Superman, superman, superman…

I recently won a large box of comics on e-bay. It contained mainly recent comics that I had either sold recently or was mildly interested in reading. As it happens, the box contained a few different variations on Superman.

As DC Comics has recently entered into it’s next attempt to nab my wallet called Countdown, (written by Batman, Superman and Justice League cartoon creator and writer of the TV series Lost, Paul Dini) which will ‘change the DC Universe forever,’ I figured I’d take a look at how they’ve treated their number one money-maker over the years.

Action 544/545: Superman at 45 years old

Hidden amongst the lot of modern comics were two veritable diamonds in the rough. And what gems these two are! Action Comics 544 and 545 introduce the reader to new interpretations on two classic foes, Lex Luthor and Brainiac.

The first issue is double sized and even features contributions from Superman‘s creators, a history of the character’s genesis by writer Jerry Siegel and a drawing by Joe Shuster. Very touching stuff.

The first part is a mind-blowing tale by Cary Bates, drawn by the #1 Superman art team of Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson. The story is about Lex Luthor apparently leaving his evil ways behind him to live on an alien planet with his wife and child… and he’s a hero on this planet, not a villain. Meanwhile, Supes is tracking him down with annoyance in his eyes after one of Lex’s left-behind schemes went into automatic and trapped Metropolis in an unbreakable bubble. While Luthor is ‘turning over a new leaf’ in public, he is secretly plotting a way to destroy Superman, cursing himself and in a very strange internal monologue, blames the Man of Steel for making him evil. At that moment, he falls into a cave of alien tech and builds the ‘super armor’ you may recall from the Super Powers toy line, designed by George Perez.In this super armor, he commits crazy crimes and causes trouble, etc, until Superman shows up. In the climax of their battle, Lex’s alien planet explodes, taking Lex’s wife and child with it… oddly mirroring the explosion of Superman‘s home planet of Krypton.

Superman figures his enemy is dead and flies off, leaving an incredibly enraged Luthor behind, clinging to planetary debris, plotting revenge for the life he almost had. This could be one of the most disturbing moments in comics at the time. The issue had humanized Luthor into a sympathetic character only to expose his genuine twisted madness. Modern comics wish they were this dark and grim!

The second story is written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Gil Kane (of Green Lantern fame). In this story, Brainiac is reduced to a molecular state and travels into a black hole only to witness the birth of the universe. In this moment, a gigantic armored glove reaches out to trap Brainiac and in that moment of trauma, he sees Superman‘s face. He exits the experience, completely redesigned as a bizarre skeletal robot.This weird experience causes him to regard Superman as the ‘Angel of Death’ and working for the ‘Master Programmer’ seen in his vision re-shaping creation (a concept later re-used by Wolfman in the epic Crisis on Infinite Earths). Then Brainiac builds an army of conquered alien races to destroy Superman. This story spills over into the next two issues.

In both tales, Superman is a very vague character, anxious and confused by these unexpected changes in his life. Up until this point in his publication, he had gotten used to understanding his foes. Seeing Lex Luthor baring his fists to duke ’em out took him off guard and he has no idea what to make of Brainiac‘s insane experience painting the Kryptonian as a demon… he IS after all, just a simple country boy.

This era is very inventive with some of the finest art and clever plotting of its time. To re-invent Superman in any way is a very tricky thing and these two issues do a superb job of just that by re-invigorating his chief villains.

If you like bronze age super-heroes, I recommend reading these.

All Star Superman

Next in the pile was a stack of issues 1-7 of All-Star Superman, a series I admit to being only part-way caught up with. All Star Superman is part of a line of comics geared to attract new readers with ‘non-canon’-stories and hot creative teams.

The other title in this line is All Star Batman by Frank Miller and Jim Lee.

The Superman team is Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, which strikes many comic fans like something they heard in a dream rather than reality.

Quitely is an artist who is familiar to most from his run on the amazing ‘Flex Mentallo‘ series and ‘The Authority.’ A master of the dynamic line and producer of some of the most unique faces you’ve ever seen in a comic book, I’m still surprised DC assigned him to Superman. His line-work is very ‘quirky’ and strange, something that you rarely find on a strong comic book character.

Grant Morrison‘s previous successes in the Doom Patrol and experimental magical spell made into a comic, The Invisibles, have lent him a kind of celebrity uncommon in the field. It’s fair to say that he has built a cult following with his comics, including a group of online followers who enjoy dissecting his writing to a stunning degree. He has gone from strength to strength in the past few years, from We3 to a stunning multiple mini-series extravaganza Seven Soldiers of Victory.

He’s also one of the most genuine and polite comic book personalities that I’ve met. And he never shies away from complementing the ‘little fellow,’ as seen here as he holds a copy of my self-published sci-fi anthology… available for purchase on my site I might add.

In any case, Morrison‘s take on Superman is something that many readers are very excited about, and in honesty they should be. While not a strict Silver Age interpretation as I had been lead to believe from its reputation, All Star Superman is a fun and inventive comic book that is not afraid to re-interpret a world where a man flying into the sun has become so commonplace that modern readers just yawn.
It’s this ‘re-invention’ (spotting a theme yet?) that is the real success of the series. The action is imaginative and strange, but the supporting cast of Lex Luthor, Lois Lane, Perry White, Jimmy Olsen and my favorite obscure character former football player Steve Lombard appears in a new light.

Morrison and Quitely are very respectful of the material with their revision, allowing a kind of subtle touch to the characters that provides a new universe for new stories to take place in without screaming ‘look at my new ideas’ the way similar attempts in this vein have.

All in all, All Star Superman is successful in creating a new Superman comic that appeals to the reader who wants to avoid the monthly series and all that its multiple creative teams and story paths bring. If you’re the target audience that wants to read Superman… but not read Superman, this is the ideal comic for you.

Up, Up and Away

Which brings us to the One Year Later story, Superman: Up, Up, and Away! consisting of eight issues of both Action Comics and Superman. The monthlies I referred to above that readers wish to avoid.

Growing up, I was Marvel Zombie. I had no interest in DC Comics. It wasn’t until Marvel creators Frank Miller and John Byrne tackled DC’s big two with Batman: Year Oneand Superman: The Man of Steel that I took notice. Since then I’ll check out either title from time to time based solely on the merits of the creative teams involved. This is weird because I dislike that kind of reader. I guess I dislike myself. I should really take myself out for a nice meal and have a long talk about it.

Anyway, the ‘Up, Up and Away’ storyline has Kurt Busiek (of Marvels and Astro City) and Geoff Johns (of JSA, Hawkman, and Green Lantern) on writing chores while newcomer Pete Woods draws up the pages, has the unenviable task of establishing the character of Superman in the aftermath of an unexplainable cosmic event (Infinite Crisis ) that happened One Year Ago.

Not easy, huh?

It succeeds brilliantly. The story follows a powerless Clark Kent and his wife Lois living the normal life of a human. Somehow he lost his powers… and he seems okay with this. The charm of the story comes from these moments that develop the simple character of Superman.

Ofcourse Lex Luthor is in the shadows, furiously crafting a wicked scheme that leads to a punch-up of mammoth proportions, but it’s the excellent writing by both Busiek and Johns that makes Superman into a character you actually care about and Luthor someone you are worried by.
The idea that Luthor is a mad genius is rarely used in comics. In the 80’s, Marv Wolfman and John Byrne re-created Lex Luthor in the image of an evil, bald Donald Trump (or just bald Trump) since the mad scientist angle wasn’t cutting it anymore. But here the mad science comes together, with Luthor using the strange Kryptonian crystals to create the perfect trap for Superman.

Yes, I know it sounds exactly like the movie Superman Returns… I can’t figure it out either.

The biggest achievement of this story is that it takes place in the dreaded monthly comic. In recent years the new fan following of comics has shied away from reading monthlies, preferring the glossy glare of a hardcover or reading the hip downloaded version.

It’s a shame because the monthly comic book is the lifeblood of the industry. They can be bad… (witness the days when readers had to follow the numbered S shield in the upper corner to figure out what part of the multiple part epic they needed to get next) they can be terrible (there have been moments when the aforementioned multi-parter is broken up with other stories, seen in Dave Lapham‘s run on Detective Comics), actually, but monthly comic books are what it’s all about. Collecting that stack of comics to dig through on a weekly basis is, to me, part of the comic book experience.

I only just realized that my British readers are laughing through their noses every time I say ‘monthlies.’

For those of you who dislike comic shopping, all of these stories I reviewed minus two are available in collected editions.

After reading all of these comics, I remembered the ‘big cosmic event’ in DC’s pipeline and sighed. The incessant need to re-invent and revise characters rather than just tell a story using what is there just astounds me. Will they ever just let these characters rest?

Guess not.

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