Just the one...?

Well, it was either an extremely slow month for dismemberments, or I just didn't read any of the right comics, because the above image is the only image of an arm being cut or torn off of a character in a DC comic that I personally encountered in August.

As you can probably figure out, those two pages were part of a facing spread, and so the arm-ripping-off ran horizontally along the top of a two-page spread, and was thus bigger than my scanner. If you're wondering what the heck is happening in it, that's the Doomsday-possessed Superman (who I think they're calling "Superdoom," at least in the branding on the covers) ripping the left robot arm off of The Cyborg Superman.

This occurred in Superman/Wonder Woman Annual #1, which was written by Charles Soule. I couldn't tell you who drew the image, as there are five pencil artists and five inkers all credited; I'm pretty sure that Benes pencilled the above pages, but that's as close as I can narrow it down.

As to what's really going on, like, more specifically than Superdoom ripping off Cyborg Superman's arm, man, I don't know how to even begin explaining this crazy-ass plot.

Remember (if you are an old, like me, or if you have read the collections) when Doomsday first appeared and fought Superman to their deaths? (And by deaths I of course mean "deaths.") Remember how Doomsday was originally conceived as basically just The Hulk, but they gave him some bone spikes and a terrible haircut to differentiate him from The Hulk? Well, this current Superman crossover story, engulfing the whole Superman line except for the Geoff Johns/John Romita Jr. book, is going further with the Doomsday-is-basically-just-the-Hulk thing, positing a take where Superman is to Bruce Banner as Doomsday is to The Hulk. It's pretty dumb. But, on the plus side...

Well, I haven't found a plus side. It's pretty dumb.

Review: Superman/Wonder Woman #1

The first stumbling block that I personally as a consumer of comic books and fan of DC superhero characters would encounter is on the cover of this issue, right below the big, over-sized "#1": It costs $3.99.

DC's gradual creep toward the $3.99 price point continues, and here the extra buck gets you four extra story pages and a wrap-around, fold-out cover the size of three covers all lined up, with half of it depicting various Superman allies and enemies (only one of which, Cat Grant, appears within the book) and the other half various Wonder Woman allies and enemies (none of whom appear within).

The next, is, of course, the premise: This is a book about Superman and Wonder Woman, who are currently dating, a romance that so far seems to have played out almost entirely in the pages of Geoff Johns' Justice League comics (When I was reading Wonder Woman, it wasn't clear that Superman even existed in the setting of that book, and while I believe Wondy's appeared in the Super-comics a few times). So apparently the space to explore their relationship is being carved out here in this new book.

The relationship itself  feels rather weird and wrong, and I suppose part of that is unavoidable, in large part because Lois Lane is so foundational to all Superman stories in all media—and there are a lot of 'em—up until this point. Superman doesn't have to be married to Lois, especially if he's a younger, rebooted, "Ultimate" Superman, but having him single or dating a mermaid or Lana Lang and at least rebuffing, being rebuffed by or verbally jousting screwball comedy-style with Lois would work far better than having him date another hero from another franchise (In much the same way it would feel...off if Batman were dating Mera or Green Lantern were dating Catwoman).

But mostly the relationship doesn't feel right because there was no real thought or effort put into developing one between the characters, a problem that is somewhat endemic to The New 52, which is a very young "universe"—about two years old in our time, five years old in their time—in which we've only been shown a few glimpses of the past in flashback, and then the present, with a long stretch of "lost" time in between.

So Superman and Wonder Woman meet one another while battling Darkseid's invasion in Justice League #1-#6 and, after five years of being teammates in many adventures we as readers aren't privy to, suddenly they start making out and decide to be a couple.

It wasn't a love at first sight thing, nor was it a drunken accidental hook-up that leads to something more, nor, as far as we can tell, was it some sort of mutual crush that circumstance kept from reaching fruition for half a decade, nor was it a gradual, budding romance between friends. The way it was presented in the Johns-written Justice League #12 was that they were going to kiss and then start dating, because that's what the script said to do.

With a book now devoted to their relationship, one might expect DC to be able to at least retroactively convince readers that there's anything at all between the characters aside from complimentary color schemes on their costumes, but writer Charles Soule either isn't up to the challenge, or couldn't work out how to meet it while also meeting the demands of a superhero fight comic.

I don't mean this to sound like the gay joke it probably will, but I got a better sense of Batman and Superman's relationship in the recently launched Batman/Superman (and in plenty of other "first" meetings between the World's Finest characters) than I got a sense of Wonder Woman and Superman's relationship here.

I suppose it doesn't help much that these new versions of the characters are still pretty ill-defined, and Soule seems to be writing a "Year One" version of Superman from the first arc of Justice League and Action Comics, but a "Year Five" Wonder Woman from the later arcs of Justice League (although the world seems to react to the superheroes as if it were still Year One too, so...I don't know, I guess it's just a mess all around).

Soule opens in medias res, as Wonder Woman is about to watch Superman dismantle a massive storm, and, when he sees a plane headed into the danger zone, they split up.

The rest of the book is divided between scenes of derring do, with Superman fighting the storm and Wonder Woman first saving a plane and then being attacked by a military ship which she immediately counterattacks (In keeping with most modern depictions of Wonder Woman, this one is all warrior, no princess), and conversation scenes.

We see Clark Kent talking with Cat Grant about blogging and online business models, we see Diana training and talking with an unnamed Amazon who for some reason wasn't on Paradise Island when its entire population was turned to stone (Not sure why she's here at all, as the role of Someone For Wonder Woman To Talk To could easily have gone to someone in her own massive supporting cast...unless there's some rule where Soule's not allowed to touch anyone else from the Wonder Woman cast...?).

And then we see the two of them talking about their relationship, which Superman wants to keep secret for...reasons I'm not clear about (Obviously, Clark Kent can't be seen dating Wonder Woman, but why can't Superman...? If his enemies go after her to get to him well, she's just as capable of tearing apart Lex Luthor's giant robots and battle suits as Superman is).

There's a rather weird exchange where Wonder Woman disses Superman's fighting ability, saying "You have things to learn, and I'm just the woman to teach you," and, in the big fight scene at the climax of the book, we see panels of Wonder Woman fighting a Superman foe with inset panels of our heroes kissing and touching one another, implying that Wondy was talking about more than combat when she said she had things to teach Superman (Which is, again, kinda weird; she grew to adulthood in an all-female culture, and her only relationship was with the first man she had ever met, Steve Trevor. Superman, on the other hand, grew up in a world of male and female relationships, and whether he has much more sexual experience than she does or not, he is at least much more familiar with the concept than this Wonder Woman would or should be).

As for the Superman foe that shows up, it's Doomsday, which is a bit of surprise. He just recently appeared in the Greg Pak-written Batman/Superman #3.1, suggesting the most likely place for Doomsday to show up next would be Batman/Superman and/or Action Comics, which Pak is also writing.

Meanwhile, someone somewhere has sent a flash drive with a picture of Superman and Wonder Woman kissing on it to Cat Grant, but she hasn't opened her mail yet. If Doomsday doesn't kill Superman and Wonder Woman (and I'm not clear if Doomsday has killed Superman in The New 52's five "lost" years, or if he's even ever appeared on Earth before), then they may have to deal with their secret relationship getting out in the open sooner than Superman would like.

The artwork, which I've so far neglected to mention, is penciled by Tony S. Daniel and inked by Matt Banning. Daniel's presences is usually enough to drive me from a book, but I must admit that this is the best work I've seen from him to date. I feel like I've said that a couple of times previously too, which, if it's true and it's not just me thinking that, then it's a good sign: He continues to improve.

I think some of that may be down to the coloring by Tomeu Morey, who usually works with Guillem March, whose work almost always looks good. Daniel does a lot of big, Jim Lee-like lay-outs, splash pages and splashy panels that bleed from one page into the next, but he also handles the talky scenes fairly well, and the aforementioned romantic scene was actually handled with quite a bit of subtlety.

That said, Daniel still isn't a good enough artist with a unique enough style to make up for the flaws in the script, premise and characterization, and, I think, even the most forgiving and generous of readers will find this is little more than a pretty generic New 52 book, reading like a Justice League fill-in issue during which the other 2/3 of the team were too busy.

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It's rated T for Teen, so here's some of that "mild violence":

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Oh wait, I forgot to complain about the splash pages! There are 24 pages in the book altogether, but a lot of wasted space.  There are three full-page splashes, showing rather innocuous action panels like Wonder Woman caught in an explosion, Superman being punched out of the water and into a plane, and Doomsday's hand on a bloodied Wonder Woman's throat.

There's a single two-page splash, seen above (it doesn't really look that bad; that's all I could fit on my scanner). So there's five of the 24 pages right there.

But there are a few other pages that are so close to being splashes that they might as well be splashes. Take the first page of the book, the first image from the interior in this post (essentially a splash with two tiny inset panels). Pages 2 and 3 contain just six panels, the first of those occupying all of page 2 and bleeding over into page 3.

And there are two instances of Wonder Woman in action filling up two pages, with smaller inset panels. So pages 8 and 9 are almost a double-page splash of Wondy trying to right a falling airplane, with three smaller, inset panels bordering it. Similarly, pages 18 and 19 show Wondy tearing the guns off a Norweigian destroyer that fired on her, with five smaller panels around it.

I suppose in a trade all these big, bold images might be welcome—certainly they'd be common in a manga collection—but when you're already feeling a bit ripped-off by paying $4 for a comic book, it sure doesn't make one feel better about the purchase to see so much of the comic devoted to pages devoted to single panels.

Yeah, it's 24 pages of comics, but it reads more like 12.

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Oh hey, here's a positive thing! I like the logo. I don't really like the stamp-like quality of the current Wonder Woman title's logo, which they ditch here, and I really like how unusual and, I don't know, fresh, I guess, the "Superman" in the title looks rendered in more simple white text on a blue field, rather than in the traditional Superman font with the big, yellow letters forming a sort of monument of a logo. 

I'm especially pleased they didn't try to somehow entwine the Superman S-Shield and a "WW" together like they did with the S-Shield and Bat-symbol in the pre-New 52 Superman/Batman title.

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Now that you've read my poorly organized thoughts on the book, might I suggest you check out Tom Bondurant's better-organized and better-written review at Robot 6...? During the course of it, he offers an intriguing thought: What if a Superman/Wonder Woman book came out in the old DCU, where the two were close friends and long-time allies, with a platonic relationship more akin to the one that powered Superman/Batman...? That would have been an interesting book to read, to say the least, and I think it would have been kind of fascinating to see Wonder Woman and her allies and enemies essentially "promoted" to World's Finest status. I think it would have went a way towards helping legitimize the character as part of DC's so-called Trinity, and might have generated more interest in the monthly title.

Pre-New 52 review: Superman: Return of Doomsday and Superman: Reign of Doomsday

When DC relaunched their entire line of superhero comics last September with 52 all-new #1 issues, they also rebooted their continuity, excising decades worth of storylines and details from their heroes' fictional histories and biographies.

It likely annoyed a lot of fans, as the huge tapestry of cumulative stories is one of the main selling points of the DC Universe brand of comics, while simultaneously making their line look more attractive to new and lapsed readers of their comics.

The move probably won't do anything to sour a lot of their back catalog of trade paperbacks. Evergreen classics like Batman: Year One or The Killing Joke, for example, or anything in a Chronicles or Archives of Showcase Presents volume, stand alone works from long ago that are usually meant to be enjoyed as distinct experiences instead of part of a month-in, month-out soap opera.

The books that suffer the very most, I think, will be the ones that DC was publishing just prior to The New 52, the ones readers were reading (and creators were apparently creating) without any indication that it would be the last Justice League story before Crisis On Infinite Earths style reboot, the last Superman story in which the hero was married to Lois Lane, the last JSA story set on the same planet as the rest of the DC heroes and so on.

Many of those comics are still coming out in collected form, or have just recently come out in collected form, and I've got to say, even as someone who was eagerly awaiting some of those trades, the reboot all but extinguished my desire to read them. I wonder how anyone who waited for, say, Brightest Day, the bi-weekly series that set-up new futures for a dozen characters who were brought back to life, would feel reading it for the first time, knowing that most of "didn't really happen," and little if any of it will be followed up on in the future. That book, in retrospect, looks a lot like a very, very long pilot episode for a television series that never got made.

When visiting a new library a few weeks ago, I found a handful of trades collecting some stories from just prior to the relaunch, and wanted to devote a week or so to reviewing them here, both in terms of how they are as comic book stories as per usual, and in terms of how they read in light of the fact that the publisher has declared they don't really matter anymore, that, in effect, they would have rather not done them.

Many of the events and plotlines that occurred in these books, and the new directions suggested for possible continuation have simply evaporated. Some of the creators have too, while others were radically repurposed to work on The New 52.

I'm going to start with two related books tonight, and then do one a piece the rest of the week...hopefully in addition to regular features like Wednesday night's "Comic Shop Comics" and Thursday afternoon's "Meanwhile..." link post.

Ready?

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Superman: Return of Doomsday is a trade paperback collection of five different comic books, none of which were originally sold as part of a cohesive whole.

These five are a one-shot special, an annual of a monthly ongoing series, and single issues issues of three different monthly ongoing series.

As such, the stories it collects are from four different writers and five different artists, and are therefore as dischordant and uneven as one might imagine, with each artist working in a radically different style, and sub-plots from Justice League of America, The Outsiders and Superboy appearing and disappearing at what feels like random upon reading in this collection.

Some of these, like a few scenes of Outsiders and Superboy that don’t involve the Doomsday vs. Superman Family characters conflict that binds the books together, don’t even seem to belong in the collection; they read like weeds that should have been pruned, but then, that’s because the Doomsday story was intruding into those already in-progress stories when they were published serially. The act of collecting these five comics between a single set of covers then reverses the feeling of intrusion. Now it feels like those comics’ ongoing plots are intruding in the crossover, distracting from the story and dragging the book as a whole down.

Super-comics are a weird business, really.

There’s not a whole lot to the individual stories. They are merely the prologue for a future storyline, "Reign of Doomsday", which ran in five issues of Action Comics (written and drawn by entirely different people than those responsible for this) and it is collected as the much more coherent Superman: Reign of Doomsday.

In each chapter of Return, Doomsday, the silent, mind-less, Hulk-like monster that killed Superman in the 1992 “Death of Superman” storyline, attacks a different character with an S-Sheild on his or her chest, subdues and captures them.

In each istance, Doomsday displays new powers that reflect those of his adversary, as well as increased intelligence.

In the first chapter, Steve Lyons and Ed Benes’ Steel #1, Doomsday beats up Steel, who tries to hold him off until the JLA shows up, but, for unexplained reasons, no one ever shows up to help out. This is told in first-person, through Steel’s point-of-view, and drawn in Benes’ version of 21st century DC house style.

Then we move to Dan DiDio and Philip Tan’s Outsiders #37, where Geo-Force and four colleagues are arguing over whether or not they should let The Eradicator join the team, when Doomsday appears to beat the bejesus out of everyone. This is told in an omniscent point-of-view, with just a few narration boxes. The layouts and art-style seem to have been imported from 1992, but Tan’s rendering is a grotesque application of effects-heavy coloring atop pencils.

Next is Justice League of America #55, written by James Robinson and drawn by Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund (the latter inking the former, in the only instance in this collection of a penciler/inker team). Robinson checks in with two or three different ongoing plots, only one of which has anything to do with the Doomsday conflict this collection is organized around, and the issue is presented in the everyone-narrates-their-own-scenes style Brad Meltzer established when he launched this volume of the Justice League comic. Booth and Rapmund’s style more closely resembles that of Benes’, so the art style is see-sawing back to where the book began at this, the halfway point.

Supergirl, now called Dark Supergirl because she’s wearing a black version of her costume, was on the Justice League at this point, and Doomsday attacks her and various other characters in this issue, but his real target is revealed to be The Cyborg Superman.

This issue is followed immediately by Superman/Batman Annual #5, which is also written by Robinson, and continues the Justice League vs. Doomsday conflict, although to better adhere to the title of the book it appears in, Justice Leaguers Dark Supergirl and Batman Dick Grayson take center stage, trying to stop Doomsday and Cyborg Superman from destroying them and the JLA satellite they’re fighting on during their battle.

Because the writer remains the same, the writing doesn’t shift again, but the art style does rather radically, and amusingly/depressingly, the small-c continuity wasn’t policed very closely: Batman is wearing a red and black cape-less space-suit throughout the Justice League issue, but that transforms into his traditional costume during this issue.

This particular Doomsday vs. Supergirl and Cyborg Superman conflict gets the most attention, too, as it encompasses sixty-seven of the book’s pages, while the other Doomsday battles get the standard 22 pages apiece.

Finally, the book ends with Superboy #6, by Jeff Lemire and Marco Rudy. Formally, it’s the most accomplished of the chapters. It opens with two pages of 12-panel grids, and, on the third page, the page is laid-out with the same grid, but the bottom hal fof the page features Doomsday smashing through the panels, stretching them like a net, and colliding with Superboy. From there, the layout transforms into one of horizontal panels, and fewer per page, the panels getting bigger and bigger as the battle rages, until Doomsday KOs Superboy with a two-page spread splash-blow, and the book resumes the layout it opened with as Doomsday gathers up his unconscious prey and escapes with him.

This one is narrated by Superboy, and Rudy’s art is much more realistic and textured than any that came before; it resembles Sepulvda’s more than anyone’s, but the storytelling is stronger, and the human hand of the artist much more evident.

The entire book tells a story that could have been summed up in a half-dozen pages once "Reign of Doomsday" began, but then, that’s superhero comics in the second decade of the 21st century: Even when the individual issues aren’t decompressed, their meaning is decompressed by their ultimate meaninglessness (Maybe Robinson recognized the existential crisis of these comics while writing the scripts for his portions of the book, and that’s why he entitled one of them “No Exit”…?). The wasted space is filled with a ton of action and fisticuffs, but none of it is terribly smart, interesting or exciting, or even well-drawn. It’s just ugly brutality, for the most part conveyed through terribly ugly art.

It’ll run you $15.

That collection then leads into Superman: Reign of Doomsday, a book which continues the story from Return of Doomsday AND the story from writer Paul Cornell’s "The Black Ring" story arc from Action Comics. That is, the first of the five comics collected in this issue is both the climax of Cornell’s "Black Ring" (collected in Superman: The Black Ring Vol. 1 and Superman: The Black Ring Vol. 2) and it’s the start of the title story featuring the Superman Family vs. Doomsday.

It’s also a pretty strange read, although it’s at least all from the same writer, and thus much more focused.

After a few pages in which we check in with Steel and the gang on a mysterious labyrinthine spaceship which is seemingly impossible to escape from, the prison Doomsday was hauling them all of to between chapters of the previous collection, we join “The Black Ring,” already in progress.

I haven’t read that story yet, although I heard bits about it—that was the storyline starring Lex Luthor that took place during JMS’s abandoned Superman Walks Around story arc, the one that guest-starred Death of The Endless from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics—and I didn’t have much trouble following it.

By exploiting a powerful alien creature, Lex Luthor has attained godlike powers, and come as close to omnipotency as one can get in the DC Universe. His powers finally dwarf Superman’s, but there’s a catch: In order to hang on to his powers, he can only do good with them, and thus while he’s technically more powerful than Superman, one of the few things he can’t do is destroy Superman.

It’s a great set-up that leads to a great scene, and it has the makings of one of the all-time great Superman vs. Luthor moments, akin to the “I hate you” moment in the Geoff Johns and Kurt Busiek written “Up, Up and Away!” story and the climax of Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, wherein Luthor gains Superman's powers and can't help but become more Superman-like than he would want to be because of it.

The Doomsday plot is little more than a distraction to this story, and Cornell isn’t able to disguise it as much more than that. It’s essentially a back-up plan of Luthor’s, and why he needs a back-up plan if the end result was him achieving godhood seems kind of…off. I mean sure, he’s super-smart, but what kind of megalomaniac plans for his own defeat so thoroughly?

Throughout the Superman/Luthor scenes, we check in on the other Supers who are trapped in the spaceship with Doomsday, and the book ends with Superman joining them and a twist/reveal that will probably be pretty obvious if you made it through the Return trade.

The art’s on the messy side, as Pete Woods and Jesus Merino trade off, with the former handling the Luthor plotline and the latter the Doomsday one, but because this happened to fall in an anniversary issue (Action Comics #900, to be exact), other Superman artists also appear to draw bits of the story, and so Dan Jurgens, Rags Morales, Ardian Syaf and Gary Frank also pencil portions, giving the issue a jam book feel instead of a "Holy shit this book is late! Quick, start calling inkers!" feel.

Fifty-one pages later, the title story begins in earnest. Artist Kenneth Rocafort joins Cornell as the primary artist for the story, and it’s a pretty good one. Superman, his allies Steel, Supergirl and Superboy and his frenemies The Eradicator and Cyborg Superman are trapped on a spaceship with four souped-up clones of Doomsday and a mysterious adversary more powerful than any of them. The ship is hurtling at Earth at such a speed that it will destroy the planet on contact. The good guys have to figure out how to stop the bad guys, escape the ship and stop it in order to save the day. Impossible task after impossible task after impossible task, with a tight time limit.

They succeed, obviously, but it’s still fun to watch them do it. Cornell has a great handle on all of the characters and, more importantly, their relationships, and gives each something unique and specific to do within the story. There may be an element of “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if all the Super-guys teamed up to fight a bunch of Doomsdays,” but that’s Cornell’s starting point, not the extent of his plotting.

It reminded me a lot of the Jurgens Era Superman story “Panic in the Sky,” in the way it was a very Superman-specific story that threatened the whole world in such a way that the rest of the DC Universe shows up in some capacity to help out, generally by following Superman’s lead.

It seems weird to feel honest-to-goodness nostalgia for an era of DC Comics that isn’t even a whole year old yet, but that’s kind of what I felt while reading this.

As with that Kyle Higgins and Scott Snyder Batman: Gates of Gotham story, it was refreshing to find a writer who seemed to have such a strong handle on such a big and, in other hands, unwieldly cast, a writer who is able to find a place for them all, to write them all well and make them all work together.

If anything, Cornell’s writing on Action Comics seems to indicate that the Superman franchise was hardly broken, which makes DC’s decision to “fix” it along with most of their universe last fall with The New 52 seem not just wrong-headed, but baffling.

Almost as baffling as the fact that Cornell wasn’t writing either of the Superman books when they relaunched. DC gave Action Comics to Grant Morrison, a decision few would dare second-guess given Morrison's direct market popularity coupled with the quality of his All-Star Superman run, but they gave Superman to George Perez as writer/artist, and it quickly changed hands in almost comical fashion (Perez wrote and broke-down the first two issues while Merino finished the art. Perez wrote #3, while Nicola Scott penciled and Trevor Scott inked. Merino was back for #4, Scott and Scott for #5 and #6. Dan Jurgens and Keith Giffen took over writing with #7, while Perez is off to...draw parts of Worlds Finest, I think...? )

I liked seeing so much of the old DC Universe, like two Batmen in a panel, for example,

or Alan Scott’s crazy-looking old new costume

which looks a lot cooler than his new new costume, from what I can tell from the only image DC has released of it so far.

I also liked the bit where Superman refers to Muhammad Ali without naming him, just calling him "an old friend,” and the ending, in which Clark Kent goes out to dinner with his wife Lois Lane, a scene that is a hell of a compelling argument for a married Clark and Lois

Which ends with a nice little “Fuck you, J. Michael Straczynski”:

(The “Fuck you, J. Michael Straczynski,” it should be noted, is implied).

Action Comics #900 included a bunch of little back-up stories from big-name “celebrity” talent, like a stories from writers Damon Lindelof (who created that show people used to like before they got sick of it, for sucking), Paul Dini, David S. Goyer and Richard Donner, plus a bunch of other folks best known for their comics work.

They’re all pretty terrible, although I kind of liked Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s four-page “Friday Night in the 21st Century” story, in which Clark and Lois host a get together with his Legion of Super-Heroes friends. There’s nothing to it, really, but I like the goofy expressions Frank draws on the various Legionnaires as they eat pizza or look into a refrigerator, and I find Franks’ semi-creepy Christopher Reeve-as-Clark and scantily-clad Lois Lane as Naughty Secretary Halloween costume designs appealing.

Finally, Brian Stelfreeze contributed a two-page “The Evolution of The Man of Tomorrow” image, which shows Superman’s evolving costumes through the ages, climaxing in the one he wears today…only today is, of course, yesterday, so Superman is wearing a Superman costume instead of…whatever he’s wearing now.

The structure of the overall package is pretty clumsy, but I’d recommend Regin as a nice, fun, action-oriented Superman story, while it’s lead-in Return of is best avoided.

I’m eager to read Cornell’s “Black Ring” story in its entirety now, based on its climax, and I do plan to check out his “New 52” books Stormwatch and Demon Knights when they’re available in trade.

I did like this Kenneth Rocafort character’s art too, I wouldn’t mind checking out some of his future work. What was his next assignment from DC...?

Oh, right.

Sigh…

The Best Part of Superman: Doomsday

I realize I was pretty hard on DC’s direct-to-DVD Superman: Doomsday film last week. I suppose I should take some of the responsibility for my own disappointment. After all, “direct-to-DVD” translates pretty directly into “not good enough for theaters,” and, well, Jesus, just look at some of the stuff that gets put in theaters. Still, I was expecting something at least as good as JLU, and perhaps that’s my fault for expecting it as much as their fault for failing to deliver it.

Anyway, I don’t want to sound like I didn’t like anything at all about the movie.

I mean, I thought it was pretty funny that the hot Metropolis nightclub Jimmy works as a paparazzo at is called “Nite Club.”

And that animated Kevin Smith is so much skinnier than real-life Kevin Smith.

And, um…I guess it was pretty cool when Superman grabbed Doomsday by the roof of this mouth to flip him.

And…uh…hmm. Well, that’s really about it from the feature presentation, but I did find the special feature documentary about the creation of the original death of Superman storyline from DC Comics quite fascinating.

While the subject matter isn’t the making of the film I had just watched, this short film is of a similar nature to the “making of” featurettes that are so common on DVDs these days, just focusing on something other than the DVD feature.

Certainly it amounts to little more than PR, and if there is a compelling documentary to be made about that time DC Comics killed off their flagship character, DC Comics isn’t really the right company to make it.

Is it a good documentary? God, no.

But is it interesting, and fun to watch? It sure is, particularly for those of us interested in the creation of comic books and the industry as a whole.

Consulting comics.org, I see that was 15 going on 16 when Superman died in late ’92, and I was just starting to get into comics. As that much maligned decade of the comic industry was dawning, the TSR/DC co-production Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the only extremely occasionally released Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles books were the only comics I was regularly reading. But I was starting to feel the siren call of the DCU, thanks to the house ads and checklists that ran in AD&D.

Armageddon 2001 got me to pick up a couple of self-contained annuals featuring Batman, and Norm Breyfogle’s expressive art drew me to an issue of Batman (featuring a ventriloquist’s dummy with a tommy gun, as I recall), and I soon discovered there were scores of Breyfogle-drawn Bat-books in the back issue bins.

The Doomsday storyline would be my first exposure to Superman, beyond the Dan Jurgens Armageddon 2001 annual in which Superman wore gloves and fought Batman, and his brief appearance in the Death In the Family trade I’d bought (which also featured Batman and Superman fighting, come to think of it).

A neighbor kid had heard about the upcoming death of Superman and thought the books would be worth a lot of money someday, and he wanted to buy them. But since his mom didn’t want him going into the creepy comic shop in the creepy downtown part of my hometown (he was a gradeschooler) and knew I’d sometimes stop there on my way home form school, she gave me the money to buy those Doomsday fight issues for him. I would read them before passing them on (probably bending spines and leaving fingerprints, then decreasing their “value.” Ha ha!), and got hooked. With the actual death issue, I bought my own as well (I opened the polybag though, so there goes that investment), and hopped on for the whole year-long “Word Without a Superman”/ “Reign of the Supermen” storyline.

Considering how much time and energy I would eventually devote to the DCU, that year or so worth of Superman comics holds a special place in my heart, since it was a real gateway to the DCU in a way that the Batman comics I read weren’t; everyone showed up in there at some point. When I occasionally reread some of them these days, I’m sometimes struck by how dated they are in their details of the DCU’s fictional history (Lex Luthor posing as his own son from Australia, Supergirl being that Matrix thing I never completely understood, some guy named “Bloodwynd” being on the Justice League, the Hawks wearing red, et cetera), but it’s still an impressively rich and detailed story, in terms of the size of its cast and the different points of view the storyline was infused with, and the number of new characters and concepts introduced.

Looking back from 2007, I’m not sure which is more remarkable—That DC was able to sustain what was essentially a weekly Superman comic book for a year without the benefit of its star even appearing (kinda like what Ed Brubaker and company are attempting with Captain America now, only at least four times as often), or how influential the world-building those creative teams engaged in would end up being. I mean, Geoff Johns has been using Cyborg Superman to great effect in Green Lantern, Steel and Superboy have had been near-constant presences in the DCU since, and so on.

But enough about me.


(Above: Bloodwynd wears a golden circlet encrusted with jewels on his left thigh. I just wanted to point that out.)

The documentary features talking head interviews with Karl Kesel, Roger Stern, Jon Bogdanove, Louise Simonson, Paul Levitz, Jerry Ordway, Dan Jurgens, Jenette Kahn, Mike Carlin, Tom Grummett and Brett Breeding, only two of whom I’ve actually ever seen images of before.

These interviews are all rather brief and perfunctory, but I found it interesting just to see these creators’ faces and hear their voices, after having been familiar with them as names in credit boxes for so long. Comics is an interesting field in that the spectrum of celebrity varies so much from creator to creator. Read just about any novel, and you’ll see a photo of the author on the back of the jacket. But man, I’ve read scores of comics that each of these people were involved with, and I couldn’t pick most of ‘em out in a line up. I could be standing in a bank line behind all of them, and I wouldn’t be able to pick any of them out, although I might think to myself, Hey, that nerdy dude up there looks a little like Paul Levitz, doesn’t he?

(I wonder if this is changing due to the Internet, the rise of the blogosphere, the influence of conventions and the conscious cultivating of a celebrity culture to comics, or if I just spend more time in fan circles now. Like, I’ve seen pictures of just about every creator I read regularly now—and many, like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Paul Pope, Warren Ellis, Rob Liefeld and Brian Michael Bendis are people I wouldn’t only be able to pick out of a police line up, but probably a crowded New York City street corner— but I had no idea what any of the crators I was regularly reading back in the ‘90s looked like. Back then, I thought Kelley Jones was a woman at first though too, so it may also just be a matter of me being an idiot.)

Also interviewed are a couple of New York retailers, who give some first-person accounts of the consumerist hysteria that ensued when word got out that Superman wasn’t long for the world, and Brian Cunningham of Wizard magazine, who seems to have patterned his own hairstyle after Superman’s. I’m not really familiar with Cunningham, but I admit to sneering as soon as I saw where he was from. He provided the necessary fan perspective, and Idon’t mean to degrade the man here or anything, but I thought it was a little sad that in creating this film, DC turned to Wizard for an authoritative, third-party, industry watcher’s perspective on the event.

I don’t know how many magazines that were active in the early ‘90s are still active (Maybe Wizard is the only one?) or if websites like Newsarama.com were around as far back as then (Was their an Internet back then? I didn’t discover it until it had already existed for quite a few years, on account of me being an extreme Luddite). But Wizard seemed like a poor choice, simply because this is just one more example of one of the Big Two legitimizing Wizard as the face of comics journalism. I don’t know, maybe Tom Spurgeon or The Comics Journal folks were asked to appear and laughed in the faces of those asking, and maybe Matt Brady of Newsarama.com didn’t want to participate, but increasingly Wizard seems irrelevant to me, as the Internet handles the fan-stuff faster and better, and the mainstream media start paying more and more attention to comics, and I can’t help feeling the market would go ahead and kill Wizard off if only DC and Marvel didn’t devote so much time and energy into subsidizing it with their ad dollars, participation in coverage and granting the magazine “scoops.”

Anyway, the film jumps from talking head to talking head, occasionally lingering on art from those comics (which all looks extremely good blown up here), recounting in breif the John Byrne relaunch of the franchise, and the circumstances that lead to the storyline. Originally, they had planned a yearlong marriage of Superman and Lois story, but since they had to wait until the Lois & Clark series was ready to marry their Superman and Lois (as the plan was to synch the two events up), it left the Super-books with a year to fill.

And this is what they chose to do.

A lot of the specifics will be familiar to anyone who’s read any of the trades of these stories or of other’s from the era, as they recount the way the “triangle” books worked and the Super Summits, several of which are captured on film.

These segments are kind of revelatory, and while I hate to turn this post into another stiff arm of Countdown, it is remarkable that DC was able to produce such a (relatively) excellent Superman monthly 15 years ago, but have had such a hard time making a coherent weekly this year. Even 52, which I enjoyed enormously from the first issue on, had art that was quite sub-par. I forgave that at the time on account of it being a necessary evil of a weekly book, but then when you consider the Super-books of the ‘90s, that excuse evaporates. I noticed this too while reading the out-of-print Panic In The Sky! trade I recently found a copy of, and the whole death of Superman epic is just another reminder.


(Above: "Panic In the Sky!" featured Brainiac versus pretty much the entire DC Universe, and it was totally awesome. The trade, naturally enough, has long been out of print).

Why is it that those storylines came out on a weekly basis, and had high-quality art on par with the art in every other DC book at the time (if not better than many of them), while 52 and, even more so, Countdown, look so ugly, rushed and messy? I suspect it boils down to lead time, the Super-books were plotted out well in advance, and Countdown seemed to be more of an “Oh shit! We need another monthly, and we need it to start in three months!” But, in theory, Countdown could have had just four regular pencil and inker teams, each of which would take one week’s issue, and would thus only be doing as much work as they would on a monthly, although the story would be weekly (In theory. I’ve been downright shocked at how bad some high-profile DC books look of late. This past week, for example, JLoA and Teen Titans, the latter of which has had some real bad luck with artists, seemed just awful when compared to so much Big Two output).

Watching this documentary—and reading trades or comics from the period—also makes the lack of quality in Countdown’s writing seem mystifying as well. Is this another matter of not enough lead time, or a problem of the one writer as showrunner, with a team of writers fleshing out plot beats strategy of comics production? Because the Super-books had just about as many writers as Countdown, and yet these stories were all incredibly tight, and made sense from issue to issue. The extreme variance in writing quality is a bit mystifying when you realize that Countdown, “Panic in the Sky!” and the death of Superman stories all share an editor—Mike Carlin. Although Countdown launched with another editor, so Carlin can only be blamed so much for the lack of quality in the book.

But, as this documentary reveals, Carlin and all of the writers and artists would gather for summits, Carlin would break out these giant poster-sized boards and together they would all plot a year-long story, dividing up the pieces of the story. It seemed like a lot of brainstorming went on there, with pretty significant details suggested from all quarters. For example, the Four Supermen of the “Reign” storyline came about because each creative team had their own ideas about what a Superman coming back should be like, and it was, according to the doc, something they were debating until Simonson suggested they use all four, giving each team their own character and subplot to advance (and giving us two of the stronger new characters of the decade, Steel and Superboy, and Geoff Johns fuel for Green Lanterns stories 15 years later).

The convention season scuttlebutt is that a third weekly is planned. I hope DC is already working on it (although I doubt it), and that it will follow a production pattern similar to the one here instead of the top-down, TV-writing approach of Countdown. Clearly the former has lead to more readable comics than the latter. (But if Carlin’s editing Countdown, he can’t possibly be leading a summit on next year’s weekly at the moment, can he? Sigh.)

But enough about Countdown.

Back to the alleged subject of this post, in addition to the look into the process of the how Superman comics used to be created, the documentary also does a nice job of capturing some of the strange media coverage of the event, and the comics culture of the ‘90s, showing how the creators took the surprise celebrity status they received, with the kind of attention and adulation that was usually reserved for the likes of Todd MacFarlane or Rob Liefeld going, temporarily anyway, to the likes of Mike Carlin.

It’s a neat little trip down memory lane, to a time when comics was a collectable market and media coverage of the medium was still new.

It’s pretty striking to watch all the footage culled from TV news and the flashes of newspaper headlines in 2007, after Captain America had died, and seeing how the media of the early ‘90s did the same thing as the today’s media, in terms of equating that comic book icon with America itself, and trying to make the story of his death out as a broader cultural statement than the more obvious reading that, Hey, maybe this comic book company would really like to sell some more comics, and doesn’t have much to say about the “End of History” that followed the Cold War or War on Terror.

It’s also interesting to watch knowing all that would follow. The Death of Superman era, creatively, commercially and even culturally, genuinely seemed innocent and exciting, and the commercial aspect of wanting to sell more comics aside, there was something pure about it (Unless the creators are all really great actors, they seemed to have been really caught of guard that anyone other than regular DC readers cared about what they were doing at all).

But those of us who stuck around afterwards know exactly what it lead to for DC. Batman in a wheel chair, replaced by a darker, more ‘90s successor. Wonder Woman kicked to the curb for a darker, more ‘90s successor. Green Lantern turned evil and replaced by a new character. Green Arrow killed and replaced by a new character. Aquaman maimed and given a new, darker look*.

The success and attention the Death of Superman storyline may have caught DC off-guard when it originally hit, but they wasted no time in trying to replicate it, each attempt leading to diminishing returns. (See also Dan Jurgens twelve to fifteen different Doomsday projects to follow).







*To be fair, I enjoyed all of these stories. The Batman one went on a bit too long and didn’t go far enough—Jean-Paul Valley really shoulda killed some dudes, as the revulsion the regulars felt for him was a tad force. After all, he was simply a marginally more brutally violent asshole vigilante than the brutally violent asshole vigilante they were used to working with. And that Wonder Woman story? Good God did that suck. But otherwise? I was on board with all that stuff, even Hal going over to the darkside, and while the conversion likely felt forced to a lot of people, if anything is going to turn someone psycho, the genocide of his entire home town of millions oughta do the trick. Besides, when he was “evil” he was only trying to get enough power to resurrect the city, and thus if he killed someone, he did so knowing that if he’s successful, he could totally bring them back to life. I was disappointed when he died simply because Parallax, lame thought the name was, had the makings of a great villain.

Review: Superman: Doomsday DVD

One of my jobs is as a comics critic. Another of my jobs is as a film critic. So in my spare time, what do I do to unwind? Well, sometimes I watch films based on comic books.

You know, flicks like this:


Now, I wasn’t planning on writing about this here or anywhere else, as I was off the clock and watching the DVD purely out of curiosity and a desire to kill 90 minutes, but after the significant amount of personal suffering the act of watching Superman: Doomsday involved, I thought perhaps I had a moral obligation to write about the film, just in case any of you are contemplating paying cash money for it, instead of just borrowing it for free from your local library or something (like I did).

I know what you’re thinking. Well, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I think I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking (I think), “But Caleb, is it really so bad?”

Well, it’s not good.

And that’s frankly a little surprising, given the relatively high standard of DC Comics-related animated output set by Bruce Timm, one of the masterminds behind Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series and sundry other animated series that don’t have the words “The Animated Series” in their titles. Timm is one-third of the directing triumvirate responsible for this film, and it’s heavily informed by his designs and previous Superman animated projects. (Timm also gets a credit or co-writing the script with longtime TV cartoon writer Duane Capizzi.) The other two directors are animators who’ve worked on The Batman, Legion of Super-Heroes and Jackie Chan Adventures.

Perhaps expecting another Batman: Mask of the Phantasm or World’s Finest was being a little too optimistic, but, at the same time, this is the first direct-to-DVD from a much ballyhooed (well, by DC) program of turning fan-favorite comic book stories into films specifically catering to fans instead of general TV audiences. Considering the creative strength of the first few seasons of Timm and company’s Batman, or the most recent seasons of Justice League Unlimited, the prospect of some of the same people creating a film without things like worrying about advertisers or anticipating the tastes and hang-ups of a mass audience hanging over them sure seems like it should be a recipe for awesomeness, right?

Yes, well, "seems" and "should be" are a lot different than "is," I'm afraid.

With the exact level of quality you’ve come to expect from the words “direct-to-DVD,” the blandly titled Superman: Doomsday boils the Doomsday through back-in-black, shaggy-haired Superman epic into just 75 minutes (That can’t be right, can it? Seventy-five minutes? That…that’s one short feature film).

I’m not quite sure what the intended audience for the film is, as the content lurches in one direction, and then retreats to the exact opposite direction, often from frame to frame.

There are scores of deaths, mostly caused by Doomsday's fists, but each is completely bloodless, and we never see a single corpse, as if we’re supposed to enjoy the thrill of high-stakes violence, without a hint of the consequences of it.

A bizarre triangle of sexual rivalry is set up between Lois, Superman and Lex Luthor (and Lois isn’t always the conflicted point of it), and some “naughty” words are snuck in.

The production is similarly all mixed up, with the corner-cutting clearly visible. Attention will be lavished on Superman and Doomsday punching each other to make the scene seem glossier and more richly colored than, say, the time Superman and Doomsday punched each other on JLU, but the city of Metropolis in which this battle occurs is a ghost town; four people work at The Daily Planet (though they never all appear in the same scene), and fewer than a dozen people seem to live in the whole city. Lex Corp has only two employees in corporate head quarters, and one of them murders the other early on.

Even the casting is half-assed, with actors seemingly cast more for name recognition than ability, and even then the names are dubious. Anne Heche seems like quite a “get,” for example, or at least would have been a few years ago, but TV’s Spike? Serenity’s Jayne?

And rather than taking any of the established continuities (comics, film or carton) as a starting point, which would probably have been a smart idea for a DVD marketed directly to comics geeks, it kind of starts over, as it’s own thing. That would be laudable if it were an improvement of any pre-existing continuity, but rather than taking the best of each, it takes nothing interesting from any of them.

And speaking of half-assed, I’m going to be totally phoning this review in (Remember, off the clock here, people).

In place of a coherent, unified piece, please enjoy this topical breakdown then, framed as a series of questions from an imaginary voice in my head that hasn't seen the DVD yet.



So, can you tell us about the plot to the film, in far greater detail than is necessary?

Consumed with a seething, barely repressed gay love for Superman, Lex Luthor (James Martsers) is tunneling to the center of the Earth to find a new source of energy, while curing human disease in his mind and assigning specialists to turn these cures into lifelong rather than instant solutions.

While his employees joke about putting a catheter in Satan’s anus to power Metropolis (?), they discover an alien something-or-other, unleashing the gray, spiky monster that we know is named Doomsday only because we’ve seen him in other cartoons and read about in comic books.

Superman (Adam Baldwin), meanwhile, has spent the last six months flying Lois Lane (Anne Heche) to his Fortress of Solitude, which they’ve turned into a Fortress of Sexitude. Between doing it with Lois and bouts of post-coital make out sessions, Superman tries and fails to cure cancer. Oh, he also has a cycloptic robot with big fat fingers that tries to watches them make out. Oh man, is there no privacy even in a place called “The Fortress of Solitude?” Ho ho!

For Superman, the relationship is all about the sex, and he refuses to confirm Lois’ suspicions that he’s actually her co-worker Clark Kent. She nags him about his fear of commitment.

In a series of clichés from every bad horror movie of the last 20 years, Doomsday comes to Metropolis, where he and Superman beat each other to “death.” It’s disappointing that the creators resort to the see-the-monster-through-a-video-camera gag, which ends with the monster striking the camera, naturally, and the tired monstervision scenes, but don’t think to adopt any of little vignettes from the comics that let us know what a scary-ass customer Doomsday is, like when he smooshes the bird that alights in his hand, or totally kills that deer.

In the wake of Superman’s death, Jimmy and Perry turn to drink, Lois turns to Ma Kent, and a gothy version of the pedophile-style Toyman turns up in a scene with a giant robot spider written into the movie specifically so occasional filmmaker and Famous Movie Actor Kevin Smith can deliver a one line in-joke about his own (far superior) film version of this same story that was repeatedly rejected so Hollywood can make a movie about Superman as a deadbeat dad instead (Hey, why didn’t they just animate Smith’s script? It’s basically the same story, only less terrible).

As for Lex, he copes by making his own clone of Superman, which is kinda like a flying, eye-beam shooting real doll (Is that the right spelling? Is it a proper noun? I’m scared of what I’ll see if I google it to check). This perfect clone (i.e. not an imperfect one, so no Bizarro-speak, sadly) replaces Superman around town, and everybody thinks he’s actually back from the dead. And he is! But that’s not him. He’s in the Fortress of Sexitude, soaking up solar energy and growing a mullet in preparation for a big showdown, a showdown that will apparently be decided by hair-length alone.

Back in Metropolis, Lois seduces Lex, she and Jimmy attack him, rifle through his office, break into his secret lab, and begin illegally gathering a bunch of evidence that will be both inadmissible in court and completely unpublishable. Then the clone starts acting evil, but not funny evil like Christopher Reeve in Superman III.

So Superman returns and totally murders his clone. And they all live happily ever after. Except for the clone. Which Superman has totally murdered.



How closely does it follow the comics?

Not very. At all. Given the fact that comic book story was about a year’s worth of comics—that’s over a thousand pages of story—getting the whole death, mourning and resurrection as relayed there into a single movie probably wouldn’t have been possible. (Now, why they bothered trying is another, more fair question).

Imagine that massive storyline stripped of the dramatic build-up of Doomsday stomping across the country and killing Disney-ready animals, the battle with the Justice League, Supergirl, The Eradicator and the Cyborg posing as Superman, John Henry Irons and the clone that would become Superboy trying to replace Superman, Mongul, Warworld, the destruction of Coast City, and the extensive mourning and funeral rituals Superman’s extensive supporting characters and the DC heroes all went through.

Everything that’s left makes it into the DVD version.

The actual Doomsday fight and death of Superman was, of course, just the beginning of the actual story in the comics, a sort of prologue to the real story, which was to characterize Superman by taking him out of the world, and showing how massive an impact that would have, and just how hard it is to replace him.

The movie does cover the mourning and return, but it’s incredibly abbreviated.



I hear this movie is pretty gay. How gay is it?

Oh, it’s gay all right. As to how gay, let’s just say “real gay,” and hope that covers it.

The homoerotic tone is set at the very beginning of the film, in fact, as we get a monologue from Lex Luthor about how attractive Superman is. I’m not making this up, I swear.

“Just look at him,” Luthor’s voice rings out over stills representing news photos of Superman. “So sleek. So powerful. So…beatufiul.. Like some great golden god made flesh.”

When Superman “dies,” Lex pouts about how he was “taken before his time,” and asks, “Why did you leave me? Why?” When a beautiful woman, his one and only confidante Mercy (reimagined as a corporate lieutenant instead of a bodyguard/chauffer/henchman factotum), tries to take his mind off of Superman, Lex shoots her in the face.

Remember what I said about Lex cloning Superman? Well, now that he has a Superman of his very own at his beck and call, what does he do with it? Take over the world? No, he coyly lures it into his—and I’m not making this up, these are the actual words in the actual movie—“rumpus room.” There’s Lex waiting, shirtless. He then proceeds to beat the hell out of his own personal Superman with kryptonite knuckles, and then mounts him, leans into his face and whispers, “Who’s your daddy?”

But wait, there’s more! Lex also keeps the real Superman’s body in a tube in his office, where he stops by to tell it about his day, as if they were an old married couple.

And later, when Lex’s clone turns on him and he must fight it for real, the villain says, “I might have to mess up that pretty face of yours” and, also, “Come to poppa.”

At one point, Lex talks to clone Superman about the need “to stage your coming out” as Metropolis’ new superhero, but I’m not entirely sure it’s the clone’s coming out he’s talking about.



Well, how’s the action? I mean, there is punching, right?

Eh. Yeah, there's some punching, but the action's not very good, at least not worth going out of your way to see.

There are two big fight scenes. There’s the fight to the “death” with Doomsday at the beginning, and a fight against the clone, which functions as The Cyborg and Eradicator rolled into one, at the end.

Both are sub-Dragon Ball Z in terms of animated action. Imagine if the DBZ fighters were professional wrestlers instead of martial artists, and their combat slowed down by about half, with loud noises and glossy computer coloring attempting to fill in for the missing blows, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the fighting herein.

For a closer comparison, remember when Captain Marvel and Superman totally wailed on another in JLU? Or when Justice Lord Superman fought Doomsday? Or when Superman fought Darkseid at the end of the series? Yeah, well, try not to remember them while watching these fights, as the Doomsday battles pale in comparison, despite the fact they allow Superman to spit up blood.

My favorite part is a scene where Doomsday's about to smash an innocent little girl into the ground, and Superman stops him by grabbing his torso. flying him into orbit, and then falling back down with him, hitting Metropolis (maybe the exact same spot where that girl was?) with enough force to knock down several buildings and creating a giant crater in the middle of the city. So, to save that girl, Superman essentially kills hundreds, if not the very same girl. I'm guessing. The destruction seems to be, based on the numbers of toppled sky scapers, the equivalent of ten 9/11s or so. Not that the film acknowledges its existence in a post-9/11 world, of course. When Superman dies, a media talking head refers to the fact that America hasn't mourned like this since the assassination of Jack Kennedy. I wasn't around for that, but I'm pretty sure 9/11 was simimlar, and would be a more likely rhetorical comparison for a hero's death that occurred in an attack that leveled skyscrapers in a major American city.

The other oddly out-of-touch moment is the mention of Clark Kent going on assignment in Afghanistan. Is this before the U.S. invasion? After? What? Is there a U.S. War on Teror in this movie's version of America? Was there a 9/11? If the creators don't want us thinking about this stuff, why bring it up at all?



How’s the cast?

On the whole, quite good. Heche is the star of the piece, and she does a nice, brassy, Old Hollywood pushy broad version of Lois, bringing some real throaty emotion to the several crying scenes. Marsters’ biggest problem is that he isn’t Clancy Brown, who has defined the voice of Luthor for a generation with his work on TAS and JLU; otherwise, he does a solid job. Baldwin similarly suffers from simply not being Tim Daly, a problem he compounds by playing Superman as an odd extended Adam West impersonation.



How are the character designs?

Pretty good, with the sole exception of the lead. Bruce Timm’s designs for The Animated Series were clearly used as a starting point, as these designs are all just kind of tweaked versions of those.

Lois is a little slimmer and with longer hair and a (slightly) bigger wardrobe. Jimmy Olsen is freed of The Worst Haircut Anyone’s Ever Had, which he sported in TAS. Lex is different than any Lex I’ve ever seen, taller and skinnier, giving him a somewhat emaciated look. His facial structure is essentially that of TAS and JLU, however, so that Doomsday Lex resembles a sort of stretched out version of the previous Lexes. Doomsday is a big improvement over the sparer design he boasted in his JLU appearances. Metropolis itself looks like the animated version as heavily informed by the films.

Superman though…I don’t know what went into this (perhaps the audio commentaries offer insight, but I didn’t have it in me to watch the movie again to find out). This Superman looks like the Timm design from the previous cartoons, only with severe underbite and sunken cheeks. The result? Superman, only uglier. Which I guess is kind of appropriate for the film, which is basically the cartoon Superman you thought you knew and loved, only much worse.



Was there nothing worthwhile about it?

Well, the “bonus material” features a rather interesting documentary featuring the creators of the comics this DVD is based on as they ruminate on the process and the media hysteria it set off. It’s a rare look behind the curtain of the creation of DC Comics, or at least the way they used to make them, and a sort of time capsule of the early ‘90s comics industry. It deserves a post of it’s own though. Check back later in the week for a discussion of that.



Are you still looking forward to the New Frontier DVD?

You're kidding, right? I was cautiously excited. Now I'm actively dreading the prospect of a direct-to-DVD animated version of DC: The New Frontier from the makers of this film.

Man Up, Martian Manhunter! Pt. 1: Doomsday

On paper, the Martian Manhunter is probably the last person in the DC Universe you want to get into a fight with. Seriously, if the Justice League gave you a choice between two doors, with Superman kicking your ass behind one and Martian Manhunter kicking your ass behind the other, you’re going to want to go with Superman.

As J’onn himself recently explained on his blog* in discussin the current Justice League line-up, “I've got all of Superman's cooler powers plus mind-reading plus shapeshifting plus intangibility plus I'm not a monumental d-bag like Geo-Force. Ooo, lava blasts? Martian Vision, bitch."

Now, J’onn’s probably exaggerating a little bit there. I mean, he’s super-fast, almost as fast as Superman, but he can’t tie the Flash in a race like Supes can. And he’s extremely strong and extremely durable, but probably not quite as strong and durable as Superman. But for the most part, he’s like Superman with a head cold, or Superman on two hours of sleep...only with a bunch of other powers too, to compensate for not being able to beat Supes in a hundred-yard dash or juggle as many planets.

Think Superman and Charles Xavier and the Vision and Plastic Man all rolled into one, and that's pretty much Martian Manhunter.

I mean, he’s a guy who once took out Despero one-on-one using only his mental powersand just plain buried Ultraman, the evil Superman doppelganger from a neighboring antimatter universeYou hear him talking smack there? It’s not even a fight, the moment you think maybe you want to fight him, then bam! you’re DDDUUNNNNN, as Ultraman himself put it.

It’s a good thing for the supervillains of the DC Universe then that J’onn is a colossal pussy.

Really, that’s the only explanation I can think of for why a guy with that much power gets taken down constantly. At this point, he’s probably been rescued by Superman more times than Lois Lane. He’s been clobbered by such inferior opponents as Superboy-Prime and Black Adam. He’s been known to spend days at a time in space crying.

You can’t really blame the whole vulnerability-to-fire thing. While this has come and gone from story-to-story, in aggregate it would appear that fire is a psychological weakness of J’onn's, which, when he allows it to get the better of him, causes him to lose concentration on his powers and turn into a puddle of goo, but, when he’s concentrating (or has had his Martian version of Zoloft that day), it doesn’t hurt him any more than laser beams or lightning bolts.

J’onn’s perennial whipping boy status really seems to simply come down to a matter of a lack of confidence on his part. What he seems to need is a coach, someone to grab him by the shoulders, look him in the ruby reds and say, “Man up, Manhunter!”

That’s where Every Day Is Like Wednesday comes in.

For the first installment of our new feature, we’re going to examine an opponent J’onn should have been able to take or, at the very least, not gotten completely, embarrassingly destroyed by in a few panels.

His name? That’s right, Doomsday, the monster that killed Superman. Well, actually, he didn’t really kill-kill Superman; he simply beat Superman really, really, really badly, exhausting almost every ounce of solar energy Superman’s cells had gathered, draining him like a battery and sending him into a death-like state that lasted months.

As was revealed in Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey (Collected in big, fat omnibus collection Superman/Doomsday: The Collected Edition, which I recently fishished reading), the big D was created over the course of centuries of brutal experimentation to be an unkillable killing machine. He has no internal organs and is almost solid throughout. He’s powered by solar energy, can survive any environment and, in the off-chance anything ever kills him, he returns to life, evolved so that he can’t be killed in the same way again.

In other words, Doomsday is one tough customer. In Hunter/Prey, dude shrugs off Darkseid’s Omega Effect (so named because no one shrugs that shit off), and mortally wounds the dark god. Orion’s astroforce doesn’t phase Doomsday, and in a short story we see a Green Lantern empty its ring on Doomsday, to little effect.

Now, given the level of awesomeness that is Doomsday (Superman only ends up defeating him at the end of Superman/Doomsday by having him hurtled forward through time to the absolute end of the universe), it seems logical that Doomsday could probably take J’onn in a fight, right? But at the very least, J’onn should be able to give the gray giant a run for his money. After all, an opponent can’t even punch J’onn if he goes all ghosty on them.The omnibus contained multiple fights between Doomsday and J’onn, and, I’m sorry to report, that J’onn does about as well against him as he did back when he was inadvertently impersonating Bloodwynd (Yeah, J'onn thought he was Bloodwynd for a while...it's a whole thing).

So, not counting that first time when the Manhunter thought he was Bloodwynd, J'onn and Doomsday first faced off in Superman: The Doomsday Wars, by Dan Jurgens and inker Norm Rapmund (also collected in the omnibus). The Watchtower Era JLA is responding a distress call from "the Georgia authorities," and it's a pretty serious line-up that goes to survey the damage. J'onn's there alongside Wonder Woman, Orion, Plastic Man, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, The Flash (Wally West) and, um, the Huntress.

The Leaguers all split up and investigate, and, before you know it, Huntress and Orion find the rest of the team all laid out flat......except J'onn, who's not only knocked out, but hung up by his cape. Sigh. Oh J'onn...

Now Huntress doesn't realize it yet, but we the readers know that it was Doomsday that just pwned the whole Justice League. Actually, it's Doomsday with Brainiac's brain in him. Or mind. How is this possible, if Doomsday doesn't have any internal organs? I don't know, so let's ignore it. Well, let's first state that if Doomsday doesn't have a brain and/or a mind, then he should be invulnerable to J'onn's telepathy, meaning that J'onn can't give him the old Martain mindfuck that he used to take out Despero, nor can he read his mind to anticipate his moves as he did Ultraman. So maybe that explains why J'onn can't lay a glove on the guy.

Actually, J'onn makes some more excuses...Okay, we know Doomsday must be super, super fast, because he fights Superman hand-to-hand, and Superman's, like, Flash fast. And J'onn says he got nailed before he had a chance to phase. Okay, I'll buy that. Of course, I thinkt he Martian doth protest too much, because he also says he was protecting someone, which is another good excuse for getting beaten up by Doomsday and hung by his own cape...he couldn't phase because he was protecting a bystander, and if he went intangible instead of taking the punch, the bystander woulda been pulped. I'd buy that too. The two excuses don't work in concert, but whatever. This is a Dan Jurgens story, not a Grant Morrison one, so we let little things slide a little.

Okay so now J'onn knows he's up against Doomsday, the monster that killed Superman. He knows just how fast he is and how hard he hits. Now he's ready for him. Time to get back in there and show Doomsday what Martians are made of!Just four panels later, J'onn returns.Oh J'onn...

To be fair, GL, Flash, Orion and Wonder Woman don't do much better. We can assume Wondy's lariat didn't work because Doomsday's invulnerable, being mindless (although he has Brainiac's mind here) and he's invulnerable to GL because he's evolved around Green Lantern rings from his previous encounters with GLs and Guardians. There's no reason why Flash couldn't have pushed him at lightspeed and sent him off-planet though. Anyway, I only mention this to make more excuses for J'onn. Maybe it's not his fault he got taken down so easily here; so did a bunch of other people that should be able to take Doomsday out, if their powers were written as they were being written in JLA and their own titles back then.

Jurgens has the League fold like a a set of lawn furniture before the fury of Doomsday, and so the Brainiac-possessed engine of destruction takes them back to his HQ, putting them all in silly little traps that incapacitate their powers.

I don't know if anyone's pointed this out before, but Superman can kinda be sort of a dick sometimes, huh?

After storming Braniac/Doomsday's city, tearing off his shirt and resucing the League, he tells them that he's teleported Doomsday to the moon, and he's going up there to tackle him head on. When Orion's like, "Yeah, let's go get him," Superman gives him a patronizing..."Alright, fine, but don't come crying to me if you get impaled on a bone shard!" Dick.

The plan is for Superman to assemble a bunch of teleporter tubes and set them up in a loop, so Doomsday is in a state of constant teleportation. To do that, he'll need Orion and Martian Manhunter to buy him some time—one minute, exactly. He doesn't think that the two heroes, each of whom could go 100 rounds with Superman, can do it, but, as Jurgens writes the pair, hes's right.Sigh. Oh J'onn...

At any rate, Superman's plan works, and he saves the day. Yeah, Superman! Why can't you be more like that strange visitor from another world in a fight, J'onn?

J'onn would get another chance to fight Doomsday a few years later, during Lex Luthor's presidency (2001's Superman #175, to be exact). This story was written by Jeph Loeb and, like most Jeph Loeb stories, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and it makes much less sense when thought about in the context of previous stories. (This was also around about the time Loeb was either losing his mind, or testing to see just what he could get away with in a comic book script and still get paid for it; this issue, for example, is intercut with quotes from President Luthor's state of the union speech for some reason. Other Loeb-written issues from this period had random speeches from American history used as narration for "Our Worlds At War" chapters.)

Now at some point during the "Our Worlds At War" story, Doomsday was freed from the teleportation loop, skeletonized by Imperiex, brought back to life, and then, in this very issue, given Joker venom. Oh, and he can talk and think now and is, for some reason, really, really weak, to the point where Superman beats him down solo, somethng he's never been able to do before.

J'onn, on the other hand, still can't put up a good showing against the monster. He tries the old Martian mindfuck on Doomsday, and then throws a couple of punches. Now, we've established that Doomsday's probably invulnerable to telepathic attack already, right? Or else how else could he have taken the Manhunter out so easily during Doomsday Wars? Plus, he doesn't have a brain or mind, so telepathy shouldn't work, right?

Well, it doesn't. But this is weird. In the second panel here, J'onn says "Sentient!" Like he's suprrised that Doomsday's sentient. Like he just discovered it when Doomsday started talking to him. But if he didn't think DD possessed any sentience, why was he trying to mess with his mind on the last page?

Oh, and I like how Doomsday breathes fire all of a sudden here. When the hell did he get that power?

J'onn, as always, comports himself with dignity, even in defeat. "Ackkkk!" Sigh. Oh, J'onn....

Luckily, Superman flies in and saves J'onn's ass from Doomsday. Again.

For J'onn's sake, let's hope he never finds himself having to fight Doomsday again, but if he does, what should he do? Other than, of course, manning the fuck up?

Don't worry, J'onn, we're here for you. I say you shapechange to resemble Superman, but lower your mass until your intangible, so that Doomsday will be totally focused on you, but unable to hit you. Then you can lead him away from bystanders and into a trap of some sort you can arrange with your fellow superheroes via telepathy.

If you want to take a more active approach, you can always throw him into space (22,300 will put him in orbit of Earth, right? So that he neither just falls back down or goes hurtling into some other poor planet). Or throw him into the sun. And if you're afraid of grappling with him (hey, I would be too), you can always turn completely invivible, fly at him at top speed, and straight up knock him into space like that.

But most importantly J'onn, and I just can't stress this enough, the first thing you need to do is man up. Or Martian up. Whatever. Just get it together, guy.


*Okay, actually it was Facedowninthegutters.blogspot.com, but click on that link anyway because it’s hilarious. DC oughta get J’onn to write the introduction to “The Tornado’s Path” hardcover collection

Related: Actually Essential Storylines: Martian Manhunter