been in the silver age. Then in the 90s, Marvel did it with four of their flagship titles at once – Avengers, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and Captain America – as part of a new initiative where the titles were essentially farmed out to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld and set in a different world than the “regular” Marvel Universe. When the books were brought back to the “regular” Universe a year later, they were given a THIRD first issue…and then all hell broke loose.
Since then, virtually every comic book published by Marvel or DC Comics has been canceled and relaunched with a new first issue, most of them multiple times. Batman, at last count, is on its conservative third volume. Superman is at six. Punisher – if I’m counting correctly – has recently concluded volume FOURTEEN. The longest running comic book at either publisher that has not been restarted at least ONCE? Looney Tunes, which recently celebrated issue #281. (It should be noted, though, that even this is the fourth volume of Looney Tunes, having been published by various other companies before Warner Bros. wholly absorbed DC Comics.)
Winner of the gold medal in “not starting over for no reason.”
The conventional wisdom seems to be that a new first issue will bring in higher sales numbers than issue #482, and that might be true. But increasingly, it has proven that a tenth issue #7 does NOT have appreciably more readers than issue #489 would have. In other words, the restarting game gives a short-term sales bump, but does nothing to retain readers, which is what the goal should be.
Anyway, to appease fans (such as myself) who prefer maintaining the original numbering rather than the constant restarts, Marvel and DC have begun featuring “legacy numbers” on the covers of their books – in other words, what issue would this be had the book never been restarted? Which is why the recent Superman Vol. 6 #20 also bears a little symbol indicating that the “Legacy Number” of this issue is #863.
Only long-time Superman fans will understand what I mean when I say “at least it’s in a triangle.”
Confused yet?
Making it even more confusing is the way that many series have changed titles over the years, and trying to figure out which is which. Thor started as Journey Into Mystery, one of Marvel’s assorted sci-fi titles. But after he made his debut, Thor quickly took over the comic book, and the title was changed from Journey into Mystery to The Mighty Thor with issue #126 When calculating the Thor legacy numbers, the original JIM numbers seem to count, but JIM itself has been re-started several times over the years. Journey Into Mystery Vol. 2 does NOT count, apparently, as it ran concurrently with Mighty Thor. And let’s not forget that the current series carrying the Legacy Number is actually called Immortal Thor, which has the same legacy numbers as did previous volumes like Mighty Thor, King Thor, Thor: God of Thunder, or the (at last count) six different series that have just been called Thor.
According to the legacy numbers, these are all issues of the same title.
Then there’s the fact that it’s inconsistently applied, especially at DC. Superman (on Volume 6), Batman (Volume 3), Flash (Volume 6), and Green Arrow (Volume 7)all have Legacy Numbers on their covers. Nightwing (Volume 4), Harley Quinn (Volume 4), and Titans (Volume 4)do not, and I can see no particular reason why.
It’s an absolute mess. True story: when the Captain Marvel movie came out in 2018 my wife – who is a geek but not as big a geek as I am – was interested in reading some of the comics to learn more about the character, but after several attempts to figure out which volume to start with, she gave up. If the plan here is to get MORE readers, it’s failing miserably.
So how do we fix this problem?
Here’s what I would make the standard rule: first of all, the Legacy Numbers should be mandatory for any series that continues the title or star of a previous series. The editors would need to get together right away, decide which books count towards the “legacy” and then stick with it from then on.
Second, I would have them stop with the constant relaunches. If a character is returning after ten years away…okay, a new first issue might be justified. If we’re going back to issue #1 because there’s a new inker, it’s not. It’s become a common practice to start over with a new first issue any time there’s a change of creative team, especially when there’s a new writer. It’s too much. So here’s the rule: there must be a minimum of three years since the previous volume before a new first issue is justified. If the final issue of Captain Dudeman was #47 and it came out eighteen months ago, then you either have to start with Captain Dudeman #48 or you have to change the title.
That second stipulation, I think, would start to get used very frequently. One of the reasons that the renumbering has gotten so rampant is that every time a new writer is brought onto a series they want to make their own mark – which is fair. But in so doing, they often want a clean slate, a sort of “back-to-basics” approach for the character, which has resulted in several books in the last few years where the first issue shows the heroes in a wholly different situation than they were in when the previous volume ended, and then it’s not until several issues later that the reasons for the change are actually explained. Sometimes it works (Fantastic Four and Daredevil both did this effectively in their most recent relaunches) and sometimes it doesn’t (the current run of Amazing Spider-Man should be studied by scholars as a cautionary example of what NEVER to do).
I don’t want to take away a writer’s ability to tell the stories they way they see fit, that’s not what this is about. But if the plan is to tell a totally different story, changing the title of the series is a good way to reduce confusion. Telling somebody “You have to read Green Lantern – but not that one, or that one, or that one…” is a recipe for the kind of bafflement that drove my wife away. But saying “Green Lantern: Emerald Champions is a great series” is a HELL of a lot easier for the casual reader to comprehend. You can keep the legacy numbers that way, but having a subtitle or supertitle (that’s when you preface the main title with something else, such as Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man) makes it a lot easier to differentiate one run from another.
What this really boils down to is that I never again want to see a comic book called Fantastic Four #1. When I was a kid, owning that book would have been a gold mine. Now I’ve got six different books called that, and it’s ridiculous.
Cover Confusion
The way the comics industry handles its covers is also an issue, and there are two primary problems I want to tackle. First, let’s talk about pin-up covers. This isn’t as bad as it once was, but for a while there in the 00s and 10s, there was an awful trend of comic books having generic pictures of the main character or characters on the cover, something that may be a fabulous piece of art but doesn’t tell the reader anything about the story between the pages. The argument at the time, I believe, was that they wanted every issue to be an accessible first issue for a new reader. While that may be a noble goal, that doesn’t make a damned bit of sense. Anybody who picks up a comic because they like the picture of Spider-Man on the cover is going to have a hard time keeping up if they open up the comic and run into “Revenge of the Return of the Colonoscopy of the Sinister Six: Part Five of Seventeen.” Congratulations – you sold that one issue…but they aren’t coming back.
“Wow, great cover!” “Thanks!” “What’s the story about?” “What the hell is a story?”
Pin-up art is fine, but a great comic book cover should tell a story. Think about some of the all-time most memorable covers: Amazing Spider-Man #129 features the webspinner dangling in front of the faces of his friends, agonizing over which of them was going to die in that issue. Green Lantern (Vol. 3) #49 shows a power-mad Hal Jordan brandishing a set of rings stolen from his fallen comrades, a look of pure chaos in his eyes. Wolverine: Blood Hunt #2 shows the ol’ Canucklehead on a motorcycle with a French vampire babe being chased by a mob of vampire stormtroopers while fleeing an explosion that is also being escaped by an overhead passenger jet.
If just that description isn’t enough to make you pick up the book and look inside, I don’t think you actually like comic books.
Now THAT’S art.
These days it’s better, although many variant covers still have what I call the Pinup Problem. So here’s going to be the rule for this one: cover art MUST be relevant to the story inside. That doesn’t mean it has to be a depiction of an actual SCENE from the story. Thematic covers, like the above Amazing Spider-Man #129, are fine. Covers promising a twist or a mystery, anything like that is just dandy, provided it has SOMETHING to do with the story. The only exceptions, the only time a simple pin-up is acceptable, are when it’s the first issue of a series (and presumably a good jumping-on point anyway), if it’s the introduction of a new character, or for certain milestone issues, such as an issue number that ends in a double zero.
Now that we’ve cleaned THAT little problem up, let’s talk about the REAL issue: variant covers.
There’s debate over when, exactly, variant covers became a thing, although most people seem to agree that the first mainstream example of printing copies of the same book with two different covers was probably Man of Steel #1 in 1986, the John Byrne relaunch of the entire Superman mythos. That was an instance where it was novel and interesting and fun. People made an effort to buy both covers to make their collection “complete.” It was really cool.
You could get with this, or — alternatively — hear me out on this one…you could get with THAT.
But like so many good things, it got overdone. It didn’t happen overnight, mind you. It was quite some time before having two covers became a regular practice, and even longer before it reached the heights it has today. Even as late as ten years ago, having multiple covers was still more of an exception than a rule. But the rules have changed and HOW.
If you pick up any random issue of a new comic from a mainstream publisher today, odds are that you will have between two and five covers to choose from. First issues are frequently more. For the first issue of this summer’s Uncanny X-Men relaunch, League of Comic Geeks (the website I use to track my own collection) lists 32 separate cover variants. And even THAT is chump change compared to the most recent relaunch of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from IDW Publishing, which currently stands at –
Are you sitting down? Are you sitting down in the sewer?
If you are the sort of person who feels the need to get every available cover and you’re a Ninja Turtles fan, I hope you can still afford your insulin.
I’M SAYING IT’S KIND OF A LOT.
The reason they do this, of course, is because people continue to BUY them. And when there are stories every other day about some comic shop or another closing down or a publisher being unable to pay its creators, I can’t fault them for looking for ways to increase revenue. But the problem is that this simply bleeds money out of the existing fans until they get fed up and walk away entirely. And like the renumbering problem, this doesn’t do anything to actually get NEW fans into reading, which is what the long-term goal should be.
This is not to say that I hate variants in their entirety. I rather like them when they do something CLEVER with them, such as what I call “theme” months, where all the variants have a different trend. For instance, DC recently did a run of variants covers that were mock-ups of the packaging of the old Super Powers action figures. (I should point out that other publishers, including Marvel, have been doing action figure variants for a long time, but this was the first time I recall them being used as a monthly theme.) In October, there were a series of variants by artist Kelley Jones showing the DC heroes as kids in Halloween costumes. Marvel did a series not long ago of variant “homage” covers based on some of their old vampire comics, and another run that showed their characters facing off against Godzilla. That kind of stuff doesn’t really bother me, except for the fact that they add to the preposterous number of variants on the shelf.
I don’t know art, but I know what I hate. And I don’t hate this.
I also really like the “sketch” covers that have become popular in recent years. These are blank covers printed on a different cardstock that fans can use to draw their own artwork or have an artist draw something for them. They’re popular for commissions at comic book conventions and events like Free Comic Book Day, and I don’t think the blanks really cause a lot of confusion on the racks compared to the 30-plus X-Men covers.
The worst part, I think, is that so many of these “variants” are barely worthy of being considered a separate cover. You commission a piece of art from an artist and you’ve got a cover. Print it with no logo or trade dress and it’s a “virgin” variant. Print it without colors and it’s a “sketch” variant. Print it with metallic ink and it’s a “foil” variant. You can crank out a dozen different covers with one sketch and people will continue to buy them. It’s insane.
I recognize that there are a lot of people who LIKE these variants, even if they aren’t MY thing. So in my capacity as the benevolent overlord of comic books, I don’t want to ban them entirely. Here are the restrictions I’ll put in place:
A standard issue of a comic book shall have no more than three covers: the “main” cover, a variant cover, and a “theme” variant for that month.
First issues will be limited to five covers, including the theme cover.
Milestone issues, such as anniversaries, will be allowed extra variants consisting of no more than one-tenth of the number of issues the book has run. For instance, the 50th issue will be allowed 5 variants, the 100th issue will be allowed 10 variants, and so on.
Retailer-exclusive variants will not count against the total. These are covers commissioned by – and only available from – specific retailers, such as an individual comic shop, store chain, or online retailer.
There will be no restrictions on “sketch” covers, nor will they count against the number of variants allowed.
See? I can be as flexible as the next guy, provided the next guy isn’t Plastic Man.
Anyway, there we have it, guys. Comic books are fixed!
Well…okay, maybe not. There are still plenty of other things in the world of my favorite medium that need to be addressed. Other problems to solve, other fires to put out…but I’ve already gone on for nearly 3500 words, which is pretty massive for one of these Geek Punditry columns. So I think it’s time to put this topic aside, at least for now.
But that’s okay. After all, I’ve got to save something to write about when Geek Punditry #200 rolls around.
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. His goal to take over all of social media after it has started to slide towards irrelevance continues.
Blake M. Petit 