Another roundup of reviews, starting with some of the comics that were dropped on Superman Day back on April 18. I didn’t bother reviewing the reprint books (many of which I’ve covered before during the Year of Superman), but there are a couple with new material that I wanted to showcase, both featuring Supergirl. Let’s dig in!
Supergirl: The World (Superman Day Special Edition) Title: (Story 1) Supergirl Y La Maliciosa, (Story 2) The Extraction Writer/Artist: (Story 1) Aneke Writer: (Story 2) Yann Krehl Artist: (Story 2) Marie Sann Main Cover: Joelle Jones
DC’s line of The World anthologies is an interesting concept. Round up comic book creators from different parts of…well…it’s the title. And then have them do a story about that book’s star set in their home country. The first three featured Batman, the Joker, and Superman (which I reviewed last year), and this summer it’s going to be Kara’s turn. This Superman Day special previews two of the stories from that book.
In the first story, by Aneke, Supergirl visits an art museum in Spain and overhears a conversation about a mountain featured in one of the paintings, one that is supposedly the home of a witch. Curious, she sets out to visit the mountain, “La Maliciosa,” and finds a climber with a bit of a secret. It’s a simple story that kind of has a Bronze Age feel to it, echoing the kind of things that we’d get from the Supergirl comics of the era. The art is really quite lovely. Whether it was intentional or not, Aneke invokes the same feel as Bilquis Evely’s work on Woman of Tomorrow, which is nicely appropriate. The second story is “The Extraction,” by Yann Krehl and Marie Sann. In this one, after the Justice League liberates a group of aliens that were being held captive and subject to experiments in Germany, Supergirl is sent undercover to try to locate one lost extraterrestrial that managed to escape before its comrades were freed. It’s a fun story, with gorgeous art by Sann preventing it from feeling as dark as the premise would suggest. The pages look like art from a modern Disney movie more than your average superhero comic, and that works exceptionally well.
No doubt when the full anthology drops on June 2, there will be a mixture of hits and misses. These two are a nice appetizer, and I’m looking forward to reading the book.
Supergirl’s Zoo-Per Heroes: Krypto’s Big Break (Superman Day Special Edition) Writer, Artist, AND Cover: Rob Justus
Last year cartoonist Rob Justus brought us the early reader’s graphic novel Superman’s Good Guy Gang, featuring Hawkgirl and Guy Gardner, who you may have heard were in a movie with Big Blue last summer. This year he comes back with a new book that also seems poised to whet the appetite of the kiddies anticipating this year’s cinematic adventure. An accident somehow transfers the powers of the Justice League to a group of zoo animals, and it’s up to Supergirl and Krypto to fix things. The book also includes a preview of the sequel to Good Guy Gang, Follow the Leader, in which the one character who was bafflingly missing from last year’s book joins the fun. I like Justus’s sensibility a lot. It reminds me of Art Baltazar and Franco’s Tiny Titans, albeit lighter on the inside jokes for longtime readers. But these two previews promise a pair of silly, fun books that seem like they’ll be perfect for the superhero fan who’s just learning to read.
Superman Unlimited #12 Title: Besides Myself (a Reign of the Superboys tie-in) Writer: Dan Slott Artist: Lucas Meyer Main Cover: Taurin Clarke
Last issue Jon Kent met Master Txyn, a more malevolent imp than our usual pal Mxyzptlk, whose taunting of the young Kryptonian prompted him to take on a new identity, Tomorrow Man. But before the sewing needle on his costume had time to cool Jon found a whole new complication dropping in his lap: a time-displaced version of himself from one of the most traumatic parts of his past.
This issue, he decides to take young Jon to Lois, who just happens to be getting a visit from Batman and Robin (checking in on her in Superman’s continued absence). Adult-Jon decide to keep his own identity a secret, although Slott at least lampshades the fact that he’s got an uphill battle trying to keep a secret in a room that includes the world’s greatest detective, the world’s greatest investigative journalist, and his own best friend. Meanwhile, the El Cadero storyline moves along a little big as well, with the Kryptonite-rich nation announcing plans to use it as an energy source. However, more nefarious purposes seem to be in the works as well, and an escapee of an experiment makes a new friend.
Part of me almost wishes that this book was setting up a new status quo for the Superman titles. I’ve never liked the fact that we lost the child Jonathan in lieu of a teenage version (you may have heard me mention this once or twice), and the idea of having Young Jon living with Lois and Clark again while still having Grown-Up Jon doing his thing wouldn’t be the worst compromise. However, the Jon we have in this issue isn’t the one that I miss. This is a kid who has already undergone some horrific stuff, and grappling to deal with it looks like it’s going to be part of the character arc here.
Slott has a little fun with the other characters here as well. Damian Wayne’s highly paranoid nature comes right into play, as it probably should, and one of my favorite supporting characters in the whole Superman family shows up in the B-plot, making for a delightfully absurd exchange right out of a Looney Tunes short.
I’m really not sure where Slott is going with this story, but I’m interested in it, which hopefully comes across as the compliment that it’s intended as.
Superman #37 Title: Prime Time Part Two (a Reign of the Superboys tie-in) Writer: Joshua Williamson Artist: Dan Mora Main Cover: Dan Mora
The Superboy-Prime saga continues this issue. Having settled in to his new life in Metropolis, Prime seems to be doing okay. He’s helping people, beating villains, and despite his tardiness he’s even making ground at his new job at the comic book store. But his past hangs over his head, with the Justice League tracking him down when he goes for a simple dinner with the Kents in Smallville. An encounter in Gotham City doesn’t go much better. What’s a reformed mass murderer with fourth wall awareness to do?
I’m really quite surprised to see this issue pull back from the “main” storyline for what is mostly 20 pages of character building…surprised, but not at all disappointed. Williamson’s re-casting of Prime into someone trying to atone for his past is working surprisingly well. What’s more, he’s even carving out a fairly unique place for the character but putting together bits and pieces of various other characters. Sure, he’s got Superman’s powers, but he’s got an awareness of his comic book origins that’s playing with in a different way than characters like Deadpool or She-Hulk. And now it seems like Williamson is adding on a healthy dollop of what can only be termed “the ol’ Parker luck.” Somehow, all of this is coming together to make for a really entertaining character.
Dan Mora’s work is as phenomenal as ever, and he’s got a LOT going on in this issue. Despite the fact that the action is relatively low, he still manages to deliver a great (if brief) fight scene in the sewers of Gotham and some really excellent “acting” on the faces of the characters, particularly Jonathan and Martha Kent. All of the Superman books are solid right now, but I would never have believed a year ago that a title starring Superboy-Prime would be the gem of the line.
Absolute Superman #19 Title: Red Steel in the Hour of Chaos (Reign of the Superman Part Two) Writer: Jason Aaron Artist: Rafa Sandoval Main Cover: Rafa Sandoval
Last issue Superman, Lois, and a newcomer with a hammer named John Henry Irons broke into Lazarus only to find a captive who’s been off the board for millennia: Teth-Adam, alias King Shazam. This issue is a lot of fight and a little backstory, filling in some of the history of this Absolute Universe. It’s a good reminder that this isn’t just a “What If?” scenario, where there’s a single point of divergence that separates this universe from the DCU that we know, but rather a universe that was shaped in the image of Darkseid from its very inception.
To me, to a guy whose favorite Superman side-character is Steel, I’m really happy to see their version of him show up. Like the mainstream version, we’re presented with a man blessed with a great mind and great compassion, cursed to live in a world where it seems like neither of those things are valued. Like Superman himself, he seems to be the kind of person that’s clinging to hope in this world where such a thing is more of a liability than an asset.
Sandoval’s artwork is sharp as heck. Any time you pit a Kryptonian against somebody with the power of Shazam, you’re going to have to be ready to bring the scale that such a face-off demands, and Sandoval does a great job really selling this as a conflict that reaches a global scale.
Every time I think I can’t find enough good things to say about this series, I find more.
Adventures of Superman: House of El #8 Title: The Wizard and the Queen Writer: Phillip Kennedy Johnson Artist: Cian Tormey Main Cover: Scott Godlewski
As Superman heads to Tamaran, he finds yet another descendant (because apparently in this future the sentient population of the universe is roughly 57 percent House of El) coming under fire. Meanwhile, Ronan and Rowan Kent face off against Pyrrhos the Red and learn the shocking (yawn) truth about his origins.
I’d hoped that the return of Rowan Kent would help this series pick up, as she’s been the element that I’ve been most interested in so far, but alas. We don’t explore her corner of the universe, but rather delve back into all of the Els that are running around, apparently reproducing like Kardashians on a bad day. Johnson just keeps throwing more and more things at the reader, and it’s not sticking. The story is trying to be Dune and it’s trying to be Game of Thrones and there’s a healthy chunk taken from Arthurian Legend, and when you put it all together you’ve got something that’s just not working for me.
There are a thousand characters running around here and, despite the fact that it seems like they’re all related to Superman, I don’t care enough about any of them to keep track of who they are. When this series is over, I’m going to have to go back and try reading the whole thing in one go. I’m just not getting into it, and I don’t know if that’s because there’s not enough to keep my interest alive from one month to the next or if it’s really just as big a mess as it feels like.
DC X Sonic the Hedgehog: Metal Legion #1 Title: Metal Legion Part One Writer: Ian Flynn Artist: Adam Bryce Thomas Main Cover: Pablo M. Collar
The first DC/Sonic crossover last year was a lot of silly fun, so I wasn’t surprised when this sequel was announced. I was a little surprised, though, when the book jumps right into a massive status quo change: portals have appeared all over the globe, seemingly stable portals that connect the Justice League’s Earth to Sonic’s world. With travel between the two worlds now simple and safe, the heroes of both universes reconnect with their old friends. Of course, the more paranoid amongst them (Batman and Shadow, obviously) are in the business of investigating the portals, finding clues that point to some old foes.
Most of this issue is just showing the heroes bouncing back and forth between worlds and partnering up with the friends they made last time: Flash and Sonic having a race, Amy joining Wonder Woman and the rest of the Amazons in battle against Hades, and Knuckles and Superman introducing Supergirl and Krypto to someone they know will get along with them famously. I like the fact that the story seems to be expanding in scope this time as well. Besides Supergirl and Krypto, it seems like this time the Titans are joining in on the fun, and the last page promises to bring in more of the DC’s less savory elements as well. This is one of those first issues that feels more prologue than actual beginning, with only the scene in Gotham and the last few pages where we meet our villains actually seeming to progress the plot. That doesn’t bother me much, but it does suggest that this is a story that’s been paced for the inevitable collected edition.
New Titans #34 Title: The Future is Tomorrow Part Two Writer: Tate Brombal Artist: Sami Basri Main Cover: Taurin Clarke
I gave the first issue for this new direction of Titans a lot of grace, because it was a new writer that was just beginning to set up a new path for the team. This issue we’re starting to see the shape a little bit, and while there are things that I like, others have me skeptical.
Part One of this story showed up the classic Titans line-up trapped in some sort of time bubble, bouncing around to different parts of their history and seemingly unaware of what was going on. It wasn’t until the last-page incursion of a new group of younger heroes (including Jonathan Kent, which is why I’m including it in “Superman Stuff”) that the spell started to crack. This issue we learn more: the pocket reality the Titans have been existing in was created by an aftermath of what happened in the whole DC KO extravaganza, and the newbies are apparently young heroes the Titans have had their eyes on as potential recruits.
All of that is perfectly fine. What’s bothering me here is more the way these new Titans are introduced. We get a few pages of narration explaining that these folks were selected because they’re the FUTURE and they’re gonna be SO AWESOME and dear GOD, do I hate that. The old writing adage of “show, don’t tell” isn’t always true – sometimes, you’ve GOTTA tell to get the point across. But when it comes to convincing the reader how great a character is, telling is perhaps the worst thing you can do. If a writer starts expounding upon how wonderful a character is without actually doing the work of crafting a story that allows them to demonstrate their awesomeness, that’s an immediate turn-off to me. And often, it’s a black mark against the character that takes some writing rehab to escape.
That said, it’s a relatively short sequence in this issue that bothers me. If it was just a one-off thing and the rest of the story works, I can be forgiving of it. It’ll all come down to what else Brombal does in this arc, I think, as to whether this newest iteration of the Titans is going to be able to stand on its own.
Justice League Unlimited #18 Title: Aftermath Part Two Writer: Mark Waid Artist: Clayton Henry Main Cover: Dan Mora
Superman is still missing, and does not appear in this issue. In fact, as far as actual members of the family go, only Supergirl makes a (one-panel) appearance. But the thumbprint of our boy blue is all over this issue, so I really want to talk about it, and it’s my blog, so nyeah.
In the aftermath (hence the title) of DC KO, the participants were each given a glimpse of the future, including a dire warning about an upcoming battle that will make their struggle against Darkseid pale in comparison. In recognition of the threat, something that goes beyond normal concepts of “good” and “evil,” the Justice League is implementing an amnesty program, inviting supervillains who promise to be on their best behavior to join them – including Lex Luthor. Lex being Lex, of course, he’s got his own agenda, but at the very least it doesn’t seem to run COUNTER to the whole “saving the entirety of creation” thing the Justice League has going on, so we’re gonna cross our fingers for the moment.
It’s not the first time, by any means, that we’ve seen the toy with Lex playing hero, but they’ve always found different ways to go about it, which I rather enjoy. Waid also has done good work selecting which characters to feature here (Giganta is another one who joins the amnesty program, and one for whom rehabilitation seems far more possible than, say, the Joker). And they even get to show us what failsafes they’ve put in place to make sure the bad guys trying to break good remain on their best behavior. In fact, Waid is really embracing the “unlimited” part of the title here, expanding the cast even beyond its already-impressive roster and running multiple storylines that all weave in and out of each other. In addition to the Lex Luthor story, we also get to see a mission to Oa comprised of Guy Gardner, Mr. Terrific, Hawkgirl, and Metamorpho (wait…where have I seen THAT group together before?), as well as the beginning of the time-travel mission starring J’onn J’onzz, Mary Marvel, and Booster Gold that Waid is exploring over in the pages of Action Comics.
While the larger “All In” storyline is playing out across the DC Universe, this title really feels like the core of the whole thing, and I certainly hope anybody who’s following this is paying attention.
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. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
The end of the school year is approaching. Tomorrow is the last day for my 12th grade students, and my 10th graders will be wrapping it all up in about two weeks. So I’ve been busy tying up all the loose ends that come with being a teacher in May. That in mind, looking for something to read, I kind of drifted to stories of the younger heroes, and I decided this week to check in on the first issue of Superboy from 1949.
In the first story, “The Man Who Could See Tomorrow” (written by Don C. Cameron with art by John Sikela), Superboy encounters Brandar the Great, a mystic whose jewel stolen from an idol gives him the power to peer into the future. The story actually begins, though, in Metropolis, with an adult Clark Kent ducking out on Lois Lane after a movie date to check in on nearby gunfire. Superman finds an injured police officer and rushes him to a hospital where he encounters a nurse, Margo Griffiths, whom he knew when they were kids in Smallville. His mind drifts back to the day they each gave a report on what they wanted to be when they grew up (Margo and Clark each got their wishes, by the way), a day that ended with a party at Margo’s house. There they saw the mystic Brandar, who predicted that some day Clark Kent would be world famous (and you can’t tell him that he was wrong), but that Margo would “cease to exist” on her 21st birthday.
Of course, these distant predictions wouldn’t prove much, so Brandar uses his magic jewel to make three predictions for the next day: “1. Dr. Jekyll will turn into Mr. Hyde! 2. The first lady of the town will lose her crown! 3. East will meet west at sundown!” Clark brushes it off until the next day, when the newspaper reports that the mayor, whom everyone had thought was an honest man, had stolen funds from the town and fled. Worried about the rest of the predictions, Superboy checks in on a ship called the Queen Felice, also known as the “first lady” of the town. The crooked mayor nearly crushes the ship with a drawbridge in an effort to escape, but Superboy saves the Queen Felice and brings the mayor to justice.
With one prediction fulfilled and the second thwarted only by Superboy’s intervention, he seeks out Brandar to find the secret of his jewel. Brandar confesses that he stole the jewel and was given a prediction that he would meet an untimely death because of it. In fear, he leaves the jewel and runs into the street, where he’s promptly hit by a car and killed. That’s the thing about predictions, friends, if you try to prevent them from coming true you usually cause their fulfillment. Dude should have read MacBeth.
Superboy, meanwhile, finds his third prediction about to come true – an eastbound and westbound train on a collision course! He knocks down enough of a forest to build a second track and diverts one of them just in time. Then, returning Brandar’s jewel to its point of origin, the flashback ends. In the “present,” Superman reflects on the final prediction that hasn’t been fulfilled – that Margo would “cease to exist” when she turns 21, and she must be almost that age. He, of course, helps her figure that one out as well, giving her a happy ending. It begs the question, though – if Clark and Margo were in the same class, does that mean that the Superman of 1949 was only 20 or 21 years old? That seems awfully young for him to be an established reporter at the Daily Planet, much less have such an established career as Superman.
Of course, continuity wasn’t that big a deal back in the day, and people got out in the world younger than they do now. Still, it feels so odd that the writer would lock him in to such a tender age when all it would have taken to make it more plausible is to set the prediction for the day Margo turned THIRTY-one. Even a later year in her mid-twenties would have made more sense.
The second story, “The Boy Vandals” (written by Edmond Hamilton with art by Ed Dobrotka), abandons the flashback framing sequence and just takes us to times past to view a quick and unremarkable story about Superboy teaching a young gang the consequences of vandalism. The interesting thing here is that this is the story where I realized, at this point, they hadn’t actually established Superboy’s home town as Smallville yet. In fact, this story seems to imply that young Clark Kent was a student in a school in Metropolis. It always interests me when we see these older stories playing fast and loose with details that seem concrete to us, but that wouldn’t be codified until much later.
This issue also gives us “Superboy Meets Mighty Boy,” a William Woolfolk/George Roussos joint, in which our favorite boy of tomorrow seems to meet his match. A farmboy named Reuben is recruited for a scientific experiment to try to transform him into the strongest boy in the world. Reluctant at first, he goes along with it at the urging of his parents, whose farm is suffering and who could use the windfall if it works. The experiment is a success, granting Reuben remarkable power, and the recruiters challenge Superboy to a contest. At the circus, the two of them compete in various feats of strength, and as impressive as Superboy’s powers are, Mighty Boy outclasses him time and again. Returning to his tent, Mighty Boy overhears the promoters saying that the experiment was a fake and that they rigged all of the feats of strength to make it seem as though he had powers, fooling even Mighty Boy himself, as part of a criminal scheme. Superboy saves him just in time and together, they put the crooks under glass. Superboy brings Reuben back home and helps his family get their farm back on its feet, because that’s just what Superboy does. This was my favorite of the three stories in this one.
I haven’t read a lot of Super-stories from this particular era, that Post World War II time before the silliness of the Silver Age really kicked into gear. I enjoyed these stories, though, showing an interesting kind of prototype of the original Superboy that I’m far more familiar with. I’ll need to look out more stories from this period in the future.
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. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
The final Reign of the Superboys story kicks off, and much more. Let’s see what’s been going on in the Superman comics over the last few weeks.
Superman #36 Title: Prime Time Part One (A Reign of the Superboys tie-in) Writer: Joshua Williamson Art: Dan Mora Main Cover: Dan Mora
I am not surprised that this was my favorite of the four Reign of the Superboys launch issues. Not that the other there weren’t good, but this is the one that feels the most immediate and important to the larger story of the DC Universe, and I’m just so dang excited about what they’re doing overall right now that it gives this issue some extra cred in my book.
Superman, of course, has been missing since the end of DC KO, but that doesn’t mean that Earth is defenseless. Superboy-Prime, his and Lois’s unlikely partner over the last several issues, is planning to stick around with the intention of proving to the heroes of the DC Universe that he’s reformed. Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as all that.
Joshua Williamson is doing some really clever stuff with the character here. It would be so easy to sweep his past under the rug and just reset him as an anti-hero. It’s been done in the past with characters like Harley Quinn, whose history of (y’know) murdering people with the Joker is rarely, if ever, referenced anymore. Williamson, however, is not only acknowledging the things that Prime did in stories like Infinite Crisis, but using that as fuel for his story. The heroes of the Justice League remember the things he did, and what’s more, they’re aware of the fact that he’s from a universe in which they’re all fictional characters, and he’s READ their comic books, and THEREFORE KNOWS ALL THEIR SECRETS. And understandably, they’re uncomfortable having him around.
The solution seems to be to have Lois take him under her wing, and the dynamic they’re structuring between these two characters is really fascinating. One might expect Williamson to have her take on a motherly role, but Prime is probably about college age here, and is intent on proving himself to be a responsible adult. (The way he does it, by the way, is perfectly in keeping both with his character and with the role he’s in, of someone in his early 20s who isn’t nearly as grown up as he thinks he is.) Lois, then, is moved into a role that feels more like a big sister. She’s looking out for him, she’s taking care of him to the best of her ability, but she recognizes the fact that he’s old enough to make his own choices and all she can really do is give him advice.
Since he brought Prime back into this book, Williamson has been leaning on Prime’s fourth wall-breaking abilities. I like the direction we’re going in here as well. Rather than just having him directly address the reader like Deadpool or She-Hulk (back in the glorious John Byrne run), he seems to be taking the approach that Prime is simply AWARE of the fact that he’s in a comic book, and he uses that knowledge of the medium and history of the DC Universe as a guidepost. It’s not like he can look into a camera as if he were on The Office, after all, although there are a couple of panels where it feels like he’s getting close.
Like every other Reign of the Superboys issue, this one ends with a last-page reveal of a character who presumably will be instrumental to the story. Unlike the other three, though, this one was actually KEPT A SECRET! Is that even POSSIBLE? The character in question didn’t appear on the cover – not even a variant – and to the best of my knowledge their presence wasn’t even leaked to the comic book media ahead of time. I didn’t think we lived in a universe where such a thing was possible anymore, but there ya go. The last page not only surprised me, but satisfied me. I’m excited to see where it goes next.
It’s gotten hard to talk about Dan Mora’s artwork, because I feel like I just kind of repeat myself every time. But in my defense, there are only so many ways to say, “Damn, this guy is REALLY good.” The book looks fantastic, and I love the way that Prime looks very much like a younger version of our Clark Kent, something he even points out to Lois as a bit of an obstacle when it comes to establishing his own secret identity.
Now that all four of the Reign storylines have begun, I feel very good about this direction. Each of the four titles has a very clear identity and is telling a different story. And if they remain separate stories, each staying in their own lane and unified only by the fact that the star is someone who uses (or once used) the Superboy moniker, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’ll be a nice little change of pace.
At least until Big Blue himself comes back.
Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #50 Titles: Dream Team (Story #1), Sturm Und Drang (Story #2) Writer: Mark Waid Art: Dan Mora (Story #1), Adrian Gutierrez (Story #2) Main Cover: Dan Mora
Isn’t it odd how rare it is for a comic book to make it to issue #50 these days? Seems like the Big Two are out to reboot every series any time there’s a new writer. Of course, this book has ALSO held on to Mark Waid for 50 issues, which is ALSO a feat in this day and age. And look – his original partner Dan Mora is back for the main story in this issue, after spending time with the Justice League, Superman’s solo title, and an unexpected trip to Cybertron. Ah, it’s a grand time to be a fan of World’s Finest.
In “Dream Team,” Dr. Destiny has placed the entire world into a dreamstate – everyone except for Superman, Batman, and Zatanna, who were off-Earth at the time. Zatanna sends the World’s Finest team into Destiny’s Dreamstone to track him down.
As a one-off story, it’s pretty solid. The thrust of the issue is Superman and Batman bouncing around in one another’s subconscious, getting glimpses of the sort of things that they dream about. Batman, for instance, learns that Superman is a little envious of his car, whereas Clark gently chastises Bruce for his infatuation with a certain feline femme fatale. Ultimately, the story is just sort of an excuse for the two characters to examine one another, who they are, and the nature of their friendship. After such a long time where the characters were NOT friends (thanks, Frank Miller), followed by a long period where they vacillated between being uneasy allies and people who trust one another but don’t necessarily LIKE each other, the way this title has made their friendship a vital part of their respective characters again is a beautiful thing.
Adrian Gutierrez is back for this issue’s second story, “Sturm Und Drang.” A little boasting pits the World’s…second finest teams against one another, when Robin and Jimmy Olsen set out to prove that they’re more competent than Supergirl and Batgirl in a race to find a lost Egyptian artifact.
As glorious as it was to have Mora back on the title, this is actually the better of the two stories. The dive into the subconscious is fine, and it’s executed very well, but there’s just so much joy to be had in the petty rivalry between the guys and girls in this issue. As Jimmy and Robin are curtailed by their own overconfidence, we watch the more “mature” girls conflict as they realize their differing opinions of Jimmy and Robin. But despite how silly the story can be, we do get to see these characters in action in a positive way. Jimmy, despite all his bravado, proves that he actually DOES have reporting skills, whereas Batgirl reminds us that Barbara Gordon is a librarian first, and librarians are the most powerful magic creatures in the world.
If you’re looking for a big, world-shattering anniversary issue, you may be a little disappointed. The two stories in this issue are both self-contained and neither of them seem to be laying out any sequel hooks. But they’re both a joy to read and do what they do exceptionally well.
Bizarro: Year None #1 Title: The Planet Writers: Eric Carrasco & Kevin Smith Art: Nick Pitarra Main Cover: Nick Pitarra
Kevin Smith’s return to the DC Universe begins here, with co-writer Eric Carrasco hopefully keeping him from falling too far behind schedule, with the most unique take on Bizarro I’ve ever seen. Set at a point in the past where Jimmy is the Daily Planet coffee boy, straining to get Perry White to take a chance on him as an actual journalist, the two of them get swept up in something beyond their comprehension. An experiment with a duplication ray has spawned a whole different universe, and the entity in charge of that world is bringing Jimmy and Perry in to help him get some things off the ground.
Smith and Carrasco have cherry-picked pieces of Bizarro lore such as the “duplicator ray” and the square Bizarroworld, but for the most part this could almost feel like an “Absolute” version of the character. It’s a total departure from the Bizarro that we’re used to, and although there are glimpses of classic Bizarro, it’s almost impossible to tell where this is going. I very much like the fact that Jimmy and Perry are the real protagonists of this story, each of them approaching the situation – and reporting in general, really – from the opposite ends of the spectrum. There’s something to be said in here about the state of journalism in the modern day, and Smith and Carrasco say it in an amusing way.
Nick Pitarra is an interesting choice. His lines and anatomy are somewhat evocative of Frank Quitely, which helps to give this whole story a feeling as if they’re trying to be a Bizarro counterpart to All Star Superman. If that is, in fact, the intention, it’s a pretty bold move. But I’m definitely along for the ride.
Absolute Superman #18 Title: Reign of the Superman Part One: King of the Black Land Writers: Jason Aaron Art: Rafa Sandoval Main Cover: Rafa Sandoval
The Absolute Universe expands yet again, as this issue gives us the first seeds of not one, not two, but THREE new versions of DCU characters, not the least of which is the guy whose emblem is teased on the cover.
No, not that one. The other one.
This new story arc begins with a flashback to ancient Egypt, when a young boy seeks a way to deliver his people from slavery. A visit from a mysterious stranger promises a change at hand, but it’s the strange visitor he encounters in the desert who leads to his transformation.
After the epilogue, in the present day Lois Lane (who is unable to stay out of trouble in any universe) has a lead on the whereabouts of Ra’s Al Ghul. As it turns out, though, she’s not the only one investigating him, and her search leads Superman into conflict with a most intriguing opponent.
The Absolute comics take such an interesting path. Sometimes the characters are superficially the same as the heroes and villains we know. Other times they seem to share little more than a name. The big character the cover teases here seems to be somewhere in between. Although we’re looking at one of the most famous magic users in the DCU, and although the existence of magic in this world has been quite thoroughly documented over in Absolute Wonder Woman, it seems as though Jason Aaron is giving the character more of a science fiction hook this time around. It’s an intriguing, unexpected choice, but I’m curious to see how it’s going to play out.
The main characters aren’t neglected, though. There’s a nice sequence of Kal-El on the Kent farm, with an unusually adorable look at the Parasite that really helps hammer home the point that Kal is this universe’s hope-bringer. Lois is…well, she’s Lois. And a brief check in with Jimmy Olsen at the Daily Planet gives Aaron a chance to take a quick shot at AI-generated journalism, which is something we all need to be willing to stand up and decry.
Perhaps my favorite thing about this title is that I really never know where it’s going to go next.
Adventures of Superman: Book of El #7 Title: Death Race Writer: Phillip Kennedy Johnson Art: Scott Godlewski Main Cover: Scott Godlewski
This issue we catch up with Otho-Ra, who undergoes a sort of unexpected transformation. And honestly, the transformation makes this series feel more and more inconsequential. From the beginning, the main problem with this book has been the sense that it’s not anchored to the Superman that we’re reading elsewhere, even though it’s ostensibly in continuity. But having a Superman in a future that believes he’s gone is already a red flag – it virtually guarantees that there’s going to be a reset button before the end. That’s especially true since the main books are currently dealing with the fact that Superman is missing in the wake of DC KO. That was a more engaging disappearance, and we’re following it everywhere, not just in this one little corner of the world. Furthermore, the change made to Otho in this book makes it feel even MORE clear that either it’s going to be dialed back entirely or (and I suspect this is going to be the case in the end) both Otho and Osul-Ra are going to be out of the picture once this is all over.
When I decided to do “Superman Stuff” here in the blog I intended to use it, at least partially, to drop my thoughts on the new Superman books as they come out. I don’t know if I’ve got it in me to keep covering the back end of this series, though – I feel like I just keep trotting out the same incomplete feelings issue after issue, and I’m sure that’s no more fun for you guys to read than it is for me to write.
Mad About DC #1 Main Cover: Dan Panosian
When I trotted out “Parody Week” last summer, I was saddened to discover that most of the old Mad magazine parodies of Superman just…don’t hold up. They aren’t all that funny anymore. But despite that, I decided to pick up this one-shot full of short parodies primarily because it is NOT by – as they usually credit the writers and artists – the “usual gang of idiots,” but rather actual DC creators like Chip Zdarksy, Mark Waid, Gail Simone, Colleen Doran, and a host of others. The question, then, is whether the people who actually make this stuff do a better job of making fun of it than those who don’t?
I’m glad to report that, for the most part, the answer is “yes.” Early on get some good stuff, like Tini Howard’s “Five People You Meet at a Convention” and Mark Waid’s legitimately hilarious “First Meeting of Harley Quinn and Ambush Bug.” The Superman-specific stuff is a mixed bag. Gerry Duggan and Tony Moore’s “Humanity is the REAL Kryptonite” is three pages of recycled jokes (which I guess is appropriate for a Mad special). Colleen Coover has a much fresher (and funnier) take on the characters with a one-pager devoted to Lana Lang’s dating life after breaking up with the former Superboy, and Chip Zdarsky himself contributes the amusing “Know Your Kryptonite.”
In general, I find that the same stuff I discovered when reading the old Mad magazines last year holds true here as well. The parody is best when it’s a bit more generalized, poking fun at character tropes or the comic book culture. When they try to get more topical – there are several gags that are there to mock the tech industry, for example – it starts to feel a bit more like the creator is climbing a soapbox and it reduces the impact of the humor in a way that will be even more profound if somebody comes back and reads it a few years from now. This stuff always works best when it comes from a place of affection. When it gets vitriolic, that’s when I lose interest.
Fortunately, most of this book seems to focus more on the former than the latter.
Supergirl #12 Title: Hero of Kandor Part Two (A Reign of the Superboys tie-in) Writer, Artist, & Main Cover: Sophie Campbell
Supergirl awakens from the injuries she received last issue only to find that one of Kandor’s scientists has taken rather…extreme measure to see to her survival. I mean, you can see the cover, I don’t know why I’m dancing around it. He cyborgs her. And she is, understandably, not happy about it.
Interestingly, though, that’s not the main thrust of this issue. As scientist Kim-Da tries to explain the struggles Kandor has been undergoing – specifically the fact that any organism born in Kandor in the last three decades has found itself unable to survive outside of the bottle – Kara also learns the measures that have been taken to defend the bottled city. I’m actually kind of glad to see the reveal here that one of last issue’s revelations was something of a fake-out. It’s a big deal, but a different big deal than we were led to believe, and it opens the issue up to some of the sort of social commentary that good science fiction can pull off. The things that Kim-Da has done are questionable, to be certain, but it invites a parallel to certain real-world scientific issues without beating the reader over the head with them, which is the way that such things should be done. There’s action here, but it’s almost an afterthought, with most of the book taken up with heated conversation.
“But wait, Blake,” you’re saying, “the cover says this is a Reign of the Superboys tie-in.” Well, technically, I guess. Conner Kent appears, but only on the first few pages, and he and Lena Luthor go looking for Kara only to find that Kandor is rather disgustingly cut off from them both. I’m almost starting to suspect that editorial told Sophie Campbell that Conner needed to be in this story arc so she just found anywhere to slot him in that she could, since his contributions to the story thus far have been negligible. The scene with him and Lena is interesting, though. We’re reminded that one of Connor’s DNA donor “fathers” is, in fact, Lena Luthor’s father Lex, and although they never use the words, there’s a casual bickering between the two of them that feels very much like a brother and sister. I quite like that.
Campbell’s artwork has shifted slightly for this story arc. Although the early issues had very light lines that were almost cartoonish in their appeal, the Kandor story has taken on slightly harsher angles and more detail to fit the science fiction-ish tech of Kandor. Complete with darker colors by Tamara Bonvillain, someone who hadn’t looked at this book since the first issue might even suspect it had a different artist entirely at first. But the art shift is justified by the story, and I’m okay with it.
Action Comics #1097 Title: Future Shock (A Reign of the Superboys tie-in) Writer: Mark Waid Art: Skylar Partridge Main Cover: Ryan Sook
Another glorious issue by Mark Waid and Skylar Partridge. Superboy is greeted by a most unexpected trio: J’onn J’onzz, Mary Marvel, and Booster Gold. The reader (but not Clark) knows that these three are searching for Clark’s own future self, missing since the events of DC KO, but they have to strive to keep Clark from learning too much about his own future while, at the same time, helping to protect him from a threat he’s not quite ready for: Epoch, the Lord of Time.
I’m pretty sure that Waid is patterning this as Clark’s first encounter with other superheroes, save for Captain Comet (who appeared in a few earlier issues of this run). It’s certainly his first encounter with visitors from the future, but there’s a moment that is no doubt intended to invoke another time travelling trio that Clark has been associated with.
It rubs me just a teeny bit the wrong way that Waid makes a running gag out of Mary and J’onn trying to prevent Booster from blowing secrets about the future. He’s the most seasoned time traveller out of all of them, and he’s undergone so much character development over the years that it feels a little cheap to dial that back. He buys it back just a little, however, by implying that his carelessness might be a reversion spurred by his recent torture at the hands of Darkseid, which makes it easier to swallow.
The best stuff in this issue, though, comes between Clark and Mary. It’s the first time he’s ever met someone so young with powers of her own. I’m pretty sure that Mary is, canonically, college-age these days, which makes her only a few years older than Clark in this issue, something which in no way goes unnoticed by the young man. The character relationships being built here are very unusual, but in no way forced or unnatural. It all feels like the pieces are falling into place as they should.
DC/Marvel: Supergirl/Blade #1 Writer: CRC Payne Layouts: Mikel Janin Finishes: Hugo Petrus
Wrapping up this week we have a surprise drop, the DC Universe Infinite exclusive digital comic DC/Marvel: Supergirl/Blade #1. As they did last fall with a pair of unannounced team-ups between Thor and Shazam, then the Flash and the Fantastic Four, Marvel and DC once again dropped a pair of digital-first crossovers on us. I’m only going over the Supergirl/Blade issue, but if you’ve got the Marvel app as I do, by all means, go enjoy It’s Jeff/Aquaman.
The X-Men’s old foe Mojo is putting together a new series, and the algorithm gives him a can’t-miss formula that leads him to abducting Supergirl and Blade to be the stars of his new vampire romance series. It’s great – while this pairing doesn’t make nearly as much sense as any of the others that we’ve seen in this recent spate of crossovers, the fact that it’s so bizarre is actually a plot point here, and a pretty funny one at that.
Mojo hits Supergirl with a Kryptonite infection to bring her powers a bit more down to Earth, and she and Blade quickly find themselves coming face-to-face with some of Mojo’s Nosferatu. The story itself isn’t really groundbreaking or anything, but the odd couple dynamic works way better than expected. The only thing these two really have in common with one another is determination, but when it’s just the two of you against a legion of vampires, that’s enough to fuel the plot. From there it’s just a matter of giving us character interaction, which comes across as sincere and entertaining. It’s always nice to get a surprise gem like this one, so if you’ve got the DC Universe Infinity app, go check this one out right now.
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. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
At last, the time has come! After months of waiting, DC Comics blessed us this week with the first of the two crossover books featuring Superman and Spider-Man, and as promised, there’s a bounty of back-up stories as well. As with any anthology, some of the stories are better than others, so this time out I’m going to give you my thoughts on each of them.
DC/Marvel: Superman/Spider-Man #1 Main Cover: Jorge Jimenez, although it should be noted that there are – at current count – FORTY-ONE different covers to this book, and while I’m absolutely NOT gonna shell out $8 a copy for all of them, if DC and Marvel put out a special that collected all of the various covers from this book and the Marvel book coming out in a couple of months, I would 100 percent purchase it.
Title: Truth, Justice, and Great Responsibility Writer: Mark Waid Art: Jorge Jimenez
In our main story this issue, Dr. Octopus is messing around with an AI assistant that turns out to be Superman’s old foe Brainiac, which just goes to show you that using ChatGPT is just bad news. Clark Kent and Peter Parker, meanwhile, are working together on a story about the theft of some radioactive materials…including Kryptonite.
Mark Waid does something truly unique with this story. In the universe he’s created here, he presupposes that Superman and Spider-Man – and more specifically, Clark and Peter, have a history together. And I don’t just mean the previous crossovers between the two that have happened in the past (all of which are decades old). No, reading this book you get a clear feeling that this is an incarnation of DC and Marvel’s respective flagship characters that have had a great number of adventures together that we, the reader, have not been privy to. Most crossovers start with the characters meeting each other for the first time. If we’re lucky, they’re at least aware of the others’ existence, but they’ve never encountered each other before. This book instead implies a whole shared existence between the two that feels so fresh and so RIGHT, and makes me wish there were more stories coming beyond just the Marvel book.
Like seriously. DC. Marvel. Get Waid working on a 12-issue maxiseries showing the entire history of this Multiple World’s Finest duo, like YESTERDAY.
Jorge Jimenez on the art is the icing on the cake. He’s got a great take on each of our heroes and both of our villains. The story looks as good as it reads. The lead story is a home run.
Title: Lois & Mary Jane in “The World’s Finest” Writer: Tom King Pencils: Jim Lee Inks: Scott Williams
Tom King’s Lois and Mary Jane story is next, and this is an interesting one. As Superman and Spider-Man duke it out with a rogue Sentinel (is there any other kind?), Lois and MJ go about a sort of casual conversation amongst the chaos about what it means to be them, the women in the lives of two of the world’s greatest heroes. It’s a really interesting way to frame these two, using their unique shared perspective in a way that wouldn’t really work with any other two women in comics. Using the backdrop of the Sentinel fight instead of just having them meet for lunch or something (as they do on the Terry Dodson variant cover) gives it a different flavor that makes it feel more unique. I feel like this one is intended to be in continuity with Waid’s story, and if that means this shared universe is one where Pete and Mary Jane are still together, I want more stories set in this universe even MORE.
Title: Superboy-Prime and Spider-Man in “Pages” Writer: Christopher Priest Art: Daniel Sampere
I really wasn’t sure what to expect out of this pairing. We’ve often seen Superboy-Prime using his knowledge of DC Comics (coming from a universe where those are all fictional) to navigate his world on more than one occasion. Christopher Priest here supposes that if DC Comics are fictional to Prime, it stands to reason that Marvel is too. (And I suppose every other publisher, by extension, but let’s just stick to Marvel now.) Prime uses his ability to travel the Multiverse to move back in time to a point in Marvel’s history shortly after Peter Parker got rid of his symbiote costume, when he was wearing a black suit made out of traditional fabric, and the confrontation between the two of them seems to unlock something in the boy.
Prime has been on something of a redemption arc in the comics as of late. This story actually feels like it could be the beginning of that, as if it logically should take place prior to his appearance in recent issues of DC KO. I have to admit, for a kid who modeled himself on Superman and stumbled so badly, I kind of like the idea of an encounter with Spider-Man being the thing that sets him back on the right path.
Title: Superboy and Spider-Man 2099 in “Beyond the Cobwebs of Tomorrow” Writer & Artist: Sean Murphy
Miguel O’Hara, Spider-Man 2099, is on the run. I know, what else is new? But as he flees from the authorities, we realize that he’s not in the 2099 that we’re used to, not exactly, and that idea is driven home even harder by the sudden appearance of a time-tossed Superboy and a special guest star. As our heroes compare notes, they come to realize the real threat they face and…
…and that’s it. The story ends with the team-up forged and our heroes barrelling off to take care of business. But the problem is, that isn’t really a story. This is, if anything, the first CHAPTER of a story, and an incomplete chapter at that. I get that these backups have a pretty limited number of pages, but this whole sequence comes across as a tease of something that I really want to read. Teasers are only fun, though, if what’s being teased eventually reaches you to be read. Despite a fun team-up and some well-executed pages, this is the first story in the book that I feel is a little bit of a letdown.
Title: Jimmy Olsen and Carnage in “Jimmy Con Carnage” Writer: Matt Fraction Art: Steve Lieber
Fraction and Lieber, the creative team behind the Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen miniseries from a few years back, reunite for the wildest pairing in this book. Jimmy’s meandering has led him to leave Metropolis for New York and get a job as the newest photographer for the Daily Bugle. And like ALL Bugle photographers learn, J. Jonah Jameson has one edict: PICTURES OF SPIDER-MAN. The only problem is that new-to-town Jimmy doesn’t even know what Spider-Man looks like. Doesn’t even know about the hyphen.
I know these stories are out of continuity, but it’s crazy what they allow Fraction to get away with in this one. It’s crazy, for instance, that Jimmy somehow has never seen one of Peter Parker’s 17 million photographs of Spider-Man. It’s crazy that he thinks Carnage matches the description. It’s crazy the significance that a hyphen plays in this story. It’s hilarious and ridiculous in all the ways that Jimmy’s solo series was, although with a bit more finality.
Title: Jonathan Kent and Ben Parker in “The Bridge” Writer: Jeff Lemire Art: Rafa Sandoval
This story (another one that feels like it belongs in this combined world) is a quick snapshot, Jeff Lemire bringing us a sweet glimpse at the adoptive fathers of our two heroes. A chance meeting, many years ago, brings Ben Parker to Smallville, Kansas just as a massive rainstorm threatens people in town, and Lemire shows us the kind of steel that forged Clark and Peter into the men that they are. Nothing particularly surprising in this one, just a good, simple encounter that feels like a minor but welcome detail in this strange world that they’re building.
Title: Bias Writer: Greg Rucka Art: Nicola Scott
This one, too, feels like a little snapshot. Jack Ryder’s program has a pair of special guests, Lois Lane and Jonah Jameson, on the air debating the concept of media bias. Lois calls Jonah out on his anti-Spider-Man stance, and Jonah responds.
There’s not much else to say about this one, honestly. Like the Lemire story, it feels like a detail added in to populate the world. I appreciate how well Rucka casts each of these characters, up to and including Jonah’s defense for his position on our friendly neighborhood wall-crawler. But it’s again just a tidbit, a nugget of something more.
Title: Power Girl and the Punisher in “Blind Date” Writer: Gail Simone Art: Belen Ortega
Of all the pairings in the book, this one may seem the most random, until you remember that both of these characters were created by Gerry Conway, and it seems that Simone thought it would be fun to pay tribute to that. She was, of course, correct about that. In this story, Karen Starr is on her way to a blind date with – well – perhaps the most hated Marvel character of the past half-decade or so. It’s just her bad luck that the restaurant where she’s meeting him happens to be full of criminals that have been targeted by Frank Castle.
As unusual as the team-up is, Simone handles it with her usual humor and charm. Somehow she structures the story in a way that brings them together organically, while still dropping in plenty of meta-commentary about the characters and playing with who they are and just how deeply different they are, while at the same time, having more than a little in common. This may be the most unexpectedly fun story in the book.
Look, I’m not going to pretend that I’m a hard sell. This is a comic book focusing on two of my favorite characters and an all-star collection of creators. It’s a load of fun and it feels oddly as though it’s being used to build towards something larger. (I’m probably wrong about that. I hope I’m not.) At any rate, it was well worth the price, and I can’t wait for Marvel’s half to come in April.
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. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
A recurring theme during the original “Year of Superman” was just how awful so many of the silver age comics made Lois look over the years. I’m sorry to tell you, friends, that Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane is another prime example of this kind of bold storytelling.
The first story is “Lois Lane’s Signal-Watch” with art by Kurt Schaffenberger with an unknown writer — although frankly, I wouldn’t want credit for this one either. Lois asks Superman a fairly reasonable question: why hasn’t he ever given her a signal watch like Jimmy Olsen’s, seeing as how she’s even more likely to get into trouble than Jimmy is. Superman initially balks at the idea, but softens and gives her a watch for her birthday. Almost immediately, Lois starts using it for ridiculously frivolous reasons: fixing the broken heel of her shoe, loosening a zipper that’s gotten stuck, and helping her out of a revolving door that won’t turn. Superman is understandably frustrated and warns her not to use the watch again unless it’s an emergency, an admonition that she takes so seriously that when she is later kidnapped by bank robbers (it must have been Tuesday) who are going to blow her to smithereens with a bomb, she STILL refuses to call for help.
This story is seemingly fashioned for the sole purpose of making Lois look like an idiot. Even the synopsis on the DC Universe Infinite app seems to recognize it: “Superman gives Lois a signal watch, and she drives him crazy calling about stupid things.” That’s the official synopsis.
“The Mystery of Skull Island” (Schaffenberger again, with art by Robert Bernstein) is a little better. Perry White sends Lois and Clark undercover, pretending to be a maid and butler for a reclusive horror movie actor who, recently having returned from his honeymoon with a wealthy heiress, has shunned any attempts at an interview by the press. Ethics aside, at least Lois doesn’t seem like a total moron in this story, as she and Clark find it increasingly odd that the wife doesn’t appear to be around in the mansion. Lois starts to suspect the actor is a modern-day Bluebeard, having murdered his wife for her money, and disguises himself as his wife’s ghost to shock him into confessing his crime. This may be one of the best stories Lois has in this era of the comics. She’s still headstrong and foolhardy, but at least she doesn’t come across as vapid or stupid like she does so often.
“The Kryptonite Girl” wraps this one up with yet another story of Lois not listening to Superman, written by Jerry Siegel himself with art by ol’ reliable Kurt Schaffenberger. He brings by a collection of alien artifacts for Jimmy and Lois to photograph for a Planet article, but warns them not to touch any of them, a warning that Lois heeds exactly as well as any three-year-old listens when you tell them to stop licking the floor. Something in the artifacts seems to give Lois the ability to emit Kryptonite rays from her eyes, an ability she is unable to turn off. When Superman discovers this, he treats Lois with the kind of dignity and respect we’ve come to expect from the Man of Steel.
The end of this story is one of the absolute WORST tropes of the era: when it is revealed that Superman actually orchestrated the whole thing to “teach Lois a lesson.” It’s the kind of story that makes BOTH characters look terrible. These are the stories that the Superdickery website was built upon, and you can’t really blame ‘em.
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. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
Once again, it’s time to look into the reviews of some of the Superman-related comics that have dropped in the last few weeks, including some pretty massive events. Let’s get right to it.
DC KO #4 Title: Trial By Absolute Writers: Scott Snyder & Joshua Williamson Art: Javi Fernandez & Xermancio Main Cover: Javi Fernandez
The Final Four have made their way through all comers, but before they can turn their attention to one another, four new combatants have entered the fray. Tainted by the energy of Darkseid, the combatants will be forced to fight the Absolute Universe versions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman – as well as Booster Gold who has been possessed by Darkseid himself.
This event has promised us one throwdown after another, and there’s no way to argue that it hasn’t lived up to that promise. This issue is perhaps the most high-octane, brutal battle yet. The fight between the four remaining heroes and villains with their Absolute counterparts is scripted and drawn with incredible energy and brutality, but at the same time, Scott Snyder has not skimped at all when it comes to character and story. In fact, there are multiple twists in this issue that catch you off-guard and send the story spinning into new, unexpected directions. At the same time, the twists all fit the characters – a great twist is one that is a surprise without violating what you already know about the world you’re reading, and Snyder pulls that off.
For people who are into Superman (know anybody like that?) seeing “our” Superman face off against the Absolute Kal-El is one of the high points of the issue. Neither character is disrespected or nerfed in respect to the other, but there’s also no room for any doubt as to which of the two is the original. I am slightly disappointed at just how the Absolute characters were used, however. Similar to the surprise guest stars from the Boss Battle one-shot, the Absolute heroes are in and out rather quickly. It’s not even clear as to when, exactly, this story takes place in the Absolute timeline – Superman seems to know Batman here, whereas in their respective comics, they haven’t met yet. Although there’s definite promise here for future brushes between the two worlds, it feels like this encounter will mostly be a footnote for the Absolute characters, even as it sets up the conclusion for the Final Four.
I know I’m being deliberately vague here, by the way – I suppose it’s clear that Superman is one of the Final Four (as it should be) but I’m trying to avoid spelling out who else is in that group in case anyone is trying to remain spoiler-free. Considering just how this one ends, though, I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep that up for the finale. So if you’re reading along with these reviews, I would highly recommend being up-to-date with DC KO when I drop my thoughts on issue five. Whenever that might be.
Superman Unlimited #10 Title: Die Laughing Part Two Writer: Dan Slott Art: Mike Norton Main Cover: Dave Johnson
Intergang has set its sights on Metropolis’s new mayor, Perry White, and they’ve contracted the Prankster to take care of the problem. But Oswald Loomis’s nephew is trying to step into his uncle’s role and take over the family business, and the NEW Prankster isn’t quite as funny as his predecessor.
This is a solid issue. There’s something up with this new Prankster – in these two issues he’s appeared we never find out his real name, and there’s no explanation for his bizarre powers, something Uncle Oswald has never had. I feel like this is just part of a coming, larger story, even as these two issues work perfectly well as a couplet. I also like how a big part of the middle of this story isn’t about the power of Superman, but rather the investigative skills of Clark Kent. Not to say that Superman is entirely absent, but we see more Clark than we often do these days, and I appreciate that.
We also get a quick interlude with Jon, who’s been setting up the new Daily Planet office in Smallville, only to get an ominous warning from an unexpected source. Even more so than the Prankster stuff, this is explicitly setup, especially since DC has revealed their “Reign of the Superboys” initiative that’s going through all of the Super-titles after DC KO ends. If you didn’t know, Jonathan is going to take the reigns of this title for an indeterminate amount of time, and it looks like the groundwork is being laid here.
I’m still really digging Mike Norton’s Superman. I love the way his character works, with the kind of strong lines and clean character work that made so many of the Triangle Era artists stand out, and I hope we see more and more Superman from him in the future.
Superman #35 Title: Life Secrets (A DC KO Tie-In) Writer: Joshua Williamson Art: Eddy Barrows, Eber Ferreira, Julio Ferreira Main Cover: Dan Mora
The final instalment of this title’s DC KO storyline runs with the conclusion of issue #4 and leads straight into #5. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of the storylines that’s been going through this book turns out to be crucial to the conclusion of the crossover. But that’s not the one that works best.
We’re following two intertwined threads here. First, the Doomsday/Time Trapper is reeling from the events of issue #4 and trying to gird himself for what must come next. After all, at least part of him is the creature that was created eons ago for the express purpose of destroying Darkseid, and it may be time for that charge to finally come due. Meanwhile, Lois and Superboy-Prime continue their faceoff with Darkseid’s Legion, and it is this latter part that is particularly revelatory.
From the moment he was introduced in this title, we’ve been building a redemption arc for Prime, and it gets center stage in this issue, where he is faced with choices that he’s made before and is given an opportunity to make better choices this time. I’m not in the business of giving out spoilers, but it should be pointed out that when “Reign of the Superboys” takes over the Superman titles next month, DC has revealed that Prime is going to be the start of this title for the time being.
There’s also a great face-off between Lois and Darkseid’s Saturn Girl. Just like prime, this series has hinted that the dark Legion may not be completely beyond hope, and that hope spot is further explored this month. I’m really anxious for the final issue of the crossover to drop…which I guess will be today as you read this. Holy cats, why are you reading this blog instead of DC KO #5? Have you lost your senses?
Action Comics #1095 Title: Pressure Writer: Mark Waid Art: Patricio Delpeche Main Cover: Ryan Sook
The adventures of Superboy in Action Comics continue, although Clark actually takes a back seat this issue. Last month, on a camping trip, Pete Ross happened to spy Clark Kent going into action as Superboy. This issue is Pete’s story, as he struggles with this knowledge and wrestles with whether to confront Clark with what he has learned – and ask why his best friend would ever keep such a secret.
I adored this issue. Mark Waid, human comic book encyclopedia that he is, is doing a phenomenal job of mining the classic tales of Superboy to bring the drama to this series. In the Silver Age this was the status quo – Pete knew that Clark was Superboy (even learned it the same way as he did in Waid’s story, if I’m not mistaken) and chose to keep that knowledge to himself. But as was so often the case with those Silver Age tales, there wasn’t an awful lot of thought given to the implications of this sort of thing. How would Pete feel about learning his best friend was keeping such a gargantuan secret? Doesn’t Clark know that he can trust him? Does anybody else know? And why would Pete choose to keep what he’s learned to himself instead of talking to Clark about it?
The answer to that last question is because it was the Silver Age, and if anybody in a Silver Age DC story had the ability to have a rational adult conversation about anything 95 percent of the stories would have ended on the second page. But Waid actually finds a way to justify Pete’s actions, draping his decision in a metaphor for a real-world issue and presenting it in such a way that makes perfect sense and somehow makes all of the characters – Pete, Clark, even Lana Lang – come across as behaving in a mature, emotionally intelligent way. How often could you say that back in the 50s?
Supergirl #10 Title: My Bloody Valentine Writer: Sophie Campbell Art: Joe Quinones Main Cover: Sophie Campbell
It’s Valentine’s Day, and Kara has a date with the mysterious, long-haired, tattooed boy of her dreams. Her friends Lena and Luna, however, are following along, sensing something is amiss.
After last issue’s slight misstep, this one is more of what I’ve come to enjoy about this series. The “date” is mostly a setup for this issue’s fight scene, but Campbell isn’t having a fight just for the sake of a fight. In the midst of battle we get some good character moments and the ongoing storyline of Kara and her friends (particularly Lena Luthor, in this case) continues nicely. Lena made a mistake in the last issue for which she’s trying to mend fences, and while this issue doesn’t patch everything up in a neat little bow, it also doesn’t cause some insurmountable gap between the friends like books that lean on melodrama are wont to do. Kara and Lena both some some real emotional maturity here, which is particularly funny when juxtaposed against the “date” scene, which works mostly as a parody of gooey Silver Age romance comics tropes.
I have to point out, though, that the recent run of holiday issues is starting to strain credulity a little bit. Literally half the issues of this series have been holiday stories at this point (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and now Valentine’s Day) and while comic book time is naturally elastic, it does have its limits. As this issue begins, Lena and Luna are going to visit Kara on Valentine’s Day to try to make up for their screwup at the New Year’s Eve party – so it’s been six weeks since they spoke to one another? Nobody has made any effort to patch things up before now? I’m willing to forgive, because this really is a great book, but I’m crossing my fingers that next issue’s story (part of the “Reign of the Superboys” initiative) won’t be a visit to show us how they celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Kandor.
Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #48 Title: Day For Night Part One Writer: Mark Waid Art: Marcus To Main Cover: Dan Mora
Once again, Mark Waid has been let loose in his favorite playground, the DC Universe. In this issue we leave behind our pals Superman and Batman and instead visit their arch Earth-3 counterparts, Ultraman and Owlman, as they begin plans to expand their Crime Syndicate to unprecedented levels, with world conquest as their goal.
Waid is building out Earth-3 quite a bit here, introducing versions of DC heroes that I’m pretty sure have never showed up in a Crime Syndicate story before (although I could potentially be wrong about that – I’m certainly not the walking encyclopedia of comic book knowledge that Waid is). There’s a particularly amusing sequence that really puts the relationship between Owlman and Talon (his Robin analogue) into focus. All of it works up to a nice last-page surprise that seems poised to set up the rest of this arc. As per usual, I’m very excited to see where this is going to go next.
Adventures of Superman: Book of El #6 Title: The Warworld Engines Writer: Phillip Kennedy Johnson Art: Scott Godlewski Main Cover: Scott Godlewski
This issue we at last return to Otho-Ra and Osul-Ra, Superman’s adopted children, who disappeared back in the first issue after Superman was abducted to the future. We also come across another clan wearing Superman-like sigils, while our hero is battered and beaten down.
I’m trying, guys, I REALLY am trying to get interested in this book, but it’s just not working. Having left behind the Green Lantern stuff (although future covers seem to indicate we’re not done with it yet), we’ve gotten back to Superman vs. Warworld, which was an era of Action Comics that, if I’m being honest, bored me stiff. Despite his power, “cosmic” Superman stories rarely work for me. The character is all about heart and how he deals with people, and throwing him into deep space against all-powerful entities and sci-fi clans that think he’s just a legend…it’s too far from the things that make me keep reading Superman comic books. It just isn’t connecting with me, no matter how much I wish it was.
New History of the DC Universe: The Dakota Incident #1 Writers: Joseph P. Illidge, Stephanie Williams, Morgan Hampton, & Nikolas Draper-Ivey Art: Valentine De Landro, Carlo Pagulayan, Stephen Segovia, Jason Paz, Fico Ossio, & Edwin Galmon Main Cover: Diego Olortegui
Strictly speaking, I don’t feel obligated to review this book the way I do many of the other Superman appearances. He shows up in this book, but his appearance is brief and it’s not his story. That said, I liked this book quite a lot and I wanted to talk about it and it’s my own blog – dammit – so I’m gonna write about this if I want to.
Spinning out of last year’s fantastic New History of the DC Universe miniseries is this one-shot focusing on the heroes of the Milestone universe. As the previous NHOTDCU explained, the Milestone heroes (versions that are fairly close to their original incarnations from the 90s) have always existed in the current incarnation of the DC Universe, but they all vanished from the public eye after something referred to as the “Dakota Incident.” This issue delves into their history, showing the reader just how they fit into the DCU, and the events of the incident that led to their departure.
I’m impressed at how relatively easily they worked the characters into the DC Universe while still keeping their original stories mostly intact. There is one element that’s added to link the origins of many of the Milestone heroes to the DC Universe proper, but that addition doesn’t really change anything about who they are or how their adventures unfolded back then. The issue also places a heavy emphasis on Static, holding him up as perhaps the most significant of these characters. That makes sense – he’s certainly the most well-known and popular Milestone character among the general public (by virtue of his old cartoon show if nothing else), but it also fits with the character of Virgil Hawkins very well.
For fans of these characters, especially the original versions, this issue serves very well to integrate them into the DC Universe, explain their absence, and – most importantly – set the stage for their return. It’s already been teased in various places, not the least of which is the last page of this issue, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the heroes of Dakota rise again.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
It’s time for another roundup of recent Superman comics. This week I’ll be reviewing the Superman and Superman-related releases that were released on Jan 28 and Feb. 6. Let’s get into it!
Superman Vol. 6 #34
Title: I, Superman (A DC KO Tie-In)
Writer: Joshua Williamson
Art: Eddy Barrows and Eber Ferreira
Main Cover: Dan Mora
In the arctic, the unusual trio of Lois, Superboy-Prime, and a Superman Robot are fleeing the Fortress of Solitude and the battle with members of Darkseid’s Legion. Meanwhile, the Final Four from the main tournament get a chance to look in on what’s happening back on Earth. It’s a pretty sparse recap, I admit, but the pages are PACKED here with character stuff.
The surprising redemption of Superboy-Prime continues this issue, as he finds himself confronting a Superman Robot that has many of the memories and personality of the original. The contrast between the two is marked and the way that Prime has to reckon with the way the REAL Superman apparently thinks of him…which isn’t what he expected, but is probably exactly what the reader would anticipate. I like Prime’s reactions quite a bit – he’s got an awful lot to cope with here, and for the most part, Williamson is handling it well. He may be going slightly too hard on the fourth wall-breaking dialogue, though. Prime is carrying around knowledge of the fact that he’s in a comic book universe, which is fine, but we don’t want it to go so far as to turn him into Deadpool.
We also spend time with the members of Darkseid’s Legion, who up until this point have come across largely as mindless stormtroopers wearing the faces of our friends. We get a different look here, a reminder that although they’re from a universe corrupted by Darkseid’s Omega Energy, they’re still fundamentally the same people, and perhaps the notion of redemption that Williamson is playing with here isn’t restricted to Prime himself.
I’m all about Eddy Barrows and Eber Ferreira’s artwork – bold, strong, and proud. They’re also pretty good about drawing a Prime that looks like an actual Superboy. Even at his most villainous, it’s important to remember that he’s still a version of Clark Kent, and there have been artists who occasionally forget that.
DC KO: The Kids Are All Fight Special #1
Writer: Jeremy Adams
Art: Travis Mercer
Main Cover: Bruno Redondo
The Justice League is strained at the moment, with many of their members caught up in the tournament for the Heart of Apokalips, and most of the others fighting to help evacuate Earth or deal with the dozens of other disasters cropping up all over the place. Jon Kent is given one of the most important duties of all: staying on the Watchtower and keeping an eye on some of the younger heroes, including the Boom, Fairplay, Quiz Kid, and Cheshire Cat. Of course, it would be a pretty short special if the kids just sat around and did what they were told, wouldn’t it? Naturally, they get loose, run into trouble against some of Darkseid’s minions, and Jonathan is forced to call on Cassandra Cain for help.
Jon has been in the last several issues of Titans, working with them as they spearhead the evacuation effort. In March, the book is scheduled to be retitled New Titans with issue #32, and the cover (with several characters in silhouette only) implies heavily that Jon will be a member of the new team. If that’s the case, I’m really quite satisfied with it. The character has been rattling around aimless, for entirely too long, and if making him a member of the Titans actually gives him something to do that makes sense, that’s the best we can hope for. What’s more, I like the group of kids that we see in this issue, the ones that Jon is protecting. I’ve wanted to see more of Boom since she first appeared in the Stargirl: The Lost Children miniseries a few years ago. Fairplay, too, is an interesting character, a very different take on Mr. Terrific that has a lot of promising storytelling avenues. Best of all, there’s a surprise guest-star in this issue that filled me with joy, and no doubt will have the same effect on a lot of other readers. It’s someone we haven’t seen in quite some time, but that DC has been teasing very heavily lately. I’m hoping that this character will stick around in New Titans as well.
Of course, none of that is set in stone. Jon is the only character in this issue whose silhouette appears on that New Titans cover. But covers – especially early solicits – can be deceiving. I don’t expect the heroes we see in this issue to be the new Titans team in its entirety, but I hope that Jon isn’t the only young hero that got a tryout in this issue, because I think there’s a lot to work with here.
DC’s Supergirl Next Door #1
Note: This is DC’s Valentine’s Day anthology for 2026. There are eight different stories in the book, but I’m only reviewing the Supergirl story.
Title: A Dream of Different Stars
Writer: CRC Payne
Art: Paulina Ganucheau
Main Cover: Amy Reeder
Allen is a new kid in Midvale, struggling to make friends and struggling to fit in. That is, until he meets another new kid in town, Linda Danvers. The two of them form a bond and she opens up to him, revealing just how deeply she misses her old home, and Allen decides to do something to help her.
Short and sweet, but that’s what this story is. It’s a lovely little tale of a couple of foundlings who find solace in one another. CRC Payne is a name I mostly know from her work on DC’s digital comics, such as Batman Family Adventures and Harley Quinn in Paradise. She’s brought the same kind, quiet, reflective tenor she uses in Batman Family Adventures to this story as well, crafting a tale that makes it easy to relate to the characters despite its brevity. Ganucheau’s art has a loose quality to it as well, befitting the more animated style we see in Payne’s other work and fitting very well for this tidy little love story. There’s real charm here that I appreciate.
DC KO: Boss Battle #1
Writer: Jeremy Adams
Art: Ronan Cliquet, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Kieran McKeown, Pablo M. Collar
Main Cover: Jamal Campbell
Seconds after the end of DC KO #3, the Final Four in the tournament for the Heart of Apokalips are poised for the battle of their lives, but World Forger manages to “pause” the game. They’re not ready, the need more Omega Energy, so he finds a way to generate some by briefly spending the heroes into neighboring realities to have additional battles and charge up, leading to fights against the wildest opponents yet: Sub-Zero and Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, Samantha Strong from Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Vampirella, Red Sonja, the murderous doll Annabelle, and – in the title fight that people have been wanting to see for YEARS, Superman versus Homelander from Garth Ennis and Darrick Robinson’s The Boys.
During the Year of Superman, I included Homelander in the week I wrote about “Superman gone wrong” – characters who are intended to be dark or even evil versions of the Man of Steel. To me, Homelander is one of the most insidious of those. He is what people who never understand Superman THINK Superman should be like. And knowing that Superman is one of the few superheroes that Ennis actually has respect for, from the minute this book was announced, I was looking forward to seeing our boy Clark finally giving Homelander the beatdown he so richly deserves.
The result is…okay.
Look, the concept of this book is fantastic. It’s utterly insane, and the matchups are crazy. (Joker versus Annabelle, anybody? COME ON!) But it’s just too short. It seems like nearly half the book is taken up just with giving each of the champions borrowed from other universes a page of introduction each, then the fights themselves are over and done with far too quickly. I have never said this before, but this is a crossover spinoff one-shot that probably SHOULD have been a crossover spinoff miniseries.
What’s more, it’s kind of inconsequential. It picks up just as DC KO #3 ends, and the final page promises that the story leaps from this book straight into DC KO #4, and it’s structured in such a way that people who are only reading that main book will feel like they haven’t missed anything. I get why they structured it that way, and I don’t begrudge that, but considering that this book is ultimately just a fun little sidestory rather than required reading (like so many of the books from “All Fight Month” were) just kind of makes me lament the fact that there wasn’t time for a little more fun.
Superman: Chains of Love Special #1
Title: Creepers
Writer: Leah Williams
Art: Ig Guarra
Main Cover: Yasmine Putri
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we get this one-shot. Livewire is being paroled from prison, but her years away have left her without her audience…until she stumbles into the Creeper, who finds a way to help her climb back to prominence. And then, with love in the air, the sparks fly.
It’s a cute enough story – questions of continuity aside (Livewire says early that she’s “from the 90s,” which feels a little meta), the two characters have an interesting chemistry that actually plays out in an entertaining way. Superman’s presence in the story is minimal however, mostly there for structure in the new environment that Leslie Willis finds herself in. But I guess DC (correctly) assumed that branding this as a Superman special rather than a Creeper/Livewire special would get more readers.
Title: Bill Zarro’s World
Writer: Dan Slott
Art: Rosi Kampe
Dan Slott and Rosi Kampe also come through with a back-up story in this issue. Bill Zarro is a lowly peon working at the Daily Planet. His boss is a jerk, his wife resents him, his kids disdain him…until one day he wakes up on Bizarro World, and everything changes. This is a short story that’s essentially an extended gag piece that builds up to an unusual and amusing punchline. The ending is funny enough to make the story worth recommending.
Absolute Superman #16
Title: The Never-Ending Begins Part Two: This Universe Will Break Your Heart, Kid
Writer: Jason Aaron
Art: Juan Ferreyra
Main Cover: Rafa Sandoval
This issue brings us the full introduction of a new Absolute Universe hero as Superman is approached by the mysterious Hawkman. This version of Carter Hall has been around for a long time, and initially doesn’t know what to make of this newcomer with all of the powers. We also see Lois as she tries to find a new direction in the wake of her departure from the espionage game, a new version of another classic character, and the recruitment of Lex Luthor continuing unabated.
Here’s something that I haven’t really said before about many of the Absolute comics: this issue is surprisingly funny. The first couple of pages in which Superman and Hawkman meet in midair are punctuated by Kal-El getting distracted by disasters both minor and major and then zipping off to deal with them and leaving Hawkman flapping his wings. The introduction to this new Hawkman works really well. It can be easy to forget that this “young” universe is still a universe, with a history all of its own, and Hawkman feels like a great opportunity to explore that a little bit more.
The Lois story has some humor as well. For a while it didn’t seem as though this book was going to brush much on the traditional Superman status quo at all, but here we’ve got Lois and Jimmy looking into being reporters, the introduction of the Daily Planet, and the debut of one Perry White. Even there, though, we see the influence of Darkseid on this world. The Planet ain’t the grand old dame she is in the main DC Universe, and although Perry has the same sort of grit you’d want from the character, it comes with more grime than one would usually expect. The way this is structured he may be a one-off character, but I really hope that’s not the case. I feel like there’s a lot of potential here, especially in having him interact with Lois.
Even the Lex Luthor scene is darkly comedic. The Absolute Luthor – with a proud shock of red hair and a burly beard, is a man utterly happy and content in his simple like. The difference between him and “our” Lex Luthor is perhaps more striking than any other Absolute character we’ve met yet, which is amusing, but at the same time, seems poised to bring him to a bitter, heartbreaking end.
Or not. Aaron has been surprising me a lot with this book.
Juan Ferreyra handles both the line art and colors for this book, and I really like his work. The flashback scenes, showing some of Carter’s adventures in the 40s, have a nice sort of archaic look to them. In the modern scenes, where he and Kal-El meet, he does this really interesting blur effect to show Superman zipping into action. It’s not wholly unique – I’ve seen similar effects from other artists – but his execution is great. I’m also a big fan of the monster designs from later in the issue, and his battle scenes look stunning.
We’re on the second issue of this new story arc, and it’s honestly shaping up to be my favorite from the series so far. It’s brighter somehow, and while that may be a deviation from the whole ethos of the Absolute Universe, I feel like that’s kind of the point. A Superman – a REAL Superman – should always be the bright spot in his world, no matter how dark the world itself may be.
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. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
I’m writing this on Christmas morning, sitting amongst piles of wrapping paper and the mountain of Hot Wheels that Santa Claus brought Eddie, The Muppet Christmas Carol on TV because it’s not time for football yet. But it’s also the first day of the final chapter. After 51 weeks in which I have watched, read, or listened to at least one piece of Superman-related media every single day, no matter what life had in store for me, I’ve only got seven days left to reach the finish line.
I’m going to think of this week as “the best of the rest.” I’m going to try to read and watch some of my favorite or some of the most significant stories remaining on the gargantuan list I started the year with. And make no mistake, that list is still pretty big. I haven’t gotten close to scratching off all of it. So perhaps, just perhaps, when I reach New Year’s Day, my journey with Superman won’t be ending, but merely evolving.
Comics:Superman Smashes the Klan #1-3, DC Go! Holiday Special #32
Notes:A few weeks ago I listened to the radio serial “Superman Versus the Clan of the Fiery Cross.” In 2019, writer Gene Luen Yang and artist Gurihiru loosely adapted that storyline into a three-issue miniseries, Superman Smashes the Klan, that kept the skeleton of the original story, but added some new elements that really made for one of those evergreen graphic novels that will be read for a very long time.
Set in the days after World War II, the story kicks off with a Golden Age-style Superman polishing off a leftover Nazi calling himself Atom Man. The fight is tougher than it should be, as Atom Man is powered by a glowing green crystal that Superman has encountered before, that makes him weak and sick. We soon discover that this is a very young Superman who does not yet know the truth of his alien origins. Something is nagging at him, and he sees an odd vision of himself in the mirror looking like a creature from outer space. Meanwhile the Lee family – Dr. Lee, his wife, and their children Tommy and Roberta – is moving from the Chinatown section of Metropolis to the city proper because Dr. Lee is starting a new job as Chief Bacteriologist of the Metropolis Health Department. Their new neighbor, Jimmy Olsen, stops by to introduce himself and invite them to the Unity House Community Center baseball practice.
The story follows the plot of the radio show fairly well, but it adds in elements that weren’t present on the air. Superman learns in the course of this story that he’s an alien himself, giving an added dimension to the story of the Lees and their struggle to find acceptance in Metropolis. We’ve also got an original character, Tommy’s sister Roberta, who wasn’t in the original story but takes on a large part of the narrative. As the daughter of a Bacteriologist, Roberta is a bit of a germophobe, which only serves to enhance her existing awkward nature, making it much more difficult for her to acclimate to her new home. I like this angle a lot. Having Tommy fit in as a typical all-American boy worked well for the radio show. You didn’t even know that he WAS Chinese for the first few episodes, making the angle of the Klan come across as a surprise to the listener. But in a comic book, there’s no way to make that kind of thing a surprise. While Tommy is still that kid who everyone loves and blends in with the Unity House baseball team easily, Roberta gives us a character to depict the alienation that someone – especially a kid – can feel in this sort of situation. The idea in the original was just to point out how foolish the likes of the Klan were, and that’s all to the good, but Gene Luen Yang (himself a creator of Asian descent) brings a whole new dimension to the story by emphasizing the struggle of an immigrant family through Roberta’s perspective. Not to make it sound like she’s some damsel in distress, mind you. Roberta is Superman’s deuteragonist in this story. She overcomes her anxiety to help her brother, realizing very quickly that Chuck Riggs is involved with the Klan and using her knowledge to race to Tommy’s rescue. She also inspires Chuck’s change of heart much earlier than happens in the radio serial.
Tommy, on the other hand, perhaps tries a little TOO hard to fit in, leaning on his ethnicity in ways he didn’t in the original radio story. Once he becomes part of the Unity House baseball team he keeps dropping jokes about being Chinese (“Confucius says” references, for example), using what makes him different to enhance his popularity. Although he’s a good-natured kid, his insistence on drawing attention to being Chinese bothers his sister almost as much as the people who insult them.
Superman himself has yet another perspective on the immigrant experience. He knows he was adopted, and we see flashbacks of Jonathan showing him a strange device that was in the ship that brought him to Smallville, but it spoke a language they were never able to translate. He’s even gone so far as to mentally suppress some of his more fanciful powers, making for a nice explanation for why he goes from “leaping tall buildings” to outright flight.
Another addition to the story is the Atom Man subplot. After Superman captures Atom Man in the beginning, we see periodically that he’s not in police custody, but being studied by the Metropolis Health Department, a study that Dr. Lee clearly has misgivings about. Lois Lane – who had almost no presence in the original radio story – takes the lead on this one, cracking open the story about the “Health Department” which turns out to be a private enterprise conducting dubious research. Naturally, this turns out to dovetail with the story of the Klan in a rather unexpected way. This is one point I’m a little unsure about. Making the Klan a more high-tech organization, with “loftier” ideals than the simple bigotry of the original works for this version of the story, to be certain, but I’m not sure if it undermines the original point at all. Perhaps smarter people than I can answer that one.
The is a fantastic story – a bold, proud tale that does far more than simply adapt the original radio drama. Indeed, it ties the story of Tommy and Roberta Lee in with the core concept of Superman, making who they are as integral to the series as who he is. I can’t recommend this one highly enough.
Fri., Dec. 26
TV Episodes:Superman and Lois Season 4, Episodes 6-10
Notes: With my wife working and my son having a mountain of toys to play with and college football to watch, I decided that the day after Christmas was the time to finally finish the last season of Superman and Lois. I’m not going to to a play-by-play on these last five episodes, so let’s assume that you’ve watched these episodes that I’m watching for the first time, and I’m going to discuss my feelings about them as I watch.
In episode 6, we see Lex trying to tighten his grip on Smallville by buying up property and bribing the citizens, but they hold firm and resist – mostly because Clark wants them to do so. It’s a wonderful series of scenes in which Clark realizes something that viewers figured out several episodes ago: after seeing Lois and the boys run to Superman’s side after he was killed by Doomsday, the entire town of Smallville now knows that he’s really Superman. And best of all, every single one of them is willing to keep the secret and cover his back. It’s a great story beat, and actually one I’ve thought about several times over the years. Considering everything that he did for the town of Smallville, especially in those continuities where he had a career as Superboy, it would be utterly absurd if there weren’t a lot of people who deduced the truth. The fact that they keep the secret speaks to an inherent goodness in them, a loyalty to the hero who has saved them time and again. Plus, when we see him trying desperately to put the cat back in the bag, convincing people that he’s NOT Superman, it’s hilarious.
Of course, there’s gotta be some drama, and the fact of his identity leaking out predictably causes some problems – kids who are resentful of Jonathan and Jordan, an antagonist from an earlier season that comes back and causes trouble. The scene where someone takes a shot at him in a diner, forcing him to reveal himself, is just glorious, and it leads to the secret being revealed to the world. When that happened in the comics I hated it, because I knew this was a genie that had to go back in the bottle and we’d seen it before. But here, when it happens on a TV series that only has three episodes left, it’s an opportunity to tell a story that hasn’t been told with Superman before, and the creators nailed it.
Beyond that, of course, another big arc in this season is the fact that Clark now has Sam Lane’s heart, and it’s reducing his powers, causing him to age. At the same time, Luthor is planning his final revenge with the combination of a new super-suit (stolen from John Henry and beefed up with Kryptonite) and the return of his Doomsday monster. It all collides in the final episode, “It Went By So Fast,” a title which I can only assume was a meta way for the writers to indicate the fact that they didn’t really want the show to end. I get it, too – this last half-season, lower on the soap opera dramatics and higher on the Superman stuff, was really fantastic, and it’s leaving me wanting more.
They’ve done the Doomsday battle before in live action – in Smallville, in Batman V. Superman, and even before in this series…This is probably the best one I’ve ever seen. With Clark on the ropes, seeing Jonathan and Jordan step up to fight hits me in that parenting place that seems to dominate how I interpret stories these days. John Henry and Lana joining the fight as well shows how big Superman has become, how this world is rising up to meet him. He may have lost a step thanks to his heart transplant, but he’s also inspired another generation of heroes, meaning he doesn’t have to do it alone.
And that’s just act ONE of the finale.
While Clark is chucking Doomsday into the sun, back on Earth Lex attacks the twins and Lois goes after him directly. As she shouts at him to stop attacking everyone around her when she’s the one he really wants, she yells the most Lois Lane line I’ve ever heard: “I am not afraid of you, but you’ve always been TERRIFIED of me,” then nails his warsuit with a mine. It’s not enough to stop him, but it slows him down enough for Clark to make it back to Earth and really start the final battle. It’s an epic, airborne spectacle that ends, inevitably, with Luthor taken down.
And now we’re only HALFWAY through the episode.
Next we get a time skip to about year later with Lana’s wedding to John Henry Irons (an event that would happen a few months later in the comics as well). Kyle and Chrissy are expecting a second child, and Kyle and Lana have reconciled into what appears to be a sincere friendship. Jordan and Sarah, similarly, seem to have finally buried the hatchet, and John Henry spends a tender moment with Natalie as Lois gets an important text about Lex’s future behind bars.
In the final act, we get a voiceover from Clark about how Sam’s heart allowed him to live another 32 years, and how he wanted to leave behind a legacy, making the world a better place. Clark, along with the twins, John Henry, Natasha, even Bruno Mannheim, begin to make real change. Using the influence of Superman and Lois Lane, they start a foundation that accomplishes good throughout the world. The twins each marry and have kids of their own, and we get a nice scene of Grandma and Grandpa Lois and Clark (in admittedly dubious aging makeup). But eventually, Lois’s cancer returns, and Clark is left alone. He lasts for several more years before Sam Lane’s heart that had beat in his chest for so long finally gives out, passing away quietly with his sons next to him.
Clark sits up, young again, seeing his own body behind him. He embraces his sons – young again – and sees his grandchildren. He finds Luthor, of all people, sitting at his kitchen table, and offers him forgiveness…says goodbye to his friends one at a time, and in the end he sees a vision of Lois, waiting, to take him into the light.
Here’s the thing: the story of Superman doesn’t end. It just – it doesn’t. Five years from now, ten years, a hundred years from now, there will and should be new stories of Superman being told.
But if Superman DID end…this is the right way to do it. An ending that is happy in the life he and Lois get to lead, despite the fact that this life – like all those of mortals – must end. And the fact that a Superman left behind a better world than he arrived on in that spacecraft from Krypton. In the comic books, they can’t really do a story in which Superman changes the entire world this way, because they still need something to tell stories about next month and next year. But here, with a television series coming to an end and, with it, closing off the stories of that universe, they have the freedom to show what Superman is REALLY capable of. This season has been a buildup, showing how Superman inspires those around him – not only his own children or friends, but the people of Smallville who were willing to stand up for him, and the people of a world that grows to do the same. The ending of this episode is a tearjerker, but it’s left with a beautiful message of hope that is entirely appropriate for Superman.
But it’s not only hope. Superman is about hope, yes. But the thesis of this series is true as well: “[Love is] the thing that makes life worth living.” It’s what makes the story of Lois and Clark so powerful, in all its many iterations. A man from another world, a woman who represents the best of ours, and how they come together…this is a story worth telling.
Comics:DC Go! Holiday Special #41
Sat. Dec. 27
Comics:DC Go! Holiday Special #43 (Cameo), Detective Comics #1103, Superman: The Kryptonite Spectrum #5, Superman Unlimited #8, Action Comics #1093, Superman Vol. 6 #33, Absolute Superman #14, Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #46, Supergirl Vol. 8 #8, Justice League Unlimited Vol. 2 #14, Justice League Red #4 (Power Girl), Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. Kong 2 #5
Notes: For the final time (this year), I’m going to do a roundup of recent Superman-related comics, starting – oddly enough – with Detective Comics #1103. One of the first comics I read this year, back in the first week of January, was an issue of Tom Taylor’s Detective that showed Superman helping Bruce through an existential crisis. This actually serves as a nice bookend, with Bruce teaming up with Lois to help with an investigation. Superman appears briefly, but most of the issue is concerned with Lois showing off how dang capable she is, and how much respect Bruce has for her. It’s the middle of an ongoing storyline, so it’s probably not something most people would read on its own, but it’s worth mentioning because it’s a great Lois guest appearance.
The final issue of Superman: The Kryptonite Spectrum wraps up W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo’s celebration of the Man of Steel in dynamite fashion. Lex Luthor has engineered a new Kryptonite Man, powered by the entire spectrum of the remnants of Superman’s home, and the battle between the two of them sends Superman on a spiral that leaves him questioning the very nature of the universe itself. Prince’s story leans heavily on metafiction, concentrating on Superman as a story and weaponizing that part of the character’s nature. The finale is entirely unexpected, but in its own way, as sincere a love letter to Superman as the likes of All Star Superman was – in fact, Prince and Morazzo lean heavily on Morrison and Quitely’s story here, and they do so in a way that’s both loving and triumphant. This is hands-down the miniseries of the year.
Superman Unlimited #8 gives us another of the one-off stories that this series has been doing so well. The influx of Kryptonite on Earth has changed a lot of things, including energy sources, and an experimental space flight is planning to make faster-than-light travel a commercial enterprise on Earth. With Lois Lane as a passenger on the maiden voyage, the Justice League assigns Guy Gardner to escort the flight in case something should happen. And wouldn’t you know it? Something happens. I have no doubt that Guy’s appearance in this issue is at least partially due to his guest-starring role in this summer’s big movie, but at the same time, it’s done exceptionally well. Guy is such a fun character – a rude, insufferable boor that is in every way diametrically the opposite of Superman…except for the fact that they’re both true heroes at heart. Seeing them together, both clashing and cooperating, pretty much always makes for a good time, and this issue is no exception.
Action Comics #1093 is another one-off story, this time Mark Waid telling a Superboy tale that shows an event that’s fundamental to Superman’s moral core. Dozens of farmers throughout Smallville are given notices of foreclosure on their farms at the same time. The new owner of the bank assures them that if there’s an “error” they’ll figure it out, but the time it would take to do so would ruin every farm in Smallville. When Superboy contemplates using his power to “find” the money to save the town, it becomes a battle of wills between Clark and his parents, who think that using his powers for personal gain – even to save the town – isn’t the way to go. I’m sure that everyone who’s ever read a Superman comic has fantasized about having the power to hunt down undiscovered gold or some other get rich quick scheme, and Waid does a good job with the Kents of painting a picture of why such a thing should be above a Superman. I still have to confess that I’d probably go dig up the gold if I had Superboy’s powers, but in my defense, nobody has ever called me Earth’s greatest hero.
DC KO’s “All Fight Month” continues with Superman #33, with the unlikely battle between Lex Luthor and Etrigan the Demon. Throughout the month I’ve been impressed at just how well these battles have transcended being mere slugfests. Oh, there’s fightin’ a-plenty, but each of them has gone beyond that to telling a story that digs into the heart of the characters involved. We see who they are, why they do what they do, and what makes them worthy of the Omega Heart, even if it’s only in their own mind. Joshua Williamson taps into the blackness in Lex’s heart and simultaneously shines a light on him. By the end of the issue, you almost (aaaaalmost) want to root for him in his fight with the Demon, because damned if he doesn’t convince you that he’s earned the win. We also continue the storyline with Superboy-Prime and Lois, whose Superwoman powers have returned, in the Fortress of Solitude. Recent announcements about the state of the Superman titles after KO ends have made these pages a bit more relevant than we’d realized, and although I hate the fact that they keep spoiling things in the solicits, I’m very curious to see what’s coming next to this title.
Absolute Superman #14 ends the current storyline with an epic battle between Kal-El and Ra’s Al Ghul for the heart of Smallville. As the two of them go at it, we see Lois facing off against the Peacemakers and Sol’s internal battle with Brainiac, all of which come to an amazing crescendo in this issue. Without going into a blow-by-blow, the ending of this one is probably the most hopeful thing I’ve seen yet in the Absolute Universe as a whole, although as suits this world tainted by Darkseid’s energy, the victory is bittersweet and not without a price. In many ways, it clears the table for this series, and it will be very interesting to see where the story goes from here.
World’s Finest #46 continues the story of Lex Luthor and the Joker, fused into a single being and armed with the power of a device that gives them the sum total of all knowledge in the human race. Superman and Batman, naturally, have to step up and stop them, this time getting a little extra help from Green Lantern to juice them up in a way he’s done once before. The issue ends on a cliffhanger, and it’s a pretty good one, except for the fact that it suffers a bit from Prequelitis. Admittedly, even in the present day what happens at the end would likely be wiped out by the next issue, but when you’re dealing with a series set in the past, there’s really zero tension with the “shocking” ending. It’s still a great, fun story, though.
I’m going to end my tour of new comics with Supergirl #8. It’s Christmas in Midvale, but Supergirl isn’t feeling merry. The holidays, with their emphasis on family, always make her remember everything she lost in the destruction of Argo City. Still, the Danvers and Lesla-Lar do their best to cheer her up, even as they get a strange visitor from the past that Supergirl has neglected for far too long. Sophie Campbell’s Supergirl is probably my favorite new comic book title of the year, but this issue is a little atypical. While the series is usually very bright and uplifting, this issue is somewhat darker and more bittersweet, particularly for a Christmas story. That said, it works really well. Sophie takes Kara’s pain and shapes it into a valuable lesson for Lesla-Lar, whose journey to becoming a superhero is an important component of this title. The story is told well and propels the characters forward, while still giving us a little Christmas cheer in the process.
This is most likely the last I’ll talk about newly-released comics in the Year of Superman, and it’s bittersweet for me too. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to taking a break on January 1st, but at the same time, I’ve enjoyed pontificating about these new issues as they come out. It’s one of the main reasons I’m thinking about how to continue this blog into the new year.
Yeah, I’m teasing that again. Sue me.
Sun. Dec. 28
Comics:Superman: Space Age #1-3
Notes: Continuing the theme of “Endings,” today I’ve decided to revisit the three-issue Space Age miniseries by Mark Russell and Michael Allred from 2022. Published as a Black Label series, like many of them, it really feels more like an Elseworlds. It’s set in a universe where Superman rises to prominence in the 1960s, with a Clark Kent that’s spurred to go out and find ways to save the world following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Before he puts on his costume for the first time, though, he encounters a strange man called the Pariah, who warns him that the world will end in approximately twenty years. Pariah claims to have accidentally unleashed a great evil called the Anti-Monitor, an ancient being whose goal is to bring order to the Multiverse by destroying every positive-matter universe until only his own Antimatter universe remains. He tries to dismiss the Pariah as one of the “kranks” he’s assigned to cover as a Daily Planet cub reporter, but something about him sticks with Clark and he’s unable to shake it. On the other hand, he’s sometimes skeptical that the world will even last 20 years, as the arms race is intensifying and made worse by a false flag attack on Coast City orchestrated by Lex Luthor. The cataclysm turns out to bring heroes out of the woodwork: Batman captures Luthor, Abin Sur passes his ring on to Hal Jordan, Themiscyra sends Diana to the UN as an ambassador, and Superman makes his true debut disposing of American missiles before they can annihilate the Soviet Union. Book one ends with these four coming together at a new Hall of Justice.
In book two, we jump ahead to the 70s, where Superman is well-established, and the world is at peace following a nuclear disarmament treaty. But an interview with Lois leaves him questioning whether he’s doing all he can, and a similar disagreement drives a wedge in the Justice League. It’s a bad time for it too, as Green Lantern warns of the impending approach of a cosmic threat called Brainiac and, at the same time, a Superman from an alternate universe where all human life has been rendered extinct. It’s not all bad news, though – Clark is promoted to an editor’s desk at the Planet, Lois breaks Watergate, the two of them fall in love and she confesses that she knows he’s Superman just before he tells her. They even have time to get married and have a son before Brainiac arrives on Earth. But he’s not there to destroy the world, only to take its greatest resource before the Anti-Monitor can destroy it himself, hoping to use that resource in his battle against the Multiversal destroyer. That resource, as it turns out, is Kal-El of Krypton. The League drives Brainiac off the planet, but at the cost of Green Lantern’s life.
The final book in the trilogy takes us into the 80s where Clark finds Pariah again, who is impressed by his years of heroism, but still sees the end as inevitable. With less than two years before the Anti-Monitor arrives, the Brainiacs again ask Superman to join their fight, and this time, he considers it – but when a heart attack fells Johnathan Kent, he changes path, dedicating himself to saving the human race by eradicating disease by scanning their DNA. It turns out to be a ploy to record their genetic code. When the Anti-Monitor destroys the world, Superman makes for the Brainiacs’ portal, but instead of going into it he pushes through a crystal encoded with the DNA of every human he could collect, sending them to the empty world populated by the other Superman. He returns to his family just before the end, where on the other world the other Superman restores the human race on a new home.
In terms of “ending stories,” I kind of have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, it’s excellently done. The writing and storytelling are top-notch and the characters, even in the Elseworlds setting, still feel mostly true to the heroes we know and love. And I’ll pretty much always be on-board for artwork by Mike Allred, whose unique style is one of my favorites of all time. On the other hand, there’s an impending sense of doom that spreads across the entire thing. There are other dark “final” Superman stories, like Kingdom Come or Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, but in both those cases we journey through the darkness with Superman and ultimately end in a place of hope. This one has a sense of nihilism that doesn’t quite befit the character. Even the ending, where the other Superman brings back humanity (starting, naturally, with Lois Lane), leaves us with the feeling that it’s only buying time. After all, the Anti-Monitor is still out there, the final battle has yet to be fought, let alone won.
The series raises some interesting questions as the different Leaguers look on things with different perspectives. Green Arrow views the world through the perspective of the “Trolley Problem,” whereas Batman’s point of view is that he just saves whoever he can, knowing he can’t save everyone. Superman, as fits the character, refuses to accept that, and is determined to find a way to save everyone even if doing so seems impossible. It’s a noble point of view that works in the regular DCU, but Russell shines a light on how unrealistic that perspective actually is. If I was looking for something realistic, though, I don’t think I’d be reading Superman in the first place. Superman is an ideal, and ideals don’t have to be realistic. They’re something to strive for, even if you know they can never really fall into your grasp, and that’s how Superman works best.
So is Space Age a good story? Yes. Absolutely. Without a doubt.
I don’t think it will ever be one of my favorites, though.
Mon., Dec. 29
Comics:DC Go! Holiday Special #47 (Supergirl), Doomsday Clock #1-12
Notes: This is a controversial book, DC’s sequel to Watchmen which brings those characters into conflict with the heroes of the DC Universe, but I’m including it here for an important reason. In the end, this is very much a story about Superman. The first issue shows us the state of the world – since Ozymandias’s scheme was revealed by Rorschach’s journal, he has become the most wanted fugitive on the planet and the world has crept closer and closer to the very nuclear annihilation he was hoping to avoid. A new Rorschach has arisen, this time working with Ozymandias, who has a tumor growing in his skull. The two of them hope to find the only person in their universe with the power to change anything – Dr. Manhattan. Meanwhile, in another universe, Clark Kent wakes up from a nightmare, a horrible vision of the car crash that killed Jonathan and Martha Kent when he was only a teenager. It’s the first nightmare he’s ever had.
Ozymandias and Rorschach ally themselves with a pair of criminals – Marionette and Mime – who are seeking their missing son. They trace Dr. Manhattan to the DC Universe, where people are in upheaval following the popularization of the “Supermen Theory,” which posits the idea that the reason so many of Earth’s metahumans are American is because they have been deliberately created by the government since Superman’s first appearance. Faith in superheroes is eroding, with the only one who still has the public trust being Superman himself.
Over the course of these twelve issues Geoff Johns and Gary Frank delve into the nature of the DC Universe itself, starting with the notion (from DC Rebirth) that it was Dr. Manhattan who was responsible for the New 52 reboot in the first place. Turns out, it’s more complicated than that. Manhattan did toy with the fabric of the universe, but the reason it was possible for him to do so is because the “Prime” DC Universe – the one that’s called Earth-0 these days – isn’t actually part of the multiverse as we know it. Manhattan calls it the “Metaverse” (take that, Mark Zuckerberg) because it’s a core reality that the others are all reflective of. In the Metaverse, Superman made his first appearance in 1938 and inspired the heroes of the Justice Society. Then reality snapped, moving Superman’s appearance to 1956. The JSA still existed, but now Clark Kent had an early career as Superboy, inspired BY the JSA, and it was that Superboy that in turn inspired the Legion of Super-Heroes 1000 years in the future. Another snap popped Superman’s first appearance to 1986, and–
–are you seeing the pattern here?
The idea is this: Superman is the center of the Metaverse. As time goes forward, his existence is the constant, and as such, the universe is in a constant state of change. But every time the universe shifts, the previous iteration is preserved in a different world in the Multiverse. The original Golden Age Superman’s world is Earth-2. Another was preserved as Earth-1985. The version Manhattan created is Earth-52, and so forth. Eventually, Superman’s timeline will catch up with the Legion a millennium in the future, and when that happens, the ideals of Superman will become universal, and create a lasting peace.
Man, that’s a nice thought, isn’t it?
This book – much like the original Watchmen – suffered from a lot of delays before it could be finished, and many of the larger concepts have been ignored since then. I don’t think the concept of the Metaverse has been explored since this book, for instance, and by its very nature it makes sense that they wouldn’t bring it up all that often. On the other hand, this book also established that Martin Stein was part of a government conspiracy to create superheroes, and Firestorm was the result of that, something that I’m almost positive has not come up again. But that’s the beauty of this book – it provides a framework that can be used to explain away virtually any discrepancy or change in continuity. That thing you remember that the heroes didn’t? It happened in a previous iteration of the Metaverse, and it’s still canon out there in the Multiverse…somewhere.
If you’re the kind of person who considers Watchmen sacrosanct, I can understand why you wouldn’t like this book. It does, in a way, undermine the conclusion of that story by answering the intentionally vague question of what would become of Rorschach’s journals, and (perhaps even more blasphemous) it allows for that world to have a happy ending. But as good as Watchmen is, I have no objection to the notion of returning to that universe. The HBO miniseries did it in excellent fashion. I like this one too, if for no other reason than because it confirms something very important: Superman is the most important hero in the entire universe.
Shoot, guys. I could have told you that.
Tues. Dec. 30
Graphic Novel: It’s a Bird
Notes: As with Doomsday Clock yesterday, I want to spend these last few days of the year with stories about Superman and about what he means. That quest led me back to It’s a Bird, the unique 2004 Vertigo graphic novel by Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen. It’s perhaps the most unusual Superman story of them all in that Superman isn’t actually in it.
The story, which is semi-autobiographical, starts with five-year-old Steve waiting in a hospital as his grandmother languishes. To placate him and his brother, their father brings them a Superman comic…after which, Steve swiftly rejects comics, as they remind him too much of the hospital, making it all the more ironic that he would grow up to write them. When an adult Steve is offered the job of writing Superman by his editor, he rejects it, unable to find the character relatable.
The story is mostly about Steve trying to find his way into the Superman, and along the way he takes some interesting detours. His father goes missing, and fears of the disease that took his grandmother come back. Meanwhile, everyone he talks to about getting offered Superman is ecstatic for him and dumbfounded that he doesn’t want the job. These two threads are intercut with pages of Steve’s own musings on Superman, on who the character is and what he means – or at least, what he’s supposed to mean – as he tries to find something about the character that he can make believable in the real world.
The interlacing storylines, of course, come together in the end, because such things always happen in fiction even if they almost never do in real life. His father’s disappearance turns out to be related to the death of Steve’s grandmother all those years ago, and in confronting his father and the disease that haunts his family, Steve starts to find a way in to Superman.
It’s a good story, a powerful one, but it’s one whose inherent premise is one I somewhat disagree with. Steve’s quest is to find a way to make Superman “real.” I don’t think that’s necessary. Superman isn’t part of our real world any more than Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny or the food replicators on Star Trek. That doesn’t mean that he isn’t important, though, or that there’s nothing to be learned from them. In a lot of ways, I think the very fact of Superman’s fanciful nature is perhaps the most important thing about him.
Just as the story is very atypical for a Superman comic (such as it is), so is Teddy Kristiansen’s artwork. Kristiansen’s style is an odd halfway point between sketches and realism, in some ways making me think of Art Spiegleman…which is appropriate enough, as this book echoes Maus in various ways. Both stories are autobiographical, and with a frame narrative about the author struggling to relate to their fathers. In Maus, of course, the ghost that hangs between Art and his father is the spectre of the holocaust, while in this graphic novel it’s the shadow of the Huntington’s Disease that follows Steve’s family.
The book, of course, is specifically described as “semi-autobiographical.” Not really knowing much about Seagle himself, I wouldn’t presume to declare which parts are true and which ones aren’t, but regardless of any plot elements I tend to believe that all of the emotion in this book is genuine. The concerns, the fears, the anxieties that “Steve” expresses are almost certainly part of Seagle’s own psyche. Writers tend to do that, after all.
This is the Superman book for people who don’t understand Superman. I don’t know if, in the end, it will actually help them figure the character out – at least, not the way that I understand him – but it will at the very least help them find a path through someone else asking the same questions, and that’s a journey very much worth reading.
Comics:Harley Quinn X Elvira #3 (Power Girl guest appearance), Justice League Red #5 (Team Member Power Girl), Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. Kong 2 #6 (Team Member)
Wed. Dec. 31
Comics: Superman #247, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth #29
Notes: Well glory be, here it is. 365 days later, and the journey I started back on January 1 with Action Comics #1 is about to end…or at least, to evolve. I’ll talk more about that (say it with me) later, but for now, it’s time for the final Superman reads of the year. I thought hard about what to read today. In the early part of the year I’d planned to end it with a classic “last” Superman story, like Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? or Kingdom Come, but I decided to add those when I did the week of comics that influenced James Gunn’s Superman. So how else to end it? I ultimately decided to go with two comic books about what Superman is, because that’s where this entire journey has led me anyway.
First is Superman #247, the Elliot S! Maggin/Curt Swan classic “Must There Be a Superman?” Like many of the stories I’ve read this year, I encountered this one for the first time when it was published in DC’s classic Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told collection. Let’s talk about why it qualifies.
The story begins with Superman taking on a special task for the Guardians of the Universe – a pod full of deadly spores on a path to Earth, and as the spores are yellow the Green Lanterns are helpless to stop it. Superman creates an artificial planet to draw the spores away safely, but is injured in the process, rescued by Green Lantern Katma Tui and brought back to Oa to heal. As Superman is healing, the Guardians take advantage of his unconscious state to plant a notion in his mind that his influence on Earth may be impeding human progress. (If this had been the “Year of Green Lantern,” you would have found me discussing a LOT of stories that drive home an important point: the Guardians are pompous assholes.) When Superman wakes up, the Guardians give him a tour of Oa, continually dropping comments about him contributing to a “Cultural Lag” on Earth, and sending him home with the notion that if he steps back, Earth will be better off.
As he returns to Earth, he stumbles on a child migrant worker being abused by his employer. Rescuing him, the child – Manuel – brings Superman back to his community where the residents begin begging him to help solve all their problems, such as fixing their crumbling houses. Superman refuses, saying that they need to know how to care for themselves, but an earthquake strikes just seconds later, destroying their homes. Superman blunts the quake and rebuilds their houses, but tries to convince them that they need to know how to care for themselves because no one – even Superman – can do anything. He returns to Metropolis only to get word of a cruise ship endangered by a waterspout, which he rushes off to save, even as the Guardians watch from afar.
Looking back at this story now, I feel like this was Maggin’s way of responding to people who asked why Superman didn’t just sweep in and fix all the problems in the world. After all, with his power, why couldn’t he just solve hunger, homelessness, war, famine, disease, and so forth? From a narrative standpoint, of course, the answer is obvious: if Superman were to do all these things, what stories would be left to tell? It would literally be the end of Superman, as a going storytelling concern. But what about in-universe? How do you explain it to a kid like Manuel, who’s getting beaten up by a man who basically controls his entire life? The answer is something that people who know Superman could have told you from the beginning: even with the best of intentions, having someone (like Superman) doing everything for them would hold them back, leave them unable to act or take care of themselves. It kind of reminds me of all those stupid ads begging me to use Google AI to write an email or a Facebook post as if I haven’t been perfectly capable of doing that for my entire life.
Superman is there to take care of the things that we can’t. As far as the things we CAN take care of…we shouldn’t expect him to do it all for us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take inspiration from him.
“Inspiration” is the theme of the final comic I’m going to read in this year of Superman, Jack Kirby’s Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth #29. Kamandi, for the uninitiated, was a series about a post-apocalyptic world in which the human race is all but extinct, and the world is populated by anthropomorphized animals. In this issue Kamandi, one of the few remaining humans, finds the “Tablet of Revelation,” an ancient carving that prophesies the “return of the Mighty One,” a great warrior of the past. When the apes see Kamandi’s friend Ben Boxer, they believe him to be the returned “Mighty One.” One of the apes, Zuma, tries to engage him in combat, but the elder says that the Mighty One can only be revealed by demonstrating his powers against overwhelming odds. A catapult hurls claimants through the sky to prove that they can fly higher than the tallest building, an enormous boulder called the “Daily Planet” awaits the man who can move it, and so forth. Ben’s mutant powers convince some of the apes he’s the Mighty One, but a battle breaks out when they pledge to take him to his suit. In the fight, they come across a very familiar blue costume with a cape and a brilliant scarlet S-shield. Zuma tries to claim the costume, but perishes in battle as Kamandi defends the suit, saying “I know who owns it! I know that somewhere he’s still alive!” The suit is left, waiting until the true Mighty One returns.
This comic was released in 1975, some 30 years before the idea of the S-symbol standing for “hope” was put in place, but it’s hard not to think of it as you read this story. Kamandi’s faith that Superman is still out there is the sort of thing you’d expect, it feels like an appropriate place for the legend. The future of the DC Universe has been rewritten dozens of times, of course, with many of the various possibilities showing an immortal Superman, a legacy of heroes that lasts a millennia, or both. This feels like part of that, like the hero himself has left something behind with the promise that more is to come.
And that “promise of more to come” feels an appropriate place for me to stop.
Almost.
Movie: Superman (2025)
Notes: The first movie I watched this year was the original Christopher Reeve Superman from 1978. I’m going to end the year by revisiting the movie that inspired me to start this journey in the first place, James Gunn’s Superman. I’m not going to write it up again – Heavens knows you can find that on my original review. But I’m going to watch and enjoy.
One year later, and I have succeeded. I have watched, read, or listened to at least one thing starring or about Superman or a member of his family for an entire year. I’m actually quite stunned that I made it.
And I’ve still got so much to say.
But not yet. Come back Friday, friends, for my final thoughts on this year-long Odyssey, and my explanation of where I’m going from here.
Happy New Year.
Blake M. Petitis 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.
Continuing on from last week, I’m still making my way through all of the different Superman adaptations I haven’t touched upon so far. Of course, Thanksgiving is this week as well, and as always, life is bound to throw a few curve balls into my plans, because life enjoys doing that to me. But I’ve got a bare minimum of seven movies and TV shows I’m going to try to hit this week. Can I do it in seven days? Your guess is as good as mine.
TV Episode:Superboy Season 1, Episode 1, “The Jewel of the Techacal.”
Notes: The same year as the Ruby-Spears Superman animated series I wrote about last week, the Salkinds (producers of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies) gave us a new live-action TV series starring John Haymes Newton as a college-age Superboy. Newton was replaced after one season with Gerard Christopher, whom I remember liking in the role a lot more, but I haven’t watched any of these episodes in years. I should, in all fairness, watch at least Christopher’s first episode as well for the sake of comparison, but I’ve only got the first season of the show on DVD and it does not appear to be on HBO Max because – and I cannot stress this enough – Warner Bros. does not know what the hell it’s doing. I’ve still got the whole month of December, though, so if I manage to locate any of the Christopher episodes, I’ll try to squeeze one in for the sake of completion. For now, though, we’re going to look at the first episode of the series, “The Jewel of the Techacal.”
Newton was joined by Stacy Haiduk as Lana Lang, and in a nice nod to comic book continuity, the episode begins with her archaeologist father, who is apparently nervous to see his daughter again after some time as he comes to town with a set of Mayan artifacts. Lana and Clark are both students at Shuster College (cute), along with T.J. White (son of Perry, of course), and a young Lex Luthor who gives neither “mad scientist” nor “insidious businessman” vibes, but rather came out of central casting in the search for a villain in an 80s movie about a ski resort whose wacky staff has to show up some snobbish guests. Anyway, as the episode opens, Professor Lang’s plane is having some trouble, its landing gear refusing to go down, so Superboy zips into the sky to make a quick repair. Lana is overjoyed that her father doesn’t – y’know – die, but is despondent only minutes later when he quickly blows her off to tend to his artifacts. The tension gets worse when Professor Lang suddenly and inexplicably collapses, a malady his assistant attributes to a curse that came with the artifacts they found. While he’s out, Lex and his goon plot to steal the artifacts, but Superboy arrives to stop it, only to find himself susceptible to the curse as well. He collapses while Lex makes off with an ancient chest containing…well, the curse, I guess. Superboy recovers and catches Lex, turning him over to the cops with most of the artifacts – all except for the cursed chest, which he brings back to…well, presumably to Techacal. We only SEE him flying into the clouds, because shooting in South America would have been entirely too expensive. Returning the chest breaks the curse, though, and Professor Lang recovers, giving him and Lana another chance.
The next time I want to crack jokes about the teen soap opera aspects of Superman and Lois, I’m going to stop myself and remember this show, because holy CRAP was this stuff overwrought. Is it understandable that Lana is upset to have her father lying in a hospital bed dying, apparently, of nothing? Absolutely. Should she be behaving like a character in a telenovela? Absolutely not. On the other hand, that’s better than the utter lack of emotion that we get from Scott Wells as Lex Luthor. (Lex only appeared in four episodes of season one and he, too, was recast for the second season.) As for Newton himself…he’s okay, but he’s a little stiff. The show doesn’t do much to justify why this is Superboy instead of Superman either, save for the fact that he’s in college and not yet in Metropolis. All things considered, it’s kind of a miracle that the show lasted as long as it did.
The really shocking thing, though, is that through 1988 there hasn’t been a single Superman-related TV series that has a proper status quo-establishing pilot. I guess that sort of requirement is more recent than I had realized.
Comics: DC K.O. #2, Superman Vol. 6 #32, Justice League Unlimited Vol. 2 #13
Notes: I popped by the comic shop today as well, grabbing this week’s books, and I’m going to take a little time this afternoon to catch up on DC’s current crossover event, DC K.O., the second issue of which is sitting in my hot little hands right now. In order to claim the Omega Energy before Darkseid – and with it, the power to reshape the entire universe – 32 heroes and villains have made it through the first stage of the gauntlet. In issue two, 16 items have been scattered across the battlefield. The rules are simple: if you’re holding one of the items when time runs out you advance to the next round. If you aren’t, you die. Lex Luthor (showing far more cunning than his counterpart in the Superboy TV show) makes right for a collection of Lantern power rings, while Superman tries not only to outrace Luthor, but stop the other villains at the same time.
Screenshot
This issue is where I feel like we’re really going to see exactly what DC K.O. is. The conceit is that the eventual winner of this tournament will be able to reset the universe as they see fit, so the consequences here are kind of minimal – heroes and villains alike can be broken, maimed, even die, and you know that when that reset button is hit it’s all going to go away. Normally I would consider the existence of that sort of reset to be a negative, but K.O. has two major things going for it. First, the writers are using the lack of consequences as an opportunity to really cut loose, pushing the battles to extremes that they normally would never approach. Even Superman has an opportunity to be more brutal without violating his ethos, and this issue shows us just how scary that would be. The other thing is that although there IS a reset button included, that button will be used at the whim of whoever eventually wins the tournament, and I have a suspicion that it’s not going to be a simple square one reset. Whoever wins is probably going to have the opportunity to change some things when they rebuild the universe (for example, should a member of the Bat-family come out on top, it seems like this would be a prime opportunity to bring back a certain faithful butler whose presence has been sorely missed for quite some time), and I’m very curious to see what shape that will take.
Superman #32 fills in a blank and continues the side-story at the same time. Half the issue is used to explain where Lex and the rest of the villains came from in DC K.O. #1 when they suddenly joined the tournament. The other half picks up the story of Lois and Superboy-Prime versus Darkseid’s Legion at the Fortress of Solitude. The Lex stuff is nice to explain something that I’m sure a lot of of were curious about, but I’m more satisfied with the Lois/ Prime storyline. Prime’s characterization has shifted since the days of Infinite Crisis, sliding from a bitter ex-fanboy to a kid who leans on the fourth wall in a way that almost feels Deadpool-like. Considering his origins, it makes sense, and it never goes so far as to have him addressing the reader; instead, it’s more like he’s got awareness of the medium he’s in and he’s using it. I didn’t have it on my bingo card for the Year of Superman, but the redemption of Superboy-Prime is shaping up to be a great story.
And in Justice League Unlimited #13, we get part two of “The Terrific Ten.” Mr. Terrific leads his team of time-tossed Justice Leaguers (including the Electric Blue Superman and a young Power Girl) into Hell itself to confront the demon Neron, who has chosen a devil of a time to juice up some of Earth’s villains again. Meanwhile, the very Omega Energy that the heroes in the main book are trying to claim is simultaneously rendering Earth uninhabitable, and the remaining Justice Leaguers are trying to help the Titans coordinate the evacuation of the entire planet. At the same time, they’re trying to round up the amped-up villains that Neron has set loose. I have to say this for K.O. – I’ve read most of the tie-ins so far, and none of them feel the same as the others. What’s happening in Superman and Justice League are totally different than Titans and Flash. And while some of them feel more immediately relevant to the main storyline, none of them feel wasted or irrelevant to the titles that they’re reaching into. You can’t say that about every crossover, and the DC creators deserve a lot of credit for making it work so well thus far.
Thur., Nov. 27
Comic: New Adventures of Superboy #38, JSA #54 (Guest Appearance)
Notes: Happy Thanksgiving! Well, it’s Thanksgiving as I write this. By the time you read this, it’ll be December 3, and I’m sure you’ll all be watching the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, and if you aren’t, what even are you doing with your holidays? But at the time I write this I just took the dessert I made out of the oven, my wife is in the kitchen making her cornbread casserole, and Eddie and I are on the couch watching the Macy’s parade. Since they don’t have a Superman balloon for some insane reason, I need to work in something else to maintain my streak. Fortunately, the DC Universe app has me covered with New Adventures of Superboy #38, one of the terribly rare Thanksgiving comics out there.
The story begins with Superboy paying a visit to the Soames Reformatory, where he pitches in with Thanksgiving dinner by cooking the turkeys with his X-Ray vision. There’s one resident of the reform school who isn’t impressed, though: young Lex Luthor. Lex pitches a fit and Superboy leaves, upset that for all his genius, he fears that Lex will never mend his ways. (Prescient kid, that Superboy.) But there’s no time to bemoan Lex’s fate – he’s gotta bounce to the future for the monthly meeting with the Legion of Super-Heroes. At the same time (somehow), 13 years in the future, an adult Superman is making a visit BACK in time. Superboy collides with his grown-up self in the timestream, and the two of them are hurled back to their respective time periods, but with their minds switched. Superman – in Superboy’s body – winds up back in the 60s, while Superboy in Superman’s body goes to 1982.
Superman wakes up in Superboy’s body, believing that something has made him younger, and decides to go hide out in the empty Kent house in Smallville until he can figure out what’s going on, shocked to find his parents there, alive. Stunned, he puts on teen Clark’s clothes and sits down for a Thanksgiving dinner with his family and teenage friends. The next day, Lex manages to sneak out of the reformatory. Superman/boy, meanwhile, suddenly finds himself in a Groundhog’s Day Loop of reliving Thanksgiving, the result of some sort of device Luthor planted on him the day before. He tries to break the loop by, instead of travelling to the future to see the Legion switching it up and going to the past. Somehow, this works, because Albert Einstein said if he went far enough back he would loop around to where he started from. Superman catches Lex, but his rage at what his former friend will one day become nearly pushes him to destroy him in anger.
The story continues in Superman #380, where we see the other half of the story…presumably. That issue isn’t on the DC Infinity app. I cannot stress this enough, they have GOT to get their act together with this app. The story’s also kind of light on Thanksgiving cheer, so I’m going to call that an appetizer, with the main course being an unabashedly holiday story from JSA #54.
It’s Thanksgiving at the Justice Society brownstone in Manhattan, and they’ve invited the Justice League to join them. We get a series of vignettes to begin the story – Batman and Mr. Terrific talking shop, Wonder Woman and Wildcat having the required awkward political disagreement, Impulse and Jakeem Thunder bonding over a mutual hatred of school, and so forth. We get an amusing bit where Stargirl is upset about being placed at the kids’ table while Captain Marvel (whose secret identity she knows, but not everybody else does) gets to sit with the adults. Everything is going great…until Kulak the Sorcerer and the Warlock of Ys appear. Kulak is out for revenge against the JSA, the Warlock hates the JLA, but NEITHER of them really counted on just how many heroes’ dinner they just ruined. Their resistance…doesn’t last long. In the end, the two teams order a tower of pizzas and celebrate the holiday the way Batman always predicted they would.
Is it heavy on Superman content? No. But he gets a few nice moments, such as catching Wildcat flying out the window after Wonder Woman “disagrees” with him and another where he and Alan Scott crack their knuckles before wiping the floor with the bad guys. But it’s a funny, heartfelt story by Geoff Johns and Don Kramer, which is only slightly overshadowed by the absolute masterpiece that the Christmas story in the next issue would be. There’s no Super-family characters in that one so I probably won’t be reading it, but if you’re looking for Christmas comics to read over the next month, make sure you add it to your list.
Fri., Nov. 28
Movie Serial: Superman (1948), Episodes 1-15
Notes: I’ve been holding off on this one until I had a day with a big chunk of time where I could watch it, as the 15 episodes of the original Superman movie serial make up a whopping four hours and change combined, but there was no way I could consider this project complete without including the work of Kirk Alyn, the first actor to portray Superman in live action.
(Before anybody comes in the comments trying to correct me, I know that Alyn wasn’t the first actor to wear a Superman costume. Ray Middleton dressed as Superman during the 1939 World’s Fair. But to the best of my knowledge, there was no footage of Middleton and, if there is, it doesn’t seem to exist anywhere. We’ve got a few still photos. Alyn’s is the earliest actual performance we can WATCH.)
Anyway, I’m not going to try to do a total recap of the movie serial the way I do for a lot of the things I watch. It’s too long, frankly, and like a lot of movie serials there’s a lot of repetition that would make it kind of tedious to read about. But here’s what’s important: the serial tells the story of the destruction of Krypton and baby Kal-El coming to Earth, being raised by the Kents, and then making up his mind to become a hero in the city of Metropolis all in the first 20-minute episode. After that, we see Superman at odds with assorted criminals and natural disasters before finally coming into conflict with the main villain of the serial: the Spider Lady, who is using her “Reducing Ray” to hold the world hostage.
The storyline is very much in keeping with a lot of the adventure serials of the era: goofy sci-fi weapons of dubious practicality, a femme fatale villain with a sort of bland identity, and tons and tons of goons that came straight out of the Goon Casting Academy. It’s the fact that the hero of this one is Superman rather than “Commando Cody” or something that makes it interesting. And the Superman we get here is very well done. Kirk Alyn is a great Superman for the era: he’s strong, but also somewhat joyful. He’s having FUN with his powers, and that’s something that you can’t always say. He also is quite clearly taking his cues from Bud Collyer’s portrayal of the character on the radio and in the Fleischer shorts, duplicating the way Collyer would start off his catch phrase as Clark Kent (“This looks like a job…”) and then drop his voice an octave (“…for SUPERMAN!”) to signal that he’s going into action. Even the credits for the serial indicate that it is “adapted from the Superman Radio Program,” so there’s no pretending it’s a coincidence.
Noel Neill, as I mentioned last week, is our Lois Lane, a role she would reprise when Phyllis Coates left The Adventures of Superman a few years later…and I LOVE Neill’s Lois. She’s slick, clever, and occasionally even devious. She’s miffed at Clark for scooping her on the story that got him his job at the Daily Planet (a story beat that John Byrne would duplicate for his Man of Steel series four decades later) and isn’t above pulling some sneaky tricks to get him out of the way so she can beat him to the story. She’s feisty and ferocious, and I’m there for it.
Special effects being what they were in 1948, the serial makes frequent use of animation. The destruction of Krypton, the rocketship to Earth, any time Superman flies, and various super-feats that would be too difficult to portray in live action are all done through animation. It’s not – I must concede – particularly CONVINCING animation. It looks like the scenes in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? where the toons and live-action characters coexist. But for the time, it was innovative, and the animation is good, fluid, and impressive.
Kirk Alyn’s name is overlooked far too often when we’re talking about the actors who have portrayed the Man of Steel. This serial and his performance are both great fun, and worthy of inclusion…it wouldn’t have been a Year of Superman without him.
Sat., Nov. 29
TV Episode:Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman Season 1, Episodes 1-2, “Pilot,” Superman and Lois Season 3, Episode 6, “Of Sound Mind.”
Notes: In 1993 it was time for TV to take another swing at the Man of Steel. But as it WAS the 90s, this time out the focus was more 90s as well. For a superhero show, the emphasis was on the relationship and burgeoning romance between Lois Lane (Teri Hatcher) and Clark Kent (Dean Cain). In fact, they even gave Lois top billing in the title, as if to emphasize the fact that this wasn’t like the OLD adventures of Superman at all. The series doesn’t even begin with Clark, it begins with Lois returning to the Daily Planet office stripping off a disguise she used to go undercover to land a big story. As they’re celebrating her scoop, a young man steps off the bus outside, carrying a suitcase with the initials “C.K.” The young Clark Kent meets with Perry White (the great Lane Smith, perhaps my favorite Perry White of all time), who rejects him due to his lack of experience. He retreats to the rundown apartment he’s renting and, as a lightbulb above his head begins flickering, he casually floats to the ceiling and fixes it. Because, y’know, super powers. Lois, meanwhile, retreats to the apartment she shares with her sister Lucy, who berates her for the way she constantly drives away all the men in her life for being too weak, then sobs while watching a sappy movie. Because yeah, it’s a superhero TV show, but it’s also a romantic comedy.
The next day, Clark tracks down an aging actress in an abandoned theater, poaching a human interest story he heard Lois reject in Perry’s office, and brings it to the Planet, where his initiative impresses Perry enough to give him the job. Just seconds later, the TV in the office shows a disaster at a space launch. Lois is determined to follow leads that point to a conspiracy in the space program, and over her objections, Perry assigns her to partner with the newcomer Clark. She’s not thrilled about it, and she’s less thrilled when her scheduled date for a gala thrown by Lex Luthor drops out, forcing her to ask Clark to accompany her if she wants any chance at landing the first one-on-one interview Luthor has ever given.
Before the Gala he flies home to Smallville (under his own power, naturally) to have dinner with his parents (Eddie Jones and Jonathan and K Callan as Martha), where he bemoans the fact that he has to hide his powers instead of openly helping people. Jonathan, always the wise one, tells him he’ll find a way. At the Gala, Clark has his socks knocked off when he sees Lois dressed to the nines, but she’s preoccupied dancing with businessman Lex Luthor (John Shea). Luthor turns out to be charming, showing off his tower and saying how he loves the fact that everyone in Metropolis has to look up to see him. He uses the ball as an opportunity to announce his newest initiative: the creation of a space station bearing his name. He’s outraged, though, when the Congress of Nations rejects his proposal to continue their own plans.
Over the next few days Lois – despite herself – finds that she’s warming up to Clark, who has a charm she can’t deny, and is full of surprises, like the ability to read Chinese (which he demonstrates after bringing her Chinese food – unbeknownst to her – from China). He also comforts her when they find a source who has been feeding her information about the space sabotage dead, an apparent suicide, although Lois and Clark aren’t buying it. After a few close calls of nearly being caught helping people, Clark asks his mom to help him make an “outfit” to use.
Lois continues to pursue the story, finally getting herself and Jimmy captured. Clark manages to find her trapped in an empty warehouse, but has to allow himself to get caught in order to protect his secret. As Lois berates him for bumbling in without a plan, he casually frees himself from the shackles, but allows Lois to continue with her raving as it transmogrifies into a bit of a self-therapy session, then he frees them both. He gets Lois – and the unconscious Jimmy – out of the warehouse just before it’s blown up. The evidence she has saves the space launch, and Clark goes back to Smallville to help finish his disguise. After a montage, he settles on something…iconic: blue tights, with red boots, trunks, and a cape. Something is missing, thought and Martha digs into a chest to pull out the blanket Clark was wrapped in as a baby, complete with a familiar crest.
Jonathan, meanwhile, is watching the space launch on TV, not knowing that Lois has 1) stowed away on the rocket and 2) discovered a bomb. She tries to disarm the bomb, but instead causes a mechanical error that ends the countdown. Sensing something is wrong, Clark takes to the air and arrives just in time to reach the bomb and EAT the explosive, saving the rocket, its crew, and Lois. The crew – planning to be long-term colonists on the space station – fear the mission will end as their window is about to close, but Superman gets beneath the rocket and flies it into orbit himself, docking it with the station and saving the mission. In the final scene, the newly-dubbed Superman arrives at Lex Luthor’s tower to confront him over the bomb: he knows that Luthor was behind the sabotage to promote his own station. And although he can’t prove any of it, he’s going to have his eyes on Luthor from now on. As he takes off, he tells Luthor “If you ever need to find me, all you have to do is look up.”
If you remember the personal timeline of my experience with Superman, you may remember that I first became a big fan of the character in the early 90s, and this show was one of the elements that paralleled that. By the time it came out in 1993, I was already big into the comics, but the show helped fuel that fandom for a few years, helping to bolster Superman’s status as an icon (recently reignited thanks to his “death”) and carrying it forward. And it was, sincerely, the perfect show for the era. It’s VERY 90s, and the different take on Superman works for the time period. Teri Hatcher’s Lois is confident (good) bordering on arrogant (bad), but it soon becomes clear that it’s a mask for her rather deep loneliness (awwwww). Clark, meanwhile, isn’t the pushover that we had in the Christopher Reeve era. His background from “Smallville” leads to people (Lois, for instance) underestimating him, but he proves to be shrewd and clever, in addition to just being competent at reporting. This show also has to get credit for one of my favorite Superman lines, one that people (myself included) often misattribute to Superman For All Seasons: when a kid tells Superman she likes his costume, he replies, “Thanks, my mother made it for me.”
The supporting cast is aces as well. I mentioned already how much I love Lane Smith as Perry White, with a sort of drawl that makes his character sound like he’s handing out homespun wisdom. Jones and Callan as the Kents make for a perfect sounding board for Clark, demonstrating yet again how wise it was of John Byrne to let them live to Clark’s adulthood rather than forcing him to spend his life UTTERLY alone. And John Shea’s Lex Luthor probably wouldn’t have worked if they were going for the “mad scientist” interpretation of the character, but as the ruthless businessman, he’s perfectly suited for the role. Tracy Skoggins’ predatory Cat Grant is very much a reflection of the earliest versions of the character, and although he would be replaced in favor of a younger actor later in the series, I rather liked Michael Landes’ Jimmy Olsen.
One thing I’ve noticed is just how well the various live-action incarnations of Superman act as a sort of capsule of the time. While the broad strokes remain the same, the details in each incarnation of the character give you a good idea of where culture was at that point. 90s television was the era of the relationship drama, and this show reflects the Superman version of that perfectly.
Sun., Nov. 30
Novel: The Last Days of Krypton by Kevin J. Anderson
Notes: I’ve been reading this novel off and on for about two weeks, and I finished it up today. If there’s one thing I wish I had squeezed more of into this Year of Superman, it’s prose fiction…but the truth is there isn’t all THAT much to choose from, and some of the best — specifically as the novels of Elliot S! Maggin — were books I read just last year, not long before I decided to do this project, and I didn’t quite have the impetus for a re-read just yet. But this book by frequent Star Wars writer Kevin J. Anderson went a long way towards scratching that itch.
As the title implies, this book tells us the story of the final days (final years, actually, but that’s not as catchy a title) of the planet Krypton before its ultimate destruction. Jor-El is the protagonist of the book, a scientist whose work has been suppressed by Krypton’s staunchly unbending ruling council, even as he finds sign after sign that the planet is in imminent danger. One of the few people who takes him seriously is Councilor Dru-Zod, who has an eye on conquest and forges a bond with Jor-El in the hopes of using him towards his own ends. Over the course of the book, Jor-El falls in love with an artist, Lara Lor-Van, and colludes with his scientist brother Zor-El (mayor of Argo City) to help save the planet from itself.
Spoiler warning: It doesn’t quite work out.
That’s the tricky thing with prequels: so much of what’s going to happen is a foregone conclusion. Anybody with even a passing knowledge of Superman’s history knows that Jor-El’s efforts to save the planet will fail and that he and Lara will perish after sending their infant son Kal-El into space. People who have a slightly deeper – but still not encyclopedic – knowledge of the lore will also know that before the end of the story Zod will be in the Phantom Zone, allowing him to survive the planet’s destruction. And the real ones, of course, will know that Zor-El will save Argo City from Krypton’s destruction only to suffer its own doom some years later. So since all of these things are locked into canon before you even crack open the book, where’s the tension? Where’s the drama?
Miraculously, it’s there.
Anderson does a fine job of weaving a story that’s still compelling despite the fact that we know more or less how it’s all going to go. The relationship between Zod and Jor-El has shades of Shakespearean tragedy, of a friendship gone wrong, although the degree to which Zod ever actually considered Jor-El a friend is debatable. He also does a fine job of fleshing out Lara and Zor-El, characters who have never been quite as well-developed in the comics as Jor-El or Zod, imbuing them with distinct personalities that fit cleanly into the story and both serve as support for Jor-El in different ways.
Most impressive to me, though, is how Anderson plunders decades of Superman continuity for the details that populate this story. Stories from the comics like the ancient Kryptonian despot Jax-Ur, the abduction of Kandor by Brainiac, or the question of just why Argo City was beneath a dome in the first place all factor into the storyline. But Anderson avoids the trap that so many prequels fall into of feeling like the writers are just connecting the dots, trying to piece together the information we already have, and instead incorporates these different elements organically and sometimes in such a subtle way that you don’t quite realize the significance of certain things until they come to the forefront.
The story paints Krypton’s destruction as imminent, and finds fault with multiple characters – even, to a degree, Jor-El himself. It builds to the tragedy, this notion that the death of Krypton’s civilization may have been avoidable, but was propelled by hubris. The book is a little vague on just how inevitable the end of the planet was – there are several elements that make it seem like Krypton was doomed no matter what anybody did – but there are definitely actions by certain people that accelerate its death, and if not for the pigheadedness of those in charge, the people of Krypton may have found a way to save themselves, even if the planet as a whole was doomed.
Anderson isn’t beholden to any particular continuity. As I said, many of the elements are drawn from different eras of the comic books, but it’s not married to any of them. (It would fit fairly well with the Silver Age, for example, but doesn’t fit at all with the Man of Steel era.) Other things, like Jor-El’s physical description of white hair and shimmering white robes, seem to come more from the movies. Ultimately, though, it serves as a sort of platonic example of the final days of a grand civilization and a backdrop of the tragedy that ultimately would give birth to Earth’s greatest hero.
Mon. Dec. 1.
Comics: Batman: Wayne Family Adventures #47 (Jonathan and Martha Kent Guest appearance), Action Comics #1092
Notes: I have a child. Children have things like choir rehearsal and basketball practice. Dad has no time to do stuff. This is the circle of life. Anyway, without the time to watch anything today, I’m squeezing in some comics.
I don’t often write about the quick read “DC Go” comics, but every so often I get one that’s so delightful I need to draw attention to it. Batman: Wayne Family Adventures is a bit of a reimagining of the Batman characters as a sort of family dramedy. The focus is on Bruce and his multitude of adopted children, and although they are superheroes, the comic strip is really about them functioning as a family, with most actual adventures happening off-panel. Episode #47 is a spotlight on Alfred, having what appears to be a fairly regular dinner with his friends, Jonathan and Martha Kent. The story is sweet and simple, a portrait of the adopted parents of Earth’s two greatest heroes spending time together and relating to one another in a way that nobody else in the world possibly could. We’ve seen elements of this in the main continuity from time to time, but this short story really is a treat.
On to Action Comics #1092, which is sort of a breather issue. The Captain Comet storyline wrapped up last issue, so this month we see young Clark Kent bemoaning the fact that Lana Lang is interested in Superboy instead of “him,” Pete Ross wonder why he best friend is so distant lately, and Sam Lane roll into town to try to do something about this super powered teenager that’s been running around lately. There’s a lot of good character stuff here for Superboy – Mark Waid is dipping his toes into the struggles of Clark trying not to draw attention to himself, and seems to be leaning in towards the old Silver Age status quo of Pete Ross figuring out that Clark is Superboy but keeping that information private. The scene with Sam Lane is especially good, demonstrating the relationship that Superboy has forged with the people of Smallville in a relatively short time. On the other hand, Waid has a teenage Clark make reference to the Star Wars prequels, a comment that makes me feel egregiously old and for which I may never forgive him.
Tues., Dec. 2
Comic: Adventure Comics #423
Notes: I had intended, this week, to try to wrap up at least the most important “Superman Through the Ages” that I hadn’t gotten to yet – things like the pilot episode of Smallville and Supergirl, or to finally talk about Henry Cavill’s Superman movies. But it’s that time of year, guys. Holidays, family events, work, and a kid who is into both choir and basketball are eating up my time. I’ve got the last few weeks of this project planned a little – holiday tales for the week before Christmas and some all-star stuff, including “endings” for that week before the new year. In the two weeks between now and then, I’m not going to make myself beholden to any theme and I’m going to read whatever I want on the day, but I’m also going to do my best to scratch off as many of the remaining movies and TV shows from my list as possible.
Today, though, that isn’t going to happen, because of the aforementioned work and basketball and whatnot. So instead, let’s look at Adventure Comics #423, a story from the time that Supergirl was the headliner of the series, but which has her in conflict with Superman, who – as you see from the cover – she’s calling a traitor. In “Treachery,” written by E. Nelson Bridwell and Steve Skeates with art by Mike Sekowsky and Bob Oskner, Linda Danvers is shopping one day when she tries on a pair of sunglasses that she cannot remove from her face. The glasses are the creation of aliens who have been observing her from space and who plan to control her via messages embedded in the glasses. The aliens force Linda to go to Metropolis to visit her cousin Clark (you may have heard of him), and secretly switch his glasses for a pair sent by the aliens. They force Superman and Supergirl to visit their spacecraft, hidden beneath the waters of the bay, and collect glasses to use on the rest of Earth’s superheroes. As they enter, the heroes immediately begin mopping the floor up with the aliens before their leader Gur realizes his crony ordered them to enter the craft, but gave no commands preventing them from fighting back. He orders them to cease all action and executes the flunky responsible. Superman is ordered to trick the rest of the Justice League into putting on the glasses, but without specific orders of her own, Supergirl again rebels against the aliens and, again, is stopped by Gur. Gur’s brother, however, however, opposed to Gur’s plans for conquest, gives Supergirl an order to use her heat vision, which melts the glasses off her face and sets her free. She makes short work of the aliens and rushes to the Justice League satellite, where Superman is trying to con his teammates into wearing the glasses. (There’s a particularly funny panel where he’s grabbing the Atom like a doll and trying to force the glasses onto his face.) Supergirl tells Green Lantern to blast the glasses off Superman’s face and set him free. Meanwhile, the alien ship is sinking and Gur and his brother fight, with the two of them eventually going down with the ship as the rest of their crew escapes. Superman and Supergirl build a craft to send the rest of the aliens home, hoping that Gur was one-of-a-kind.
I’ve never read this story before, and I was surprised by just how much I liked it. The hero-versus-hero trope is kind of tired, as is the “mind controlled hero,” but it actually works here because there’s a reasonable explanation. “Here, try on these sunglasses.” It’s a simple enough way to kick things off, and it’s completely believable that even a Supergirl would be off guard and fall into that trap. From that point, it’s easy enough to accept her swapping Clark’s glasses and pulling him in as well. The only weak point was Superman utterly failing to convince the rest of the JLA to put the glasses on – he’s just not that good at deception. Speaking of which, it’s a good thing that nobody else seemed to see Superman flying around wearing the alien spectacles, because the ol’ Clark Kent disguise would have gone out the window REALLY quickly if they had.
We’re going into the last month of the year, friends, and my goal at this point is just to knock off as many things remaining on my list as possible. So expect the next two weeks to be kind of eclectic – movies, TV shows, comics, and whatever else I haven’t gotten around to yet. Thanks for sticking around this long – I hope you’ll find the last month of this little project to be as much fun as the first 11.
As I write this, it’s Oct. 29 and I am still very much in the Halloween mood. I know, however, that this isn’t going to be posted until Nov. 5, and I respect the fact that you guys have probably shifted gears by now. So I’m going to do another random week for you, bouncing from one story to another at will and not beholden to anything in particular. You may still see a vampire or two, I make no promises.
Well, except for the promise that you’ll see a picture of my kid in his Halloween costume when we get to Friday. I can absolutely promise you THAT.
Comics:Superman #410, 412, 413, Jon Kent: This Internship is My Kryptonite #16
Notes: With the end of the year looming, I’m going to try to tick off some of the more random comics on my list that I haven’t gotten around to, books that don’t fit into any particular theme or week, but that I want to read for one reason or another. And I’m going to start in 1985 with a three-part Lex Luthor story that has become a minor classic.
Superman #410 starts normally enough, with Superman saving Honolulu from a plunging satellite. With Hawaii safe, Clark returns to the Daily Planet office and dutifully types out the story, turning it over to Perry White to put on the front page of the paper. As the evening edition hits the streets, though, Morgan Edge comes to Perry with horrifying news – the satellite Superman supposedly stopped is still in orbit, making the story he “told” Clark Kent seem fake. Superman zips to space to investigate and finds the satellite he clearly remembers catching floating in orbit where it belongs. Superman is faced with a horrible choice – tell Edge the truth and have people believe Superman is losing his grip on reality, or allow him to think Clark falsified the story. Given a choice between shattering peoples’ trust in Superman or in Clark Kent, he allows Edge to think Clark was at fault. Edge and Perry immediately fire Clark from both the Planet and WGBS news. As Clark tries to find the truth about what happened, we see Lex Luthor in a secluded island hideaway, boasting to his minions how he has found a way to broadcast false memories into Superman’s mind.
The trilogy skips issue #411, the legendary tribute to Julius Schwartz issue, and resumes in Superman #412, which begins with a humiliated Clark Kent on the unemployment line. He’s called away just as he’s about to be served, as Superman is needed to prevent a nearby construction disaster. Meanwhile, as Perry, Lois, Jimmy, and Lana agonize over Clark’s dismissal, Luthor is gloating over how Superman “allowed” his old pal Clark to take the fall for his own false memories. Lana, in fact, tears into Superman the next time she sees him for the same reason. Clark turns to his old friend Steve Lombard – who now owns a sporting goods store – for work. They’re hanging out when Luthor arrives in Metropolis, planting a series of “Scrambler Rods” around the city and nearly impaling Steve in the process. As he catches up to Luthor, an enraged Superman drives his fist into Luthor’s chest, killing him. When he withdraws his hand, Luthor’s armor explodes in an atomic wave that destroys the entire city of Metropolis!
For, like, a panel, before Superman finds himself clinging to the top of a skyscraper, having hallucinated the entire encounter. Luthor, meanwhile, has finished planting his rods, ready for the final phase of his “Ultimate Revenge” plan.
The final chapter picks up just seconds later, Superman still at the top of the building, having lost all faith in his own grip on reality. Even though he’s certain that Luthor is behind all of his current troubles, he no longer trusts his own senses, destroying his effectiveness as Superman. He stumbles back to Steve’s store, where Steve receives a phone call from Lois with a plan of her own. She has Steve invite Clark to a “charity bash” that evening, to which he reluctantly agrees. As he ponders his future, another hallucination hits – Steve’s store seems to vanish, then the entire city block, then the entire city, including his friends. Clark is missing, then, when the “charity bash” begins – actually a dinner in honor of Clark thrown by the people who still believe in him. While his friends give testimonies in Clark’s honor, Superman watches in horror as Luthor makes him believe he is obliterating the entire planet Earth. While Luthor has Superman captive, suffering from his hallucinations, Clark’s friends are growing worried, searching for him, wondering where he’s gone. When Superman’s hearing picks up on their fervent pleas, it breaks through Luthor’s spell. He goes after Luthor, but a strange vortex plucks Luthor from his clutches before he can bring him to justice. Superman joins Clark’s “other” friends at the dinner, claiming the whole thing was part of a plan of his to smoke Luthor out, thanks Clark for going along with it, and says he’s SURE Clark is looking forward to getting back to work.
I’ve said several times that the late 70s and early 80s were kind of a pallid era for the Superman comics. The villains and stories felt recycled and pointless, and although there were attempts at change (Lois “breaking up” with Superman, Clark dating Lana, etc.) none of it felt particularly important or consequential. But in the last year or so before the John Byrne reboot, they took some chances, and this story is one of the better ones. Although the conclusion still puts everything back in its neat little box, the journey to get there is an interesting one and I like the whole concept of everybody coming out in support not of Superman, but of Clark Kent. This was a time when Clark was usually still written as the disguise and Superman as the real personality, so having people in Clark’s corner for once was fresh and satisfying. Luthor’s getaway is a little irritating, but the knowledge that the vortex was sucking him up to participate in Crisis on Infinite Earths helps a bit. I almost wish they hadn’t given Clark his job back at the end – with the reboot on the horizon it wouldn’t have really made much of a difference, but may have made this story even more memorable.
Thur. Oct. 30
Podcast: Totally Rad Christmas, Episode, “Superboy-Young Dracula (w/CM Chuck)”
Notes: It’s the day before Halloween, so I decided to take a break from my usual Star Trek podcast on the way to work and see if the Totally Rad Christmas podcast had dropped any Halloween episodes this year. To my delight, I found that Gerry D and CM Chuck had gotten together to review an episode of the 1988 Superboy series in which young Clark faced off against…well, Young Dracula. I haven’t really gone back and watched this series in a long time, and I’m not sure at the moment where to find it. I own the first season on DVD, but not the subsequent ones, and although I know at one point it was available on DC Universe, that before it was merged with HBO Max and before Warner Bros. lost their collective minds and started throwing their IP to the four winds in the hopes of finding somebody desperate enough to buy them. The whole situation is ridiculous.
But anyway, the podcast. I don’t really remember the episode they’re discussing, and I wish I had it readily available to watch, as I’ve still got so many other Superman/vampire encounters fresh in my mind. I was glad to see that Gerry did enough research to unearth Superman #180, which I talked about last week, and how it demonstrated that a vampire biting a solar-powered Kryptonian wasn’t the best idea for the vampire. But that was a side conversation, not about the show itself, and the scattershot nature of this particular podcast does a nice job of emulating a conversation hanging around the comic shop, but isn’t exactly comprehensive in its coverage of the topic at hand. I’ll have to find this episode on my own somehow.
Comics: Superman: Silver Banshee #1-2, Cheetah and Cheshire Rob the Justice League #3 (Cameo), Saga of the Swamp Thing #24 (Guest Appearance), Justice League of America #36 (Team Member), Flash Vol. 6 #26 (Guest Appearance), Justice League Unlimited Vol. 2 #12 (Team Member)
Notes: In the comments to last week’s blog, Ben Herman asked if I’d ever read Dan Brereton’s two-issue Superman: Silver Banshee miniseries from 1998. And I know I have, I bought it when it came out and it’s still in my collection, but I probably haven’t read it SINCE the original publication. And as it, too, is a Halloween story (which I had forgotten, or I would have included it last week), this seems like an excellent opportunity to revisit it.
On Halloween Eve, Lois Lane gets a tip that will help her uncover a notorious gang of art thieves called the “Trickertreaters.” At the same time, in the Netherworld, Silver Banshee learns that there is one remaining descendant of the MacDougal clan, the clan responsible for her curse, and that she will never be free until the last MacDougal has perished. On Halloween, though, there are other options – she can go to Earth again, and if she uses the power of “good works,” the final MacDougal can lift the curse freely, without need for further death. Lacy MacElwain, her target, now lives in Metropolis (because of course she does) and the Banshee sets out to find her, but instead is snared by a summoning spell cast by the devil queen Hecate. Hecate – as it happens – is the one who lured Lois Lane with the promise of catching the Trickertreaters, whose newest member happens to be…oh come on, you can guess…yep. Lacy MacElwain herself.
Funny how things work out sometimes.
Anyway, Hecate’s stooge Thorpe knocks out Lois and ties her up as the art thieves arrive with their newest acquisition, an amulet that has no apparent monetary value, but that Hecate needs so she can do evil witch stuff. She tries to dismiss them without payment, but they take offense to that and wind up battling Thorpe, who turns out to be some kind of were-demon-thing. That’s an industry term, peeps. Lacy manages to get her hands on the amulet, which she brings to the mystic web where the Silver Banshee is held captive. The two of them are transported away from Hecate’s lair, and the Banshee tells Lacy that she will be freed of her curse if Lacy destroys the amulet, but it turns out to be fairly powerful. Thorpe tracks them down, but Superman (who got a little concerned when he found a dead body in the church where his wife was supposed to be meeting an informant) has caught up to them and saves her. As he confronts Hecate, Lacy flees for home, but the Banshee follows her, demanding she destroy the amulet. Unfortunately for Lacy, Hecate’s demons – including the transformed Trickertreaters – have trailed her as well.
In issue two, the Banshee tries to defend Lacy from the attack, but is forced to merge the two of them into a single body to prevent her death. In their shared form, the Banshee promises Lacy that destroying the amulet will set them both free. Unfortunately, Thorpe has his hands on it now. Superman, meanwhile is trapped by Hecate’s magic, and she plans to use Superman and Lois in her scheme. She gets the amulet back from a reluctant Thorpe, and the Banshee/Lacy hybrid attacks. The Banshee’s wail is surprisingly effective against Hecate, but she can’t free Superman or Thorpe from the Puppeteer demon that is holding them. In the battle, Lacy is killed, and the Banshee is freed from her curse, but unwilling to allow Lacy to sacrifice herself, she follows her into the afterlife, where the two of them are consumed by light. When the light fades, Superman, Lois, and a back-from-the-dead Lacy are all that remain. Lacy goes home, only to find that in saving her, the Banshee is now bound to her…no longer merged, but more of a regular haunt.
I’m really glad that Ben suggested I read this one again. The Silver Banshee has always been an interesting sort of anti-villain – she does bad things (murdering people, y’know) but she doesn’t do them out of actual malice or evil, merely out of a desire to free herself from a torturous curse. Once that curse is lifted, you can take the character in different directions, and this two-issue story is a nice sort of capstone to the status quo John Byrne first established for the character. She’s been used periodically ever since, sometimes as a villain, sometimes almost as a hero. I don’t recall offhand how long Lacy stuck around, but I don’t think she’s currently a factor when the Banshee shows up. Still, if there can be THREE ongoing series starring Batman bad girls who keep straddling the line between villain and kinda-sorta-hero, I think it’s well past time the Silver Banshee got at least another miniseries or something to give her the spotlight.
Notes: I don’t have a ton of time to read, though, because there’s trick-or-treatin’ to do, so I pulled the 2010 Supergirl annual, in which Kara is accidentally bounced 1000 years into the future and encounters the Legion – but NOT the Legion SHE knew. This is her cousin Kal-El’s Legion (recently restored in Action Comics) when they were teenagers. Brainiac 5 wants to find a way send her back immediately, worried about her disrupting the timestream the way he always worries when Superboy shows up, but it’s not that simple. She’s there for a month, joining the team and lending a hand, and learning – tragically – the circumstances of her own death. When a horned villain calling herself “Satan Girl” attacks, Kara and Brainy bounce four days into the future to see that Satan Girl has destroyed Metropolis, possessed the Legion, and taken over the world. It gets worse when she realizes that Brainy himself summoned her, but is arrogantly dismissing his own part in it.
An epic battle ensues between Satan Girl and the possessed Legion, with Kara, Brainy, and an army of animatronic Jimmy Olsens on the other (it makes sense in context). In the end, Brainy manages to send them back and prevent himself from summoning Satan Girl in the first place, then brings Kara home. In the process, they erase her memory of the future, including that of her own death, but Brainiac swears to do something to save her.
I like this story for a lot of reasons. Don’t ask me to explain why, but the various versions of the Legion that have flirted with a Supergirl/Brainiac 5 romance over the years have always appealed to me, and this one plays with that element as well. I hate it when people get into “shipping wars” over their preferred pairings, but I have to admit that I have a few of my own, and this is one of them. It works for the characters as they were at the time, and I hope that when the dust settles around the whole All In/DC KO thingamabob and we have a new, proper Legion again, this is an element that will be touched upon.
That said, I’m a little bummed because the reason I chose this particular issue is that the DC Universe app describes it as a Halloween story and…it ain’t. I mean, it was released in October and there’s the whole “Satan Girl” thing, but there’s no mention of Halloween in the story whatsoever. I assume that most of the listings on the DC app are copies of the original solicitations for the comics, especially for something as relatively recent as this, but that gets me a little grumpy that I skipped over a chance for some prime Halloween content.
There are greener – relatively speaking – pastures with the Halloween story from Superman/Batman #65. The story begins with Superman trying to save a falling plane as he’s done thousands of times. And this one, of course, has Lois Lane on it, as it has thousands of times. But it also has Perry White, his parents, Jimmy Olsen – and Superman watches in confusion as the plane goes down, killing everyone he loves. The scene shifts and we see that Superman is actually unconscious, as are Batman, the Joker, and Lex Luthor, all of whom had been engaged in a battle, then all taken down by an outside force. We watch the Joker live through his worst nightmare – a place where people actually treat his terrors as a joke. Lex Luthor’s worst nightmare, it turns out, is living out the bland, boring life of a subservient, specifically Jimmy Olsen. And Batman has a nightmare of a family – married to Selina Kyle, a son named Richard, his parents alive — and then watching them all gunned down by Alfred so he can bring things back to “the way it has to be.” The dream is nightmarish enough for Batman to wake up and realize all of them have been captured by – and are about to be buried alive by – the Scarecrow. Superman comes to next, stopping Batman from going too far in his revenge, and in the end we see a glimpse of the Scarecrow’s own worst nightmare – a land where he’s just an ordinary man of straw, one without a brain. It’s a cute story, and definitely one that feels more seasonally appropriate than the Supergirl one. But I think that’ll do it for Halloween in this blog. Until next time, anyway.
Halloween Bonus: I know you won’t believe me when I say this, but I had no influence on my son’s choice of Halloween costume this year. Well, not directly anyway. Obviously, his sphere of reference is influenced by proximity to me, and I wasn’t exactly subtle when I told him how happy it made me to bring him to watch the new James Gunn movie back in July. But at no point did I deliberately try to influence or manipulate him when the time came for him to select a Halloween costume.
“Eddie,” I asked him during one of our 27 trips to the various Spirit Halloween locations in our area, “What do you want to be for Halloween this year?”
“SUPERMAN!” he announced.
“Nobody is ever gonna believe I had nothing to do with this,” I said.
We wound up getting his costume at Walmart rather than Spirit, since they somehow got an exclusive on costumes from the movie. But we got the black hair color spray from Spirit, and I finally got a chance to wear the Superman pajamas he and his mom got me for Father’s Day back in June.
And I may be a little biased, but amongst all the arguing about Reeves and Cavill and Corenswet…well, with all due respect to those gentlemen, I may have a new favorite Superman.
Sat., Nov. 1
Comics: Superman: Red and Blue 2025 Special
Notes: This summer, during my family’s annual trip to Pittsburgh, I used the time to read over a lot of collected editions of various Superman books that didn’t quite fit in anywhere else. One of those was the collection of the delightful anthology series Superman: Red and Blue. I was quite happy when DC announced that they were bringing the concept back this year for a one-shot special with four new stories.
First up is “Priceless,” written by Paul Dini with art by Mirka Andolfo. Dini’s story features Superman on a mission to collect a rare mineral he needs to bail Supergirl out of an alien prison. It looks as though Dini is maintaining the characterization of Supergirl from the movie – a sort of hard-partying girl who gets into a little trouble with her dog. The story is funny and the art is wonderful, but there’s a nice little turn at the end that shows us that things weren’t exactly what Superman had assumed – and, in fact, family is everything.
“All the Time in the World” by Michael Walsh is a pretty simple story, a day in the life of Superman set in the era when Jonathan was still a toddler and Clark is desperately trying to find the time to be a husband and a father in a world where the demands for Superman’s gifts are neverending. This one…hits. I mean, there’s nothing world-changing or anything going on here, but it’s a theme that is particularly significant to me, right now, at this moment, where I’m looking at a schedule and trying to figure out how to fit in my son’s choir rehearsal and his basketball practice and his speech therapy and my own job and my wife’s job and if it is even possible, in the entire totality of the universe, to carve out even a single afternoon where I’m not going to be pulled into yet another thing that I don’t even know is going to happen now but it going to turn out to be of universe-altering consequence approximately 30 minutes before it has to happen. I may not have any literal fires to put out or people to catch as they fall off a building, but this is real. I know nothing about Michael Walsh, but I have to assume he’s a parent, because how the hell else could he understand this so well?
Next is Dan Abnett and Caitlin Yarsky’s “Out of the Ordinary.” When Superman saves a small town in Canada from a giant robot – you know, like you do – he is approached by a reporter for the tiny local paper who sheepishly asks for an interview. And to the surprise of absolutely nobody who understands Superman, he graciously agrees to one. The bulk of the story is just a quiet conversation between Superman and this young woman in a small-town diner, about what it’s like to be him and what it means to be “ordinary.” It’s a lovely story that really does nail the character, and in fact it functions very nicely as a (Clark Kent-ian polite) kind of rebuttal to Quentin Tarantino and anybody else who thinks that Superman is the “real” identity and Clark is a mask.
Last is “Red-Letter Days” by Rainbow Rowell and Cian Tomey. On Lois and Clark’s anniversary, Superman is summoned away by one of those regular world-threatening crisis type events. By the time he gets back, Lois has gotten a tip on an enormous story that deserves front-page coverage, but it’s going to take her and her husband staying up all night to get the sources and get the news straight. This isn’t a Superman story, it’s a Lois and Clark story, and I love it for that. We see the two of them doing what they do best (when Clark isn’t wearing a cape, that is) and in a way that isn’t interrupted by supervillains, alien invaders, time travel, or any of the other thousands of things that screw up a superhero’s life on a daily basis. It’s a story of a loving couple that struggles a little sometimes to find time for each other, and it’s delightful.
Superman’s the greatest hero there is, I think I’ve fairly well established my position on that by now. But for all the stories where he saves the world or the universe or a cat in a tree, there aren’t enough stories like the ones in this anthology. Four stories that lean on the man part of his name rather than the Super. There aren’t enough of these, and I hope that the Red and Blue anthology comes back again and again.
Sun., Nov. 2
Comic: Brave and the Bold Vol. 3 #16
Notes: Sundays aren’t days of rest for teachers. We’ve gotta get ready for the week, and I’ve got a ton of stuff on my plate today, so I decided to look for a one-off story I could read without sacrificing a huge chunk of time. I decided on this issue from the 2007 reboot of DC’s Brave and the Bold, which in this incarnation was a team-up title without a specific anchor character – there was never any telling which two characters would wind up with each other on any given issue. And as you can tell from the look on Superman’s face, this team-up with Catwoman surprised him as much as anybody.
Written by our old pal Mark Waid with art by Scott Kolins, the story begins with Superman responding to a bat-signal, telling Gordon that Batman asked him to cover for him while he was out of town. Gordon asks him to look into a rumored underworld auction, and Superman’s hearing picks up a burglary nearby. He finds Catwoman stealing an enormous jeweled egg, and Catwoman – a little smitten with the Man of Steel – tells him she needed it to get into the same crime auction. The evening’s prize is allegedly a map that leads to a certain hidden cave outside of Gotham City. Superman reluctantly agrees to work with Catwoman to stop the map from falling into the wrong hands. Selina dresses the two of them up to go undercover at the auction and a comedy of errors follows, most of them based on Superman’s attempts to sidestep actually giving any sort of aid to the criminal element around them. In the end they manage to prevent the contents of the cave from being used for nefarious purposes, and their encounter ends in a bit of a stalemate…but one that leaves Catwoman smiling.
I really enjoyed this issue. Batman never makes an appearance, but the story is essentially about him – specifically about how Superman and Catwoman, respectively, each feel about the Dark Knight and how that common ground allows them to put aside their differences and work together. And while you don’t get the impression that Catwoman’s flirting with Superman is entirely serious, it doesn’t seem as though she’s entirely joking either. After spending her life playing with the bad boys, a “date” with the ultimate good guy seems to be a refreshing change of pace for her, and even when Superman gets a little bit of an upper hand on her in the last few panels, she doesn’t seem to mind all that much. It’s just a simple, charming little story, the likes of which we could certainly use more of.
Mon., Nov. 3
Animated Feature: The Batman/Superman Movie: World’s Finest (1997)
Notes: When I woke up this morning at around 2:30 with a rumbling in my stomach I had every intention of going to work. However, as the rumbling continued to have pointed conversations with me for the next several hours, I eventually resigned myself to a day on the couch. And since getting off the couch to find something to read didn’t seem like a fun time, I decided that today’s Superman fare would consist of something I could access via my remote control. Bizarrely, The Batman/Superman Movie: World’s Finest doesn’t appear to currently be streaming anywhere, not even on HBO Max. Although I could theoretically have watched the individual episodes of Superman: The Animated Series that were cut together to make the film, I once again am grateful for my adherence to physical media and how I’ve used that to meticulously populate my own Plex server.
Younger people reading this blog (and of course, we all know how popular it is with the kids) may not realize just what a big deal this movie was. Today, when everybody and their brother is trying to create a cinematic shared universe, it seems like a film of this nature would be a no-brainer. But in 1997, despite the fact that these characters were all owned by the same companies and their shows were worked on by the same people, there was still relatively little crossover. Batman: The Animated Series was a smash hit, and when the same creators put their work into a Superman series this is exactly what everybody was hoping for, but it was far from a foregone conclusion that we would GET it, at least not until it got gotten.
The movie starts off with the Joker and Harley Quinn stealing a jade dragon from a shop in Gotham City. Batman’s examination of the crime scene sets off some alarm bells, and he makes plans to head to Metropolis. In Superman’s town, the Joker and Harley rather forcibly coerce Lex Luthor into a partnership, presenting him with the “jade” dragon, which is actually made of Kryptonite. Lois and Clark are on-hand when Bruce Wayne flies into Metropolis for a business summit with Luthor, and feeling like she’d made a fool of herself in front of Superman earlier, Lois finds herself smitten with Bruce, who invites her out to dinner to discuss his plans in Metropolis. Although Bruce and Luthor have a business deal in place, Bruce pulls back from parts of it that are intended to create militarized robots, something that burns Lex.
That evening, as Batman roughs up some hoodlums in a bar to find information about the Joker’s whereabouts, Superman bursts in to stop his “vigilantism.” He’s shocked when he uses his X-Ray vision to peer through Batman’s cowl to see Bruce Wayne’s face, and Batman warns him about the Joker’s Kryptonite by taking out a shard to hold him back, allowing him to escape. When Clark returns to his apartment, he gets two surprises: a phone call from Lois informing him that she’ll be having breakfast with Bruce tomorrow, and a bat-shaped tracking device on his cape that alerts him to the fact that he was followed, and that Batman is watching him from a nearby building, his own identity revealed.
The next day, as Bruce arrives at the Planet to pick up Lois, he and Clark briefly compare notes on the Joker’s schemes. Clark is also a bit concerned about Bruce’s burgeoning relationship with Lois, to which Bruce replies, “It seems to me you had your chance.” At their date that night, though, the Joker swoops in and kidnaps her, despite Bruce’s efforts to keep her safe. The heroes go to her rescue, but despite knowing they’re walking into a trap, the Joker manages to get the upper hand and nearly kills them all before escaping.
Lois’s relationship with Bruce gets more and more serious, with her even requesting a transfer to the Planet’s Gotham office, but when she discovers he’s Batman (during an uncharacteristic moment in which his mask is yanked away) the brakes are put on. The heroes naturally team up to stop the Joker and Luthor, complete with his army of murderbots, and ultimately have to save both Luthor AND Metropolis from the Joker’s lunacy. Lois breaks up with Bruce, with the supreme irony of her not wanting to be in a relationship with a man with a dual identity, and Bruce and Clark part perhaps not as friends, but at least with respect and cooperation.
At the time this movie was released, the comics were still in a kind of nebulous state for Superman and Batman. The antagonistic relationship they had in the early years of the post-Crisis reboot had largely vanished and they were teammates in the Justice League again, but they had not yet re-forged the friendship that they’d enjoyed in years past. The movie does a quick job of fast-forwarding through that relationship to get them to a more stable place: when Batman and Superman first encounter one another in costume, they’re antagonists. The next day, each of them having learned the others’ identity, they immediately begin working together, if grudgingly. The cast is top-notch, of course. Tim Daly and Kevin Conroy ARE Superman and Batman for so many of us, but perhaps even better than the two of them together are the interactions between Mark Hamill’s Joker and Clancy Brown’s Luthor, perhaps the two greatest villain voices in animation history. I loved this movie when it first came out, and I still have fun watching it today.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my stomach is doing that thing again.
Tues., Nov. 4
Comic: Batman Adventures #25, Batman: Wayne Family Adventures #29 (Superboy Guest Appearance), Jon Kent: This Internship is My Kryptonite #17
Notes: I went back to work today, although I’m still not really at 100 percent. But I’m a teacher, and if you ask any teacher they’ll tell you that it’s sometimes easier to go to work feeling like garbage than it is to prepare for a class without you in it. At any rate, after the classing is done, I still need to work in something Superman, and I want it to be something quick. Continuing the theme from yesterday, with the World’s Finest movie, I decided to take a peek at Batman Adventures #25 from 1994, the first team-up between the animated Batman and Superman. Well, kinda, anyway. This comic came out before there was a Superman: The Animated Series, and the Superman that appears is based more on Superman as he appeared in comics at the time, long hair and all. Still, writer Kelley Puckett did an admirable job, and the artwork by the brilliant (and gone far too soon) Mike Parobeck make this issue a delight to revisit.
The story opens with Bruce Wayne at a party, unaware that there are crooks planting a bomb in the kitchen. Among the people he schmoozes with at the time is a Lex Luthor with long, red locks and a beard (befitting his “Lex Luthor Jr.” persona from the books) and a ponytailed Clark Kent. LexCorp and WayneTech are competing for a military bid, but the discussion is lost when Clark’s superhearing picks up the ticking bomb under a table. Bruce also notices something amiss and the two of them dismiss themselves, Superman appearing moments later to dispose of the bomb. While he takes it into space, Batman apprehends the crooks who planted the bomb in the first place. Superman comes down to help finish mopping up, and the two icons meet for the first time.
Maxie Zeus sends Commissioner Gordon a video taking credit for the attack and promising to blow up Gotham City if he doesn’t get the “proper tribute” by midnight, and although Zeus is clearly insane (demanding such ransom as “five hundred head of oxen” and “two hundred vestal virgins”), Gordon is clear that he doesn’t bluff. As the heroes search for Zeus’s explosives, Luthor offers his military hunter robots to aid in the search. Superman and Batman find Zeus’s lair, along with the controls of the bomb, just as Luthor’s robots crash in and attack everyone, including Superman, which he tries to explain away as saying the robots “mistook him for an enemy” – but shoot, isn’t it impressive that their weapons can slow him down? They defeat Zeus, but Batman soon deduces that the whole thing was staged by Luthor to secure the military bid. He confronts Luthor with the evidence, telling him to withdraw his bid or he’ll present the evidence to the military. In the end, he and Superman part on terms a bit friendlier than they did in the later movie.
It’s fun to go back and look at this sort of embryonic animated Superman here. Setting the story in Gotham gets them out of having to deal with elements like Lois, Perry, or the Daily Planet, with only Superman himself and Lex standing out as being from that world. And truly, visuals aside, they’re not that far off. Give each of them a haircut (and a shave, in Lex’s case) and tweak the dialogue a little so that this no longer comes across as their first meeting; you could quite easily make this canonical to the animated series. The relationship is slightly warmer, without the initial antagonism we saw in the movie, and is a little more in line with who they would become once they joined the Justice League together. The story works nicely as a little bit of a time capsule, looking at the world of Batman: The Animated Series before that world had a Superman in it and kind of guessing how he would fit in. The later Adventures in the DC Universe series would do the same thing with lots of characters, which made the whole thing kind of out of sorts when those same characters eventually appeared in different forms in the cartoon…but it was no less fun.
It was a nice week off from themes, folks, but we’re running out of 2025 and I’ve still got several themes left that I intend to tackle. So next week, I’m going to mirror something I did in October with “Superman gone bad.” Starting tomorrow, I’m going to spend seven days exploring the Supermen of Other Worlds – and I’m not just talkin’ Elseworlds, my friends. See you in seven!
Blake M. Petit 