the m0vie blog

Earlier this week I reviewed Wednesday Comics, a rather spanking anthology from DC Comics. I kinda figured, however, it might be worth my while to break out some of those fifteen stories on their own (but not all of them) and discuss them, as it’s easy to lose sight of a particular writer/artist’s work in an anthology. I’ve done Batman and Wonder Woman, so I figure I should round out the trinity with the Man of Steel.

John Arcudi’s Superman project was arguably the comic in Wednesday Comics with the most banking on it. Aside from featuring perhaps the most iconic superhero on the face of the planet, it was also serialised in USA Today. That’s a pretty solid forum for publicising a comic book event, a respectable newspaper with an international circulation. So I can understand that DC might have wanted to avoid a particularly “challenging” or even “geeky” story. However, they ended up choosing perhaps the must dull and lifeless story in the collection to serialise to the public at large. Even more than that, Arcudi’s Superman is a perfect illustration of everything that’s wrong with the character in recent years and why he has seen his hold on popular culture somewhat diminished.

Superman's ship isn't the only thing which crashes and burns...

I’ll concede that’s a pretty heavy claim to lay against a twelve-page comic strip, but it really is an example of the fundamental mishandling of the character that occurs every time in recent memory that DC have been presented with an opportunity to reintroduce him to a wider audience. Superman is an old character – perhaps the first superhero, and definitely the most iconic – but the general conception (or at least the one driven by creators and arguably fans within the comic book industry) is that he is a fairly shallow creation, who has somewhat lost his appeal in recent years.

The most obvious measuring stick for the character is to compare him to his counterparts over at Marvel, for instance, who have had something of a renaissance in the past decade, while Batman remains the only real DC Comics property that can consistently deliver gold on celluloid. The logic is that Stan Lee crafted his heroes from a more flawed model than those original iconic DC characters, making them more human and divine. Indeed, Joss Whedon would have you believe that the reason we can’t engage with superheroes like Superman is because (Batman excluded) DC Comics is a pantheon of gods disconnected from human feelings and concerns, unable to connect with a modern audience.

Superman's strip doesn't exactly get off to a flying start...

Maybe he’s right. He probably is. He is Joss Whedon, after all. However, DC Comics seem to have latched on to this theory with everything they have and have become convinced that the only way to make Superman interesting is to make him more “human”. Of course, the flipside is that, by doing so, they alienate what makes him interesting. They take the “super-“ out of the “-man”. Superman Returns, for example, the highest profile attempt to re-engage with the American public in recent memory, puts its lead character in touch with the common man by making him the father to a child he abandoned to fly off into space. “Deadbeat dad” isn’t quite a label I ever imagined applying to the hero, but I did after watching the movie. Similarly, J. Michael Straczynski’s recent take on Superman, the Grounded arc, has the hero engaging with the American people by fixing cars, and telling people to walk themselves to hospitals, and dealing with local drug dealers, while walking across America.

This notion underpins Arcudi’s Superman contribution, and it’s perhaps unfair to use this twelve-page strip as a forum to discuss that, but I think it does merit discussion. Here Superman’s “human fouble de jour” is a sense of homelessness and restlessness. “You don’t belong,” an alien invader effectively sums up the story’s central internal conflict, sparking several very large (and very wasted) pages of introspection and nostalgic flashbacks.

The Superman strip hardly left me beaming...

Let’s ignore for a moment the generally retrospective tone of the Wednesday Comics series or the fact that the story needs to function on a page-by-page basis (something that this story never really does, as it’s hard to engage with moping). Ignoring that pulp mentality and nostalgic tones would dictate a wonderfully exciting and mind-bendingly awesome rock-’em, sock-’em action epic with the character, this notion of listlessness directly contradicts one of the core philosophical underpinnings of the character. Superman has, since his inception, been a beautiful metaphor for the integrated immigrant, the kind of person who built America with their bare hands, retaining their own cultural identity, but sharing in an even greater would.

Or to quote Garth Ennis’ Hitman:

Jeez. You’re everything that’s great about this country an’ you don’t even know it.

Come again…?

Hey, lemme tell you the problem with America, okay? This could be the greatest place on Earth. It really could. You got all these different people comin’ here to get away from oppression an’ poverty, all lookin’ for a better life. But what do they do? They hang on to all the things which got ’em into trouble in the first place. They wanna go on fightin’ the same wars and hatin’ the same people they did in the old world.

They wanna be Italian or Greek, or Irish or Polish or Russian, or African or Vietnamese or Cambodian or whatever… So they hang onto alla that. They stick to their own kind an’ everyone stays suspicious of everyone else an’ for what…? Culture? History? What the hell is that, a bunch of stuff your folks said you hadda believe in all your life? Does that make it real?

But you, man. You showed ’em how it’s done.You’re the classic immigrant guy who comes to the States an’ joins the meltin’ pot. It’s like you’re sayin’ — Okay, I’m from the planet Krypton or wherever, but that’s all in the past. I’m startin’ over.

I’m American. What can I do to help?

– Tommy Monaghan and Superman work some things out, Hitman

Yay! Another shot of Superman appearing introspective!

That is Superman’s identity in a nut shell. Instead here Superman whines like an emo teenager, “I’m an outsider here.” When he turns to Batman for advice, and Batman lays some truth/common sense on him(“You’ve spent your whole life on Earth. You were raised human. This is your home, Clark. Plain and simple.”), he simply throws a little tantrum (“What on Earth made me think I could talk to you about this?”) and flies off to sulk.

The truth is that Superman engaged with the American public by doing what they couldn’t, rather than trying to live their lives with their problems. He punched out Hitler, he foiled war profiteers, he vindicated the working class in their struggle against exploitative rich people. That’s what endeared him to people originally, and that’s what made him appealing to the public at large. Writing him like a teenager going through some self-esteem issues isn’t going to make him easier to connect with, it’s just going to alienate those drawn to Superman by his inherent appeal – his very alieness, but his desire to represent the best in us.

And this is the point where the strip goes down the drain... the moment he stops fighting badass space invaders...

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting for a moment that it’s impossible to deal with the conflict between Superman’s heritage and his humanity – in fact, Richard Donner’s Superman II did it wonderfully effectively – just that it fundamentally undermines the character if it’s used to render him impotent for the duration of the plot. After all, what’s the point of watching the man who can do everything if he isn’t going to bother doing anything?

And this device is used to provide a retrospective of Clark’s life. However, one has to wonder why a page was given up recount Superman’s origin when we already know it (and there are only twelve pages)? It might have been interesting to present as a splash page (similar to the half-splash-page which appears later on, itself a copout and false compromise), but instead it presents a rigid and linear recounting of possibly the most famous superhero origin on the planet. In a story where space is supposedly of the essence.

It did seem like he was phoning it in at points...

Of course, this plot device is all the more infuriating because it’s just a plot device to get us to a rather disappointing climax. We end with a rather surprisingly lackluster battle between Superman and some aliens. this could be exactly the sort of pulpy action the comic needs, but it’s hard to engage after all the moping that proceeded it. And the simple fact is that Lee Burmejo isn’t perfectly suited to this sort of “clash of the titans” conflict.

So a moment which should be off our “coolometre” scale ends up feeling rather disappointing – less engaging than any number of physical conflicts running throughout Wednesday Comics. And it all ends up serving a rather cruel punchline which leads me to believe that Arcudi isn’t particularly interested in the Man of Steel himself. After Batman gets to talk sense earlier on (and deliver a badass zinger – suggesting “super prozaic or something”) he also gets to singlehandedly steal the finale of the story as well. Sure, Superman takes on a bunch of evil aliens, but he then gets all emotional and rings Lois in Metropolis, fearing for her safety (rather than… y’know, flying there at the speed of sound). And Superman discovers that Batman flew to Metropolis from Gotham and basically out-maneuvered and out-played a foe who was almost a physical match for the Big Blue Boyscout – doing all of this so easily it played out off-panel.

At least Batman can look introspective and bad-ass at the same time, notice how ridiculously emo Superman looks...

It’s a bad sign when I leave a Superman strip with a wide publication base believing that he’s lamer than a character who appeared on two pages. Still, with all that whining and soul-searching, I probably have a greater amount of respect for Lois. Which is a damned shame, because it was a very public platform to leverage the character against – I somehow doubt, however, it had too many USA Today readers running to their local comic book store. If DC were looking for a conventional choice, maybe Batman would have been better. At least he’s meant to be the hero of that one.

In fairness, Lee Bermejo’s art is beautiful. The water colours look lovely and are the best thing about the storyline. He does characters brilliantly. I would suggest that he doesn’t do “blockbuster” moments as well as other artists, and was perhaps a poor choice for a script ending with an extended fight sequence. It’s also clear that Bermejo is a little bit uncomfortable with the space. His artwork on the “one page origin” is stunning, as is his “mind attack” half-page later one. However, one can’t help but get the sense that maybe these moments could have been even stronger had they been executed in an interesting and engaging manner (I suggested condensing his origin into a splash page, rather than the convention panel-based layout, for example).

Superman is a miss. It’s a disappointment. It isn’t as soul-destroyingly terrible as, say, Teen Titans, but it wastes its potential and manages to be incredibly boring. The story never really goes anywhere, and the introspective mood doesn’t really suit either the hero or the project as a whole. It’s a shame, because there really have to be greater or more interesting ideas for the character than this.

Ah well, Absolute All-Star Superman is out soon.

Filed under: Comics | Tagged: comic books, Comics, dc comics, superman, wednesday comics, wednesday comics: superman |