I Thrill When I Drill a Bicuspid

Of all the comics I bought this weekend at New York Comic Con...

and the even greater number of comics I looked at in the back issue bins....

...this is the one I simply could not put down. It called to me.

Why am I such a Super-Misfit?

Rob
(Cover by the great Nick Cardy, btw.)

Clark + Diana? For now, maybe.

DC recently announced a Superman/Wonder Woman romance (starting in tomorrow's Justice League #12), and I'm curious to see what DC does with it. My biggest fear is that it will derail some of Brian Azzarello's plans for Diana in the regular Wonder Woman comic; it seems more of a Superman storyline than a Wonder Woman one to me, although that's mostly because Wonder Woman has been refreshingly free of crossovers with the rest of the DCU.

Kissytime.

I don't think it will last at all -- probably a year, maybe a little more -- but that doesn't mean I think it's not worth doing. (That remains to be seen by the stories we get.) Hopefully both characters will be treated with respect throughout the storyline, and the relationship will be dealt with maturely once it ends. I like the idea of exes in the DCU -- relationships which were once one thing and are now another. If they want to do that with Superman and Wonder Woman, that's fine with me. It's a big step, but it doesn't have to be a disastrous one.

Interestingly, AP writer Matt Moore writes this in today's story about the couple: "One aspect that did not survive the relaunch: Lois Lane's role as Superman's love. She's still around, but the two have never dated, nor are they likely to."

That's gullible to the point of ridiculousness. Moore is swallowing whole this temporary PR push, and ignoring everything we know about these characters (not just Superman and Wonder Woman, but all long-running, serial fiction characters) periodically reverting back to their iconic forms. Not only is Lois likely to date Superman, but history indicates she's all but guaranteed to. In the unlikely event that the Superman/Wonder Woman couple sets the world on fire (and I honestly don't think it's even intended to; I think DC wants people to buy it, but they don't necessarily want us to like it or root for it), it'll take ten years instead of 3-5, but Lois and Clark are ultimately bound to fall back into each other's orbits, and eventually date (and possibly marry) once again. Lois's gravity will always pull Clark in, and rightfully so.

Which is why the deviations are so potentially interesting to me. But whether they crash or fly is all in the execution.

Rob

Today's Slice of Awesome

Glass artist Mike Kelley has, for the last decade or so, been creating duplicates of  the Bottle City of Kandor from Superman comics.

As every schoolchild knows, Kandor was a Krypton city shrunk by Brainiac before the planet exploded. It's full of miniature Kryptonians, who lack superpowers because of the artificial red sun and gravity in the bottle.

And the idea that there's a fifty-dollar art book full of photos of these amazing recreations of the tiniest awesome city ever -- and that book is featured in The New York Times -- is blowing my mind.We live in an age of wonders.

Rob
(More context here and here.)

Walking with Superman

So there's this year-long storyline in Superman in which our hero decides to take a walk across the breadth of America. He doesn't explain his motivations for this, though it seems to be precipitated by a woman slapping his face because while he was in outer space, her husband died of cancer, which she believes he could have cured somehow. Superman was off in space at the time, trying to keep 10,000 other Kryptonians from conquering Earth (under which rule, presumably, her husband still would have died). But the details don't matter too much to me (though the notion that this is actually happening as a reaction to Superman witnessing his own people wiped out a second time is intriguing). In new writer J. Michael Straczynski's first story, Superman gets slapped, Superman goes walking. And -- I hoped -- we would get a year's worth of done-in-one stories where Superman would come into a city, identify and solve a problem, and then walk on. He's Shane, he's The Lone Ranger, he's Superman.

And these problems, I expected, wouldn't be entirely super-villain oriented. In walking on Earth, Superman would be encountering the recession, corporate greed, pollution, maybe the effects of global warming, who knows? It'd be a return of the Social Justice Superman from the Golden Age. The guy who kept landlords from raising their rents and evicting goodhearted people. The guy who puts the heat on corrupt senators. This guy (click to enlarge and read):

"You can announce that henceforth my mine will be the safest in the country"

 And to a certain extent, I was right. In the most recent issue, #702, Superman walks through Detroit. He encounters tons of people who are out of work, but he also meets up with some technologically advanced aliens living incognito in one of the city's neighborhoods. They fight, they talk, and Superman wonders whether to evict them from Earth or not. (They've fled a tyrannical government, and argue that their situation was no more tenable than an exploding planet.) Basically, he tells them they should be doing something for the community.

Later on, Superman brings them a guy who's sick and obviously dying, and they use their technology to heal him. And then Superman has an idea, and this happens (click to enlarge and read):

"It is expected that as many people as were fired during the automobile shutdowns will be rehired to handle the wave of equipment slated to be produced by these factories."

Immediately. Detroit's unemployment problems are solved!

Now, this is definitely over-simplifying real-world issues. I got to the point where the aliens set up a medical research firm and gave everyone jobs, and I thought "Oh, come on!" But then I realized something:

That's exactly how something like this would have been handled in the Golden Age. Find a problem, find a solution, and Outta Here! (I mean, look at how that Golden Age mine-safety story was wrapped up. In one panel!)

And while that isn't necessarily satisfying to today's readers (it wasn't initially satisfying to me), I think it's an interesting choice for JMS to make, particularly because it goes against the grain. And I have to consider -- do I really want five issues with pages devoted to the aliens putting this company together? There's something to be said for getting it done and capping it off with a happy (though facile) ending.

When this storyline started, my biggest hope for it was that it would give us done-in-one stories of the "Social Justice" Superman of the Golden Age. And in this issue, that's exactly what we got.

So now that I've seen it, I've got to decide... is that really what I wanted?

I'm not sure. It's still not entirely satisfying to me, but I have to admit it's something of a catharsis to see someone essentially punch unemployment in the face.

Rob

How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?

A little more on nostalgia.

One thing I noticed on my list is that some of the cultural touchstones of my generation—Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, particularly—aren’t on my list of nostalgia movies. And I really do love Raiders, and I really did love Star Wars. They’re great movies, and came out right at the perfect time for me, when I was 8-11. Pretty much zero hour for nostalgia.

I guess the difference is: They kept coming out. Empire followed Star Wars, and was even better… but then Jedi came out, and it was good… but also kind of a letdown. I was in high school rather than elementary school, and instead of a mind-blowing experience, I got a really good action movie. And then neither of the Raiders movies grabbed me the same way as the first. Partially because I was older, and probably also because it’s breakneck pace simply wasn’t as new to me. (And maybe they weren’t as good. It’s been years since I’ve seen Temple of Doom or Last Crusade, and I didn’t even bother with the one this summer.)

And Star Wars, of course, returned with awfulness, to an extent that I’m surprised how thoroughly it killed my interest even in the original movies. That shouldn’t happen, but it did. But I don’t think it’s so much the drop in quality that makes me less nostalgic for these properties. It’s that, well, they’re properties. They kept coming out and were a constant presence at the time when I was growing up and realizing that these movies weren’t just amazing flights of imagination, but also launching pads for toys and games and lunchboxes and happy meals. If there’s just been one movie of each, the phenomenon would have passed before I recognized it. But since they kept coming out, each new movie was born to someone growing more cynical about the whole process. I was hardly a hard-nosed cynic at 14, but I was aware enough to know that people wanted to sell me things.

I wonder if the sweet spot of Star Wars nostalgia isn’t maybe 6 years younger than me, where the kids would have seen the first two movies on VHS or in the theater rereleases, and then they were taken to see Jedi for the first time. Their minds would be blown, just like mine was with that first movie. And then they would have had fifteen years of nothing… the perfect soil for nostalgia to take root. But since I first saw Star Wars, one thing has been layered on top of another so many times that the original moment I could be nostalgic for is lost under layers and layers of extraneous stuff.

This:

is occluded by this:

and by the time this comes out, who cares?

Strangely enough, I am still nostalgic for certain runs of comics I read as a kid: The Bates/Swan Superman of the 70s, the Bates/Novick Flash, the Levitz/Giffen Legion. I think, in their cases, there’s an opposite effect to a constant presence killing nostalgia. These books came out every month—so often, and with so much work produced, that I could be nostalgic for specific stories and runs without mixing it up with the properties themselves. I might not have noticed the departure of Irv Novick originally, but by the time Don Heck was drawing Flash a few years later, I knew my personal golden age on the title had passed... and later figured out when. And the Levitz run of Legion stood so high above what had come before that it was like comparing Star Wars to Solar Babies. It was incredible, world-expanding stuff. And even more important, it felt like it was mine.

Maybe that’s what nostalgia is. A sense of ownership of the material you love, and a true ownership of your own personal experience of reading/watching/listening to it. I remember hearing Styx’s “Too Much Time On My Hands” for the first time over the radio when my friend Tom slept over in 1979—the first time I ever listened to FM, top-40/rock radio. I’m not so nostalgic for that song, but man, do I remember that listen. That’s nostalgia.

We can’t own pop culture: it’s for everybody. It’s pop. But we can own our memories, and how these things touched us. I heard a story on the radio a while back about how when you remember an event that you’d forgotten for years, it’s much stronger and more precise—and more faithful to the truth of the event—than something you mull over every day. Which might be why Star Wars had progressively less hold on me when I got older and saw it in more and more contexts, and why Airplane—a movie I saw a lot in a specific time, and then not again for decades—hits me so much more strongly.

Rob

Meet the New Bad

Reading this week’s issue of Trinity, I wondered about something I’ve mused on before: How can a new villain catch a break?

I mean, here we have Konvikt, a nonverbal bruiser from another planet. (He’s joined by Graak, a little guy with the best line in the issue—“Konvikt missing big chance, but Graak cool, Graak cool...”—but that’s neither here nor there.) And in Trinity #3, he holds his own against the entire Justice League. Black Lightning, Flash, Hawkgirl, Black Canary, Green Lantern, Firestorm—no one can touch him. And then the Big Three show up (it’ll be a heck of a long time before I call Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman the Trinity; my Catholic don't go deep, but it goes at least that deep), and WHAM! Superman gets knocked out.

And I really want to call shenanigans.

I want to say, who IS this guy? He’s fought the JLA to a standstill and then knocks out Superman with a punch?

But that’s the point of the scene: Konvikt is extremely powerful. (A secondary point might be: If Konvikt can knock out Superman in one punch, how come the rest of the JLA is still standing?) But for some reason, I’m finding it hard to simply take writer Kurt Busiek’s word for it. I’ve spent over three decades of my life being told that Superman is extremely powerful, and I’ve just known Konvikt for two weeks. So try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that Konvikt is a first-level badass simply “because the writer said so.”

It’s not Busiek’s fault—I’ve been conditioned by a lifetime of reading comics. If Superman is being outpunched, I want an explanation. And since Konvikt is a figure of mystery, the explanation is still forthcoming. The two needs are in conflict—something's got to give.

I don’t think there’s any way to introduce a character like this out of the blue without prompting some level of disbelief among seasoned readers. To be honest, I think I felt the same thing about Doomsday, a character who was wildly successful for a time. The last “new” character that I can think of that I accepted immediately as fighting in Superman’s weight class was Mongul—and he was introduced in DC Comics Presents #26, published in 1980. I was 11.

There have been other characters lately that have made me wonder these same things—most recently Titus, Roger Stern & John Byrne’s “godlike” conqueror in JLA Classified, who had the added burden of the question, “If he’s so powerful and fought the League so long ago, why haven’t we heard of him before?” Of course, the answers to these questions are always very mundane in the real world. We’d never head of him before because no one’s ever written about him before. We don’t know why Konvikt can K.O. Superman—for now, we just have to accept that he can. Keep reading and you’ll find out why.

I actually admire Busiek’s restraint in writing the fight scene in Trinity #3. He didn’t have Konvikt wipe the floor with the JLA to show what a threat he was; he just fought them to a standstill. It might be the best way to handle a scene like that, in that it doesn’t devalue the League while it still establishes Konvikt as a threat. But somehow, I can’t quite accept Konvikt at face value without conscious effort. Those 30-odd years of Superman reading have made my disbelief too heavy to suspend for long.

At the base of this, I'm curious: Is it possible for a character introduction like this to work? Has the introduction of Konvikt worked for you so far? If not, do you expect it to become more plausible as more is revealed? Is there a way of introducing a character like Konvikt—mystery and all—that wouldn't cause disbelief? Or is that disbelief okay, considering it mirrors how everyone else feels when they see Superman get clobbered?

Rob

Fanboy Myopia Throwdown

Copyright of the Superman material in Action Comics #1 has reverted to the heirs of one of Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel.

Naturally, fanboys at Blog@Newsarama want to congratulate the family on regaining some measure of profit from the creation of the superhero -- heck, the genre -- that has given them so much joy.

Oh, wait, this is Newsarama. They go apeshit: "Greedy families, how dare they? Superman is DC's! Superman is ours! Waah, waah, waah."

Get a grip. There'll be an exchange of money, and it'll be business as usual. This is a good thing for creators, and a good thing for Superman. It's not particularly good for Time Warner, but they won't be washing windshield on a corner anytime soon.

Rob

Happy Birthday, Superman!

Now learn some manners, willya?

Rob

That's What I Like to See

Peter Tomasi really knows how to write Superman (click to enlarge):


Rob

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Something's wrong with my scanner, so I'm still stuck poaching images off the web until I can figure out what's what. (This one comes from Head Injury Theater.) But when you can stumble upon Superman cleaning He-Man's clock, well...what's not to like?

Honestly, I might loathe He-Man even more than the Transformers.*

As always with Friday Night Fights, Bahlactus rings that bell like he's playin' guitar. Or something like that.

Rob
*Note: The People's Republic of Robsylvania does not and has never acknowledged the Thundercats as a legitimate cartoon.

I don't know if I ever mentioned this, but...

Superman is a dick.

Enjoy!

Rob

Where is My Supersuit?!!

Two quick items.

One: Here's Brandon Routh as Superman, this time. The S is a bit small for my taste, but I think the costume looks pretty good, overall, and Routh seems pretty convincing. But stills don't prove nuthin'. Leets see some clips!

Also, the Beat lets us know that Nicholas Cage is Ghost Rider. With a photo and everything -- although no flaming skull as yet.

Rob

Look! Down on the Street!

It's a Guy! In a Vest! It's Superman!

The Beat has pictures of Brandon Routh as Clark Kent.

Rob

Krypto-tease

Wanna see a teaser poster for Superman Returns in 2006? Look no farther.

Rob