On the new Superman movie: Politics, performances and nitpicks

This post will obviously have spoilers for Superman. And, less obviously, for the 2006-2012 comic series The Boys...and maybe the 2003-2007 volume of The Outsiders too...

•Overall? I thought it was quite good. It's definitely the best Superman movie I've ever seen in a theater, and maybe the best Superman movie ever (I should note that I didn't actually sit down and watch the Christopher Reeve movies start to finish until I was an adult, and thus have no real nostalgia for those films, although, yeah, Reeve is a fantastic Superman and Clark Kent). 

I thought this was the first of all the Superman films that felt like it starred the comic book version of the character, rather than some new or different or original movie version of the character, and it is the first movie I've seen that seemed to be set in some recognizable version of a DC Universe. 

I think that bodes well for the future, given that this is the launch of a new (and hopefully improved) DC answer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

•The change in approach. I think the most immediately telling difference between James Gunn's Superman and the previous iteration from Zack Snyder's 2013 The Man of Steel and the handful of "DC Extended Universe" films he appeared in is that the Snyder version seemed somewhat insecure and defensive in its very conception. 

That is, when Snyder and his studio bosses set out to make a new film version of Superman, a character universally known by his iconic costume, they seemed somewhat embarrassed by that costume's bright colors and the red trunks being worn over blue tights...or, if not embarrassed, than at least worried that such a character might not be taken seriously enough.

Gunn's Superman, on the other hand, not only has a costume featuring his traditionally bright primary colors, and that not only features the trunks, but he's also accompanied by his flying, super-strong dog with a matching cape.

It reminded me of something from a social media post that's stayed with me over the years. I wish I could remember who said it so I could properly credit them [Update: Kevin Hines informs me that it was Brett White, and he shares a screenshot of the original tweet.] It was in reaction to the fact that DC and/or Warner Bros or whoever were once again publicly hemming and hawing about the difficulty in making a Wonder Woman movie, while Marvel Studios was in the midst of advertising the then-upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy (so this would have been circa 2013 or 2014, I guess). 

The statement was along the lines of, "DC's like 'We're not sure people will get Wonder Woman', while Marvel's like, 'Here's a raccoon with a machine gun.'"

The raccoon with a machine gun film was, of course, directed by James Gunn. 

•The politics I've seen a fair amount of discussion about the politics of the new Superman film reflected on my Bluesky feed, probably a result of the fact that everything I tend to pay attention to online has to do with either comic books or politics. (And I'm not just referring to the silly statement from a particular actor who used to play a TV Superman saying, before he had even seen the movie, that it was somehow wrong or bad that Superman was being depicted as an immigrant...you know, just as he has been for 87 years now.)

Honestly, I think this headline from the Vulture review of the film by Alison Willmore, which I saw here, best captures the political agenda of the film: "Superman Isn't Trying to Be Political. We Just Have Real-Life Supervillains Now."

A relative of mine liked the new Superman film a lot, and, in texting me afterwards, she mentioned two points related to the real world.

First, she said that she got something of an Elon Musk vibe from Lex Luthor. Now, if Luthor reminds you of Musk, or Donald Trump, or any other rich, powerful person making your life worse, well, that's somewhat intentional....at least on the part of DC Comics, if not necessarily James Gunn.

That's because when John Byrne reconceived the entire Superman franchise for DC's emergent post-Crisis continuity in 1986, he purposefully turned Superman's perennial archenemy from a typical supervillain into a rich, powerful businessman/corporate CEO type—a then more relevant, visceral vision of evil than that of a mad scientist or crook in tights. Byrne's new Luthor was the sort of bad guy that hides in plain sight, being more-or-less accepted by society at large while engaged in nefarious acts in secret.

That's just who Luthor is, and has been for some 40 years now.

In the film he is, as expected, also duplicitous and manipulative, driven not only by greed, but also by his envy of Superman and, perhaps, a personal animus against aliens to commit his various bad actions. Again, that's just Lex Luthor being Lex Luthor. 

This particular version is also a pretty bad boss (I liked the bit where he yelled at his employees to clean up a mess he made, and then purposefully knocked over a mug holding pencils like a cat as they did so). And a rather shitty boyfriend. 

Oh, and he also engages the comic book supervillain equivalent version of using bots to help shape public opinion on social media. 

And, as we will learn near the climax, he wants to be a literal king.

If any of that reminds you of the current president, or Elon Musk, or any other real world figure, well, that probably reflects more on that figure's behavior than on any creative decisions Gunn made in his depiction of the Lex Luthor character (I will note a distinction that the above-cited critic, Alison Willmore made between Luthor and our real-world supervillains: Lex Luthor is really smart, while Trump and Musk are famously...not. I would also add that Luthor is, at least in this particular portrayal, also fairly young and rather handsome, and thus makes a poor filmic stand in for the likes of Trump or Musk).

Now, there are two specific points of the film that seem to more directly address real-world events. One I think was probably intentional on Gunn's part, the other is almost certainly a coincidence, and the fact that it's in the film at all is more a matter of unhappy circumstance in the real world than some attempt by Gunn to comment on it. That is, it is, again, more about the us having real supervillains than Gunn trying to make any particular political points.

One major plot point in the film is the invasion of one fictional country by its neighbor, another fictional country. The former, the victim nation, is Jarhanpur, while the latter, the aggressor, is Boravia.

While they both sounded vaguely familiar, I didn't recognize either when I first heard them mentioned, nor did I connect them to any particular DC comics past while I was sitting there in the theater. Looking them up when I got home, I saw that Jarhanpur appeared during Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke's JLA run, being introduced in the "The Golden Perfect" story arc (fom 2002's #62-#64). 

There it was presented as an exotic, fantastical country, but it was, visually, coded to resemble a Middle Eastern, maybe Muslim majority coded country. The people all had brown skin, the buildings had minarets and Plastic Man made joking reference to belly dancers and Ramadan.

As for Boravia, it apparently appeared in a couple of stories in 1939's Superman #2 and 1958's Blackhawk #126. I don't think I've ever read either—I might have read and forgotten the Superman story, while I know I've neve read any Blackhawk comics—but it seems to be, as it sounds, a European country. 

Unlikely neighbors, then. 

Sometime before the film begins, Superman apparently intervened in Boravia's invasion of Jarhanpur, destroying some of Boravia's military hardware and then flying that country's leader into the dessert to essentially threaten him not to try it again.

I immediately took this to be an intentional parallel to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, thanks, I think, to the geography in play (In the movie, Boravia is immediately east of Jarhanpur, with which it shares a border). That and the rationale the president of the aggressor nation gave for the invasion in a press conference, something about liberating its people from their own fascist government.

A few days after I had seen the film, that relative I mentioned above asked if I thought this aspect might have been a nod to the Israel's war on the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip, launched in 2023 in retaliation to the October 7 terror attack by Hamas. She was not the only one to note this possible reading; I've seen social media posts reading the movie that way, with one noting that the film made Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu one of its villains.

Honestly, this reading didn't occur to me at all as I was in the theater, but, after hearing it, I could certainly see it: The apparent desert climate of the two countries, the fact that Jarhanpur's people seemed to be composed mainly of poor brown-skinned people, the fact that Boravia had a professional military with uniforms and tanks and jets and, at the climax, they line up to attack what looks essentially like a bunch of civilians. 

And now that I've picked up some old copies of JLA and see what Jarhanpur looked like in the comics, it certainly seems more like the Middle East than Eastern Europe. (Also, there's the fact that Luthor apparently did a deal with Boravia in which he would get a portion of the conquered land as his own, not unlike Trump expressing his desire for the United States to "own" the Gaza strip once Israel and/or the U.S. managed to quite illegally displace all of the people who live there.)

Was Gunn referencing either—or both—of these conflicts? 

Maybe. 

Given when these particular crises started, he would have certainly had the lead time to work them into his screenplay. 

On the other hand, it could be as simple a matter as Gunn making the rather broad, anodyne and hard to argue with statement that the unprovoked military invasion of a neighboring country is wrong, or, even more broadly, that the strong should not victimize the weak. 

I think, a few years ago, all Americans could agree on that, but, when presented with real world examples like the conflicts mentioned above, Americans have various opinions. One imagines that just like so many Republicans in congress and right-wing influencers are either pro-Russia or, at least, ambivalent to the fate of Ukraine, they would similarly be unmoved by the plight of Jarhanpur if they were serving in the DCU's congress or doing their podcasts there.

The other plot point that is echoing real life? Well, it's not exactly subtle. 

The alien Superman, who illegally "immigrated" to Earth and lived his whole life as an upstanding American citizen and productive member of society, is, at one point, roughed up by a man in a mask working on the behalf of the U.S. government and then whisked from American soil to a "foreign" forever prison without the benefit of any due process, literally being told that, as an "alien", he has no rights. 

That's some evil supervillain shit, obviously, but, given the lead time needed to make a movie of this size and expense, Gunn and his fellow filmmakers had almost certainly written, filmed and had maybe even produced the special effects for those scenes well before masked goons kidnapping immigrants from our streets and putting them in detention facilities or shipping them to foreign countries without any due process was yet a common occurrence in America. (Trump didn't invoke the Alien Enemies Act until March 14 of this year, for example.)

Personally, I think Gunn was just using his imagination to come up with something wicked and un-American to show just how evil Lex Luthor is. He probably wasn't imagining that the Trump administration would be regularly doing that very thing by the time his big, summer film started playing in theaters. 

Finally, one of the two most evil things Luthor does, or threatens to do in this film, includes threatening to "euthanize" the perfectly healthy (if often misbehaving) dog Krypto, making a point of telling a helpless Superman that doing so will probably be quite painful for the dog. Meanwhile, here in the real world, the current secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and thus a person quite high up on the organizational chart when it comes to implementing the policy of snatching up immigrants to send to prisons abroad, is Kristi Noem, a woman who rather famously shot her perfectly healthy dog Cricket to death due to its behavior problems. 

Again, Gunn likely wasn't calling Noem out. He was probably just demonstrating that Luthor is evil. So is Noem.

•David Corenswet I thought David Corenswet did a phenomenal job with what turned out to be a fairly complex job. Rather than a simple dual role, in which he had to play Clark Kent and Superman as two entirely different characters, his Superman was conceived in such a way that there were various layers to the character, and to what degree he was being himself in any particular scene.

I found it interesting that, in this particular outing, both Clark Kent and Superman are sorts of public performances that the real character playing them both, who I guess we can call Kal-El for clarity's sake (even though I don't remember that name being used in the film at all), takes on at different points. 

We only see that real character behind them both, Kal-El, in a few instances. When starting dinner in Lois' apartment, for example, or when he's recovering from his pocket universe ordeal at his parents' farmhouse in Kansas...and, I suppose, occasionally bleeding into his Superman persona, when he's alone with Lois in front of the "interdimensional imp" battle, or gets angry or frustrated while wearing the suit.

I think this is probably most evident during the interview scene, when he says "Miss Lane," and essentially turns his Superman persona on as if he was flipping a switch. Throughout, as he gets frustrated at some of her questioning, we can see his real, Kal-El self keeps intruding on his Superman performance, too.

It's a rather nuanced performance, far more than the just looking handsome and strong and inspirational and nice that one might expect of a Superman actor.

I do sort of regret that we didn't get to see more of Corenswet's Clark Kent performance in the film, but, I suppose, that needed to be sacrificed in order to give us a version of Superman that has already revealed his secret identity to Lois. Still, with such a big and interesting cast in the Daily Planet scenes, it would have been nice to see more of Clark; maybe in a sequel...?

Corenswet, Gunn and company did a good enough job of making Clak and Superman seem like two entiely different people that it was easy to believe that no one made the connection between the two (I know Guy Gardner references the hypno-glasses, a bit of forgotten Superman lore that I've never actually encountered in a comic book, but then do you want to take Guy Gardner's word for anything...?

•Nicholas Hoult Nicholas Hoult's Lex Luthor was similarly great. It was certainly the best live-action performance of the character that I've ever seen, although I've never seen any of the TV Luthors that weren't animated (I know a lot of folks really like Michael Rosenbaum's Smallville Luthor).

Hoult's Luthor is handsome, quick-witted and charming, and it's easy to see how this Luthor could prove to be charismatic enough to be the leader of a company or sell the U.S. government on his metahuman Planet Watch force (or whatever it was called) or be a popular media figure.

Part of this Luthor's enmity towards Superman seems to be that the hero pulls the world's focus away from Luthor himself, who thinks he should be the center of the world's attention, and Hoult's Luthor is one that we could imagine being that center of attention.

He also, more than any of the previous actors, looks and acts like the Luthor I recognize from the comic books of the last 25 years or so. 

•Luthor is so bald And speaking of Luthor, I don't know exactly how they did it, but man, this Luthor is so bald. Like, there is no hair anywhere on his head at all. There are close-up scenes where, on the big screen, you can see Hoult's head filling that gigantic space, and you can see the little roots of hairs left on his clean-shaven face, but his scalp...? Nothing. I don't know if they used a bald cap or, like, digitally removed any and all hairs on his shaven head in post, but Superman's Lex Luthor is, like, the baldest anyone has ever been in a movie. 

•It needed more purple and greenThere's a brief shot of a flag at the decommissioned army base by "the river" where Luthor keeps one of his pocket universe portals, the place with all the tents (I am 99% sure that those scenes were filmed at a beach in Mentor, Ohio, where I used to live and still work, and that the river in the back ground is actually Lake Erie). That flag is yellow and green, rather than purple and green. For the life of me, I can't imagine why they didn't go with purple and green in that shot.

Similarly, I wish that Luthor's "Raptors" wore purple and green armor, rather than the kind of generic black/metallic coloring they have. Given the deepness of the cuts in the film—the hypno-glasses, Boravia—I have to imagine the filmmakers at last had a conversation about coloring the Raptors purple and green and must have had some reason not to do so. 

•Rachel Brosnahan Rachel Brosnahan is also a particularly strong Lois Lane. She definitely looks the part, and I think she captured the character pretty well. I think because of the fact that we're already past the learning of the secret identity point of the relationship, it frees her up to do more, and be a more active partner in Superman's life, while, at the same time, their relationship is new enough that there is still some drama in it; that is, they haven't yet reached some sort of happily ever after point with one another, where they tend to be in the comics these days, just yet.

I like that we got to see her doing some journalism and we got to see her doing some mild adventuring and we got to see her doing some journalism while doing some adventuring, in that scene at the climax where she's dictating a story while piloting a UFO. That's some quality DCU journalism right there. 

•The origins of Krpto I heard an interview with Gunn on NPR last week where he talked about how this particular portrayal of Krypto was inspired by his own experience with a terribly behaved dog. 

Still, after seeing the film, I wondered if Gunn had ever read Mark Russell's The Superman Stories. Russell, who admitted that he hadn't really paid any attention to actual Superman comics before writing his prose stories, presents a very different vision of a Superdog, but the gag with Russell's is just how terrifying and what a public menace a dog with all of the powers of Superman would actually be. I thought of Russell's Superdog in the scene where we see that Krypto has broken through the glass storefront of a pet store and helped himself to some dog food, which reminded me of Russell's dog's depredations. 

•Mister Terrific I thought the film made great use of the Mister Terrific character, a really rather minor character in DC Comics history, being a legacy version of an even more minor, footnote of a Golden Age character. He's not a character one might expect to see turn up in a Superman movie, or even a movie dealing with any iteration of a Justice League as opposed to a Justice Society (His appearance in Justice League Unlimited cartoon notwithstanding).

I especially appreciate that they used him instead of Blue Beetle Ted Kord who, given the presence of Guy Gardner and Maxwell Lord, would have been the most obvious candidate for "the smart one" in a "Justice Gang"...especially since Ted came with his own flying vehicle, something so necessary for the film that they had to invent one for Mister Terrific (On the other hand, the old, bad DC Extended Universe produced a Blue Beetle film just two years ago, and, having never seen it, I'm not sure whether or not it had a Ted Kord character in it at all. Anyway, maybe it would have been weird to use another Blue Beetle in this film).

Edi Gathegi's performance as Mister Terrific was, well, terrific. I liked his deadpan delivery, and his ongoing frustrations with his colleague Guy Gardner, Lois and even Superman. His coolness and confidence seemed to be borne of the original conception of the character, as he appeared in that one issue of The Spectre that introduced him, more so than in his later, more popular appearances in various JSA titles. 

Gathegi looked a little smaller and less imposing than I would have imagined Michael Holt to be in real life (same with Hawkgirl, actually), but his costume couldn't have looked any better, seemingly pulled directly out of the comics with only the little Max Lord/"Justice Gang" symbol thingee on the chest added. Even that weird mask seemed to work in live-action.

•Most importantly So the line "I'm goddam Mister Terrific"...inspired by All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder, or nah...? 

•Metamorpho In contrast, I didn't really care for the visual depiction of Metamorpho in the film and, the longer I think about it, I can't help but wonder if he's just a character that doesn't really work in live-action...or, at least, not as well as he does in comics, or the more comic-like medium of animation.

I think actor Anthony Carrigan did a decent enough job in the role, particularly as far as expressing the "freak" nature of the character and Rex Mason's resignation to that nature. He also did a fine job of expressing the rather tough ethical/moral dilemma the film put Rex in, forcing him to decide to inflict violence on a stranger or strangers so that no violence is inflicted upon his own son.

Still, Carrigan is a lot smaller than any of the Metamorphos I've read about, be it Ramona Fradon's original version from the '60s, or Bart Sears' version in Justice League Europe or  and those that followed in various Justice League books or crossovers or anthologies. 

Additionally, the film's version seems to have elaborate scoring or scarring on his face, suggesting the Metamorpho of the 2003-launched The Outsiders (who actually turned out to only be an aspect of Metamorpho, and took the name "Shift", I guess; retroactive spoiler alert!).

Finally, he looked weird wearing what looked like baggy shorts to, I suppose, protect his modesty. If they didn't want to go with the form-fitting briefs with an "M" on the belt buckle, they could have at least got him some better fitting trunks, akin to those Corenswet's Superman rocked.

Some of the demonstrations of his powers looked kind of cool (growing Kryptonite out of his hand, forming that big hammer in the climax), but others just looked...weird and indecipherable as when he was flying in a half-gaseous state, or when he had tentacles. Again, I think he mainly just isn't a comic book character that translates all that well to live action. 

•Green Lantern Speaking of, do Green Lanterns just not work in live action? Nathan Fillion is pretty great as Guy, and as glad as I was that they chose to use that particular Lantern (certainly the best one to choose when it comes to contrasting against Superman's personality or brand of heroics) his powers looked a bit weird and fake to me whenever he used them. His constructs looked more like cheap plastic than hard light. (I thought his powers looked far better when seen from a great distance, as when he and the J.G. are fighting the "imp" in the background, and all we see of Green Lantern are some green flashes, beams and giant baseball bat).

Also, Guy seemed to be able to fly without any sort of aura around him, which isn't how I thought their rings worked, but whatever, I suppose that varies from artists to artist. 

Anyway, after this and 2011's Green Lantern, which I don't recall really selling Green Lantern constructs terribly effectively either, I'm left wondering if, like Metamorpho, those characters' powers are ill-suited to being depicted in live action.

•Maybe Neil DeGrasse Tyson will weigh in You know the bit where Superman, Krypto, Joey and Metamorpho are all being dragged toward the black hole in the pocket universe, and Superman uses his super-breath to push them away from it? Would that really work?

I'm asking, as I have no idea. 

It felt a little dubious, though, and I woulda preferred if Metamorpho turning into a rocket would have been all that was necessary to free them, as that seems a bit more cut and dry and, well, um "believable" (You know, in a scene involving a flying dog in a cape and a guy who can turn himself into a rocket).

•Another deep cut? I like that they included a scene involving what was essentially the old Daily Planet flying newsroom, when Perry orders the staff onto Mister Terrific's ship, where they can finish up the Luthor expose while flying through the air, as the city is imperiled by the dimensional breach.

•But enough about DC Comics I wonder if the Ultraman reveal has any impact on The Boys, either the show, which has yet to wrap up, or the comic book which, while years old at this point, is probably going to still keep being new for some readers...many of whom, in the future, will likely have seen Superman before reading. 

I thought the reveal of what Ultraman looked like under his mask was spectacularly obvious, based on his costume alone (so I've been expecting it for months now) and, wow, they sure telegraphed it by the scene relatively early in the film where the Fortress opened up to allow Luthor, Ultraman and The Engineer entrance. 

Anyway, that Ultraman costume looked a fair bit like Black Noir's comic book costume and, if you've already read The Boys, then you know the way in which Ultraman's relationship to Superman is similar to Black Noir's relationship to Homelander, The Boys' version of Superman. 

I've never watched the TV show, but, from what I've heard, the showrunners were planning on going in a different direction at the end than Garth Ennis and company did in the comic (it sounds awfully different in general, really), and thus I imagine that one particular reveal will play out different. 

For the folks making the show and the audience enjoying it, I hope that's the case at this point; it would be too bad if the new Superman movie inadvertently spoiled the ends of The Boys TV show.

•The fates of the non-Luthor villains Finally, while I'm not entirely sure how it could have been done differently, I was a bit disappointed that both Ultraman and the Boravian leader seemingly died at the end of the film.

This is, of course, in large part because of how sour the ending of the Man of Steel was, in which Superman took the life of his opponent, perhaps the most un-Supermanly thing he could have done in a film. 

Gunn certainly seemed to telegraph early and often that that's not his Superman, as he not only spent a lot of time saving people and even checking on them to make sure they were alright, but he also took pains to save a random barking dog and a squirrel, and expressed frustration with the Justice Gang for killing a giant monster threatening the city, rather than finding a non-lethal solution to the problem. And, of course, the motivation for some of Superman's actions in the movie are his concerns for a dog, Krypto.

The point was hard to miss: Superman not only cares about human life, he cares about all life. 

So while the killing off of Ultraman is somewhat ambiguous, with Superman kinda sorta knocking him into a black hole and not saving him, it still seemed somewhat out-of-character for this Superman. I kind of wish either Superman managed to save him and turn him into a friend off-screen, and we got a shot of a happy Ultraman in the Fortress at the end, or, even more simply, they had given Lex a line or two in which he states that Ultraman technically isn't even alive, but is some sort of biological automaton or something. 

That said, if a future movie has Ultraman come out of a blackhole with chalk-white skin, wearing a homemade Superman costume and talking backwards, well then, I'm totally fine with it.

As for the Boravian leader, Hawkgirl seemingly drops him to his death, a moment meant to draw another sharp contrast between Superman and the Justice Gang's brand of justice. It seems awfully harsh—especially if we're meant to see him as a stand-in for Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu—and given what a big deal Superman's intervention in Boravia's invasion plan was in the world of the movie, well, the assassination of its leader seems like a much, much bigger deal, no? 

Given that Gunn thinks it's important to explain why Krypto is such a poorly behaved dog during that surprise cameo at the end—surely Superman could properly train a dog—his lack of explanation regarding the deaths of Ultraman and, maybe, that of the Boravian leader felt a bit jarring. 

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 2: Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man

Though well aware of its existence, and familiar enough with it that I knew of its dynamic cover by Carmine Infantino and Ross Andru, Dick Giordano and Terry Austin, I had never actually read the 1976 Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1, the very first collaboration between the two biggest American comic book publishers* and the first time any of their characters would meet one another in a shared story.

I had a pretty good excuse, though. I wasn't yet born when the book originally hit newsstands (Although I guess I had a second chance when it was collected in 1991's Crossover Classics, and a third chance in 1995 when it was republished in a "special collector's edition").

The recently released DC Versus Marvel Omnibus is giving me another chance though, and this time I seized it.

This collection certainly primes the reader to appreciate just how significant the comic was at the time. 

There are several different prose pieces from various comics professionals that discuss the book's publication. These stress the care that went into assembling the perfect creative team: Writer Gerry Conway was chosen as the only one at the time to have written both characters, pencil artist Ross Andru because he had drawn both and was the current Amazing Spider-Man artist. They also stress the incredible cross-company wrangling that went into every panel. (In his afterword to the collection, Tom Brevoort writes that "Superman/Clark Kent and Spider-Man/Peter Parker appear in exactly the same number of panels in the story and are in aggregate the same relative sizes in each." He didn't believe Marvel and DC were quite that exacting with the portrayal of the characters when he first heard it, so he actually consulted the text to check it out for himself and realized that they actually were.)

Readers at the time would also have been clear on what a big deal it was. Not just because superhero comics fans would have of course known that the two publishers' characters had never met, but because of the presentation of the book: It was published in tabloid format and cost a whole $2.00. That will seem like a steal to today's serial comics readers, who are used to shelling out $3.99 for a 20-ish page story, but in 1976, the average comic book was still only 30 cents. 

The original comic also contained a pair of short introductions running in parallel columns on its inside front cover, one from Marvel's Stan Lee and one from DC's Carmine Infantino, both trumpeting the rarity of the occasion. 

Inside, the action pauses at three points for page-length recaps of the origins of the heroes and the villains (the latter of whom share a single page), apparently there for any DC-only readers who weren't sure who this Spider-Man fellow was, or any Marvel-only readers who were somehow unfamiliar with Superman's whole deal.

As to why those two characters were chosen, well, that's obvious enough as to probably be not really worth mentioning. They were each publishers' most popular flagship characters, and each was the apotheosis of his respective publisher's protagonists. 

As for the villains involved, they are Superman's archenemy Lex Luthor and Spider-Man's villain Doctor Octopus, who are both derivations of the basic mad scientist archetype. (Reading this in 2024, I did wonder why the Green Goblin wasn't chosen as the Spider-Man villain featured, as the movies and 21st century comics had lead me to believe that he was Spider-Man's number one adversary. Was that not the case in the mid-70s? Or was the Green Goblin currently dead at that time?)

The book opens with a splash page featuring the two characters facing off, with the credits between them—oddly enough, "Edited By: Carmine Infantino and Stan Lee" is the top credit, perhaps this book's equivalent to "Stan Lee Presents"...?—and the title of the story blaring in the lower left corner: "The Battle of the Century!"

From there we get a 15-page Superman solo story in "Prologue 1". After a great double-page spread of Andru's Superman streaking into action towards a giant, city-smashing (and now rather retro-looking) robot, we get what amounts to a Superman solo story. 

The robot, piloted by Lex Luthor (wearing his familiar Super Friends get-up) steals a maguffin from S.T.A.R. Labs, and though Superman defeats the robot, Luthor and the doohickey escape. Superman briefly returns to the Galaxy Communications Building—this was during the time Clark was a TV news anchor—where we meet jerk prankster Steve Lombard, Galaxy owner Morgan Edge and Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen. Clark's not there long, though, leaving to track down Luthor for another battle, one that ends with Luthor being taken to jail...after he stashes the thingamabob for later use. 

From there, Clark and some co-workers take off for New York City, where they will be attending the "World News Conference."

After the aforementioned page detailing Superman's origin (In five panels and about 75 words; Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely would famously get it down to just four panels and eight words in 2006's All-Star Superman), it's Spider-Man's turn. 

His "Prologue 2" is also a 15-page solo story, this one opening with a double-page splash of Spidey reclining on a flagpole, as his Spidey sense alerts him to the presence of some thieves atop a nearby roof-top (These splashes look great in this format; I can only imagine how impressive they were in the original tabloid format). 

The thieves turn out to be in the employ of Doctor Octopus, who Spidey battles until the villain makes his getaway in a flying ship with its own set of tentacles. The police show up just in time up to chase Spider-Man away, their guns blazing (That's one big difference between the two red-and-blue clad heroes; Spidey is considered an outlaw vigilante, while Superman is embraced as a beloved celebrity).

Peter Parker stops at the Daily Bugle to sell pictures of the Spider-Man/Doc Ock fight to J. Jonah Jameson, a sequence that includes these two sublime panels, depicting Jameson's reaction to a terrible, terrible photo of Parker's that Jameson accidentally had run on the front-page. From there, there's a few panels of an attempted date with Mary Jane Watson, during which Parker must make a lame excuse, dash off to become Spider-Man and resume his battle with Doc Ock, this time defeating him and sending him to jail. 

In the last panel, Parker and the Bugle staff head to the same news convention the Galaxy staff was headed to.

The two prologues, which have now accounted for 30 whole pages of the book, or well more than your average superhero adventure already, do a great job then of establishing the characters, in costume and out, as well as their basic milieus and supporting casts and ongoing conflicts.

It's worth noting that both look, read and feel like a regular Super-Man story and a regular Spider-Man story—or, I suppose one could say, a "real" Superman story and a "real" Spider-Man story—which likely argues that the publishers made the right call in hiring creators with past experience on both characters. 

It helps, I suppose, that this was a time in which both superhero publishers were much more strict with the basic designs, looks and depictions of their stable of characters, and they tended to have to be drawn a certain way in order to look like themselves. These days, there is much more leniency given to super-comics artists, and designs can vary quite radically, depending on the personal styles and whims of the artists. (By the way, some of the aforementioned prose pieces noted that John Romita Sr., one of the two definitive Spider-Man artists, was tasked with re-drawing the Peter Parker faces in this comic, just as Neal Adams re-drew some of the Superman figures. Neither is credited for their work in the final product, however.)

And then, after a one-page, five-panel Spider-Man origin recap, it's time for a third prologue, this one a much shorter, five-page one in which Lex Luthor and Dr. Otto Octavius meet one another in New Mexico federal "Maximum X Security Penitentiary Number One," apparently some sort of special prison just for super-villains. Despite supposedly being escape-proof, Luthor breaks them both out and they escape together, with Luthor riding on Doc Ock's back like he was a horsey as he runs away on his metal tentacles.

Then, finally, it's time for the crossover to really start. 

At the news conference, Clark tells Lois Lane about "Comlab One-- The world's first orbiting communications laboratory!", which is apparently on display there. Lois then meets young Peter Parker, who saves her from a fall, and then, immediately afterwards, she meets a rather petty and possessive MJ (MJ: "I guess you're not the liberated type--eh, 'Miss' Lane? Some men like that sort of thing. Some men dig their women, 'feminine'." Lois: "Pull the claws in, MJ. Peter's cute-- --but he's a bit young for me, don't you think?")

Then, suddenly, Superman—actually, "Superman"—swoops in, fires weird beams from his eyes at the ladies, and then they both disappear, as the hero flies away. 

Clark and Peter both rush to change clothes and then meet in the sky over the roof-tops for the first time, the moment afforded another two-page splash. 

In Marvel fashion, they immediately come to blows, Superman having "heard reports" about Spidey and thus assuming he's behind Lois' bizarre disappearance, and Spidey, having seen Superman blast them with eyebeams, assuming Supes is to blame (In actuality, it was Luthor disguised as Superman; Luthor also gives Spidey a surreptitious blast of a "red sun radiation device" to power him up enough so that he'll be able to go toe-to-toe with Superman...at least for the length of a fight scene). 

What follows then is a dynamic 12-page fight scene, unusual in its length and choreography. It doesn't end until the red sun radiation wears off, and there's a fun sequence in which Spidey pounds away at Spider-Man for several panels, Andru drawing multiple arms on the wall-crawler to suggest how often and how fast he's throwing punches into Superman's chest and abdomen, and Superman just stands their stoically, absorbing the ineffectual blows, until Spider-Man steps back to look at his hands, now encased in pink jagged lines to suggest pain, and remark "Oboy." 

With their battle over (The unsurprising winner in a contest of super powers? Superman), the two finally calm down, realize neither is to blame for their love interests' disappearances, and decide to team-up, with Superman dragging Spidey behind him as he flies by a strand of webbing, Spidey having somehow fashioned skies of webbing to "air-ski" behind Man of Steel.

After pages of investigation, the two heroes eventually track Luthor and Doc Ock to the abandoned satellite headquarters of Luthor's Injustice Gang, from where Luthor enacts his world-imperiling plan. Using the thing stolen from S.T.A.R. in the first prologue, he's able to hijack that fancy communications satellite that Clark pointed out to Lois (and readers) earlier, using it to fire a beam that somehow generates hurricanes numerous and powerful enough to engulf the whole world (I'm not a scientist, so I'll just have to take Luthor's word for it that making giant hurricanes is well within the abilities of the communications satellite). 

Luthor will only relent and call off the super-storms if the United States government pays him "ten billion dollars within the next hour."

As Superman leaps out of the satellite and flies to Earth to intercept a two-hundred-mile tidal wave that will destroy the Atlantic coast of America, Spidey battles the villains, encouraging Doc Ock to ultimately turn on the mad Luthor ("I can't let you do it, Luthor!" Octavius cries as he smashes computers with a tentacle, "The Earth is my home, too!")

Eventually, the day is saved, as are the heroes' respective love interests, both of whom are at this point in history completely ignorant of the double-lives their men are currently leading.

At 100 pages—bigger even than an 80-page giant!—the book likely read as appropriately epic in 1976, and surely the bicentennial kids at the time would have felt they got their two bucks worth. Heck, at that length, it's basically a short graphic novel, published at a time when that word wasn't part of the average comics reader's regular parlance.

Conway and company certainly do a fine job of thoroughly introducing their heroes and villains, to an extent that later crossovers wouldn't even attempt, as the publishers would eventually (perhaps rightly) assume that anyone reading superhero comics at all would be pretty familiar with the participants in any crossovers (Like, why would you even pick up a book about Batman and The Punisher or Galactus and Darkseid if you weren't already familiar with them...?).

The creators also devote themselves to comparing and contrasting these heroes, boiling down and then accentuating what make them each unique and likable in the first place, and giving readers little moments of interest, like the panels in which MJ and Lois meet one another, or those where Edge and Jameson run into one another and discuss their talented but lacking employees Kent and Parker.

It's pretty much the ideal inter-company crossover comic.

That said, the intensity that went into the discussions and behind-the-scenes crafting of the comic was such that neither Marvel nor DC seemed to want to repeat it, even though it was the first of a whole series of crossover comics, being followed by a 1981 re-teaming of Superman and Spider-Man and a Batman/Hulk crossover, and then a 1982 Uncanny X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover. 

For each of these, the publishers would essentially take turns running the crossovers, so that they didn't need two teams of executives and editors counting panels or measuring figure drawings on the way to production. 

We'll look at the first of these second-wave crossovers next week. 

Next: 1981's Marvel Treasury Edition #28, featuring Spider-Man and Superman

*Actually, Tom Brevoort writes in his DC Versus Marvel Omnibus afterword that while the companies were in discussions for the Superman/Spider-Man crossover, both happened to be working on different adaptations of The Wizard of Oz. Rather than compete with dueling comics, they released their first joint venture: MGM's Marvelous Wizard of Oz. That comic does not, of course, appear in the omnibus. 

Come on Grayson, you're better than that.

Making fun of Lex Luthor for being bald seems somewhat beneath you, Dick Grayson. You've been making fun of super-villains since you hit puberty, so I'd really expect better material at this point in your career of insulting your foes.

Yes, calling attention to Luthor's lack of hair  probably is a good way to get under Luthor's skin, as we all know he's quite sensitive about being bald–in fact, permanently losing his hair after Superboy blew it out while fighting a lab fire is the entire reason Luthor went into villainy in the first place and has had a 70+ year grudge against the Man of Steel.

But Mr. Clean?

The Hair Club For Men?

For shame, Grayson. I'm surprised you didn't throw out "curly," "cue ball" and "Kojak" while you were at it. Step up your game, Dick.

(From Grayson #11, written by Tim Seeley and Tom King, drawn by Mikel Janin and colored by Jeromy Cox)

Look and marvel at Pete Woods and Paul Cornell's Mister Mind!

They say a hero is only as good as his villains, which is one of the reasons I think Captain Marvel is one of the greatest superheroes ever—he's got the best villains! In addition to his archenemy Doctor Thaddeus Bodog Sivana, he's got Mister Mind, an evil alien worm determined to conquer and rule the world.

He was first introduced in Fawcett's Golden Age Captain Marvel comics, as the unseen mastermind behind the Monster Society of Evil that was bedeviling Cap and the whole world. The revelation that he was just a little worm, who wore glasses to see and a little radio around his neck to talk, was a surprise twist. He was put to death in a tiny little electric chair, mounted atop a regular electric chair, and then stuffed and mounted.

But he returned, repeatedly!

After DC bought Fawcett and absorbed their characters, Mr. Mind was relegated to Earth-2 and Earth-S, but was introduced into the post-Crisis DCU in a short-lived miniseries it's probably best to pretend never happened (in that, he was the worm in the bottom of a tequila bottle Sivana was drinking on) and then better and more thoroughly by Jerry Ordway in his Power of Shazam series. Ordway's Mister Mind was a Venusian evil alien worm determined to conquer and rule the world, the vanguard agent of a race of Venusian worms. Ordway's was less cartoonish and more realistic in appearance, looking much more like a caterpillar.

Mind played a big and surprising role in the weekly series 52, during which he had grown from his larval form into a "Hyperfly," an evil butterfly-like cosmic creature that feeds on entire universes.

Writer Paul Cornell and artist Pete Woods brought Mind back in another surprising appearance during their Action Comics story arc, "The Black Ring" (reviewed here).

Mind appears in a splash panel on the last page of the first issue (#890), emerging from the head of one of a trio of mind-controlled kidnappers who have attempted to capture Lex Luthor:
As you can see, Cornell and Woods' Mind looks an awful lot like Ordway's, although now he's bigger—about the size of a large stuffed animal—and while his body is rounder and fatter, his legs and mandibles are pointer and more menacing looking—sometimes. Depending on the context. Here he's dripping with gore, and meant to be a bit scary.

He still talks via a radio or "talk box," although it's a little more modern and space-age in design. While the original wore spectacles, and Ordway's had big, round eyes that visually echoed the original's glasses, this one was the segmented eyes of an insect, save with one in the middle being black, suggesting a pupil. The result is an eye that looks insect-like and cartoonish at once.

Cornell usage of Mind is as the first of many villains Luthor is juxtaposed with throughout the year-long storyline. Mind is working for someone else, although he himself doesn't know who or what he's working for. He (and we) just know it's something incredibly powerful, so powerful its made a lackey out of a villain who has organized Monster Societies, attempted to conquer the world and once almost ate the whole Multiverse.

He engages Luthor in a sort of mental combat, psychically imprisoning Luthor in a series of absurd fantasy sequences, including ones in which Luthor is a Promethean caveman stealing fire from super-gods, another in which he is a playing the role of Doctor Frankenstein from the James Whale movies, another in which he's a Godzilla-like giant monster and Luthor is a Superman-like superhero and, most adorably, a wild west sequence in which Mind wears an adorable cowboy hat and wields a shooting iron:

 

That gives you a good idea of this Mister Mind's size, and how having him emerge from your head would be the end of you.

Unfortunately, it also means he's not much for hand-to-hand combat. This sequence shows what he did to the poor sap whose skull he was occupying (note the prone, headless body in the first panel), and how easily Luthor defeats him once they've escaped the mental plane for the real world:

As to how he returned after his time as a Hyperfly in 52, he attempts to explain to Luthor that he's actually the offspring of the original Mister Mind, but "our consciousness is passed down on a strand of eight-D R.N.A."

He returns again before the story ends (in a chapter drawn by Jesus Merino), when his unseen master is finally revealed and their relationship can be explained without really spoiling anything.

He appears in outer space alongside Lex, the "Lois-bot", the cosmic entity and Superman in the climax of "The Black Ring", although he's not really there-there, but sends a "four-dimensional holographic projection" of himself...meaning either Mister Mind survived being punted off a building or, just as likely, reproduced a "grandson" of the original Mister Mind in the same manner that the new Mister Mind at the beginning of the arc was created and shared the consciousness of the original.

Review: Action Comics Vol. 1: Superman and The Men of Steel

Action Comics was perhaps the most notable of the DC Comics that were rebooted and relaunched in fall of 2011 for two reasons: First, it was the oldest comic book, and giving it a new #1 issue would require dialing the numbers all the way back from #904, and, secondly, there was no other book was paired with a more perfect-seeming creator than its marriage to the popular, imaginative, ambitious forward-thinking, writer/Superman priest Grant Morrison. If any of the 52 new "New 52" books were to meet their goal of reinventing the publisher's staid stable of characters for a new generation of new readers, then certainly the pairing of Superman and Grant Morrison would be the one to do it, right? We are talking about the writer who produced all those amazing scenes featuring Superman in his JLA run, who wrote perhaps the very best Superman story in All-Star Superman and whose Final Crisis was filled with such imagery as Superman singing away the ultimate evil.

Morrison's collaborator for the project was artist Rags Morales, one of my own personal long-time favorite comics artists (his work on Forgotten Realms was among the first I saw when I started reading comics that really struck me) whose work had only grown more refined over the years.

Still, I waited for the trade. There was something of an economic component to that decision, as Action Comics was being sold at a $3.99/30-page price-point—I don't mind paying more for more content occasionally, but $4 still strikes me as a silly price to pay for a serially published comic book when a more permanent, bound format is only a few months away. Mostly my decision to wait had to do with the fact that I was so certain I would enjoy a book written by one of my favorite super-comics writers and drawn by one of my favorite super-comics artists featuring one of my favorite superheroes that I didn't feel a need to try out the first 20-some pages to see how it turned out.

I just recently read Action Comics Vol. 1: Superman and The Men of Steel, a hardcover collection of the first eight issues of the rebooted Action Comics.

I wasn't too terribly disappointed.

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What was most notable about Morrison and Morales' take on Superman is the degree to which they rebooted the character, and the fact that Morrison went for a stripped-down, purified, best-of-all-eras remix approach like he did with All-Star Superman, but made different choices than the ones he had previously made, so the resultant take seems to be similar in approach to All-Star, but completely, dramatically different.

The book opens, after all, with Superman wearing a homemade costume consisting of a Superman t-shirt, a towel-like red cape (it's actually the indestructible cloth he was swaddled in as a baby), a pair of jeans and a pair of work boots—it's Superman as Superman as a child playing Superman. But since this is a "Year One" approach, a re-telling of his origin story as the first superhuman in the world (in that respect, it covers the exact same ground as J. Michael Straczynski's dreadful and dour looking Earth One: Superman original graphic novels), Superman is basically inventing the act of playing Superman.

Morrison writes it as a sort of New Age Golden Age, with Superman's powers and, as is so often the case in Morrison's writing, he metatextualizes the story, so that changes that occurred to the Superman mythos in its first few decades due simply to Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and the first few creators to work on the character continually tinkering with him are here internalized and made part of the story.

So this Superman's costume is a work in progress, his powers are a work in progress (they are, essentially, exactly what they are upon his first appearance: He can't fly, but he can leap; he's not indestructible, but nothing short of an exploding shell can hurt him), and his relationship to his allies, his enemies, even his exact mission, methods and moral code are seemingly still in the works.

Morrison's Superman is young, brash, dangerous and vulnerable, and at least two of those are qualities DC executives have been talking about restoring to their characters for years now.

In the first issue, he's threatening the life of a rich, powerful and corrupt businessman in the tried-and-true pretend-to-murder style of Batman tossing a crook off a ledge simply to catch them. He cockily references off-panel actions he also performed in the first issue of the original first issue of Action Comics. He's pursued by the police and the military. Lex Luthor is after him. He's a crusading journalist. He's disguised as Clark Kent, here affected not only by a pair of glasses, but big, baggy clothes that hide his physique and an extreme case of behead (In All-Star, artist Frank Quitely evoked the Superman-to-Clark transformation through the character's posture and body language, so Clark looked like a big, clumsy ox of an oaf). Bullets bounce off him. He outraces speeding cars on foot and, in a climactic scene, he stops a speeding train by standing in front of it and pushing in the opposite direction.

*********************

Things start to fall apart by the second issue, and for all the false-starts, overnight creative team changes and angry disavowals by outgoing writers, I think there is no surer sign that something is deeply fucked up at DC Comics than this fact: They rebooted their flagship title starring their flagship character for the first time since 1939, and they didn't bother to get all of their ducks in a row to guarantee a single story arc got drawn by a single artist.

By the second issue, Brent Anderson is drawing portions of the story, and while he's a great artist with a style not discordantly dissimilar to Morales', it's different enough that the characters don't look like they do when Morales draws them. Given that these are the first appearances of these new versions of the characters, it would probably have been beneficial to have on artist draw the first, say, three scenes in which Lois Lane appears, for example.

By issue #3, a third artists is employed—this one is Gene Ha, and he only draws a dream sequence/buried memory set on Krypton, excusing the shift in style. The remainder of the first story arc is drawn by Morales, Anderson and Brad Walker. All are good artists, but the blend isn't so good—it basically scans like Morales doing a terrible job. The table of contents lists five inkers and three colorists; I'm not sure who did what where, but it's an all-around shoddy job, paradoxically made all the shoddier by how accomplished some of the participants are.

The worst bit comes at the climax of the story, when the Morales-lead melange gives way on the final five pages to an artist whose style looks nothing like that on the previous pages, whose Clark Kent has shifted design to resemble artist Gary Frank's Christopher Reeve's inspired design, and who draws the last image in the story—a close-up of Superman's Chicletty grin as he buzzes the reader's POV in a splash page.

In this respect, Morrison's Superman run mirrors his run on the various Bat-titles: A great story full of a lot of promise, done in completely by poor art...and/or poor planning and editing that resulted in a mess of artists coming, going and drawing a few pages here and there. It doesn't matter how strong the script is if the art part of the equation is half-assed. Essentially, they just cancel each other out.

This is a great comic if you can read past the art, if you can redraw it in your imagination while reading, but that's more work than a reader should have to do in 2011, 2012 or 2013. Especially if they're paying $4 for each chapter.

Those aren't the only artists involved, either. Andy Kubert draws two whole issues himself, and these are far enough removed from the main narrative that the style-shift doesn't derail anything (they're set in the past and future, mostly, save for a scene or two featuring characters from the future lurking in a darkened Fortress of Solitude in the present).

The original comics contained back-up stories starring various characters from the main, Morrison/Morales/All Those Other Guys stories, and these feature more artists still. Flipping through the book, the impression one gets is of a jam-book, rather than a graphic novel.

********************

As I said, the story is significantly different enough that it appears all-new, or at least an all-new arrangement of familiar elements: They probably could have (maybe should have) pushed this material as the YA market cracking Earth One stuff.

I was struck by how much it seemed like a paper version of the Superman movie Morrison would like to make, mostly because of how many elements of Superman comics he wrangles into a single, three-act narrative structure.

Here's the synopsis: After the death of his parents, Clark Kent has moved to Metropolis where he lives in a shitty apartment like movie Peter Parker, and works as a muckraking investigative journalist for The Daily Star (the closest thing to a friend he has being Jimmy Olsen, the Daily Planet photographer assigned to Lois Lane). Donning a homemade costume, he fights crime and is pursued as a criminal for it, until the powers that be can stand it no longer. General Sam Lane, father of Lois, and special consultant genius Lex Luthor set up a trap to capture Superman.

They do, and poke, prod and torture him a while. Meanwhile, Brainiac, the being responsible for the destruction of Krypton, comes to Earth. It shrinks Metropolis, puts it in a bottle and adds it to its collection. It's up to Superman to save the day, along the way discovering the secrets of his own origins and convincing himself and the world at large that he really is a hero. The only thing missing is a love story between Superman and Lois.

So Morrison packs in Superman, Jimmy, Lois, Lex Luthor, General Lane, Brainiac, Metallo, Dr. John Henry Irons (who becomes Steel in a back-up), life on pre-explosion Krypton and the Bottled City of Kandor. Not bad for a six-issue story arc. I think a version of Mr. Mxyzptlk might be introduced here too—there are actually a couple of candidates for visitors from the 5th dimension—but neither are revealed as such in this first story arc.

**********************

Of those, I think Morrison does a pretty good job with most of them. Jimmy, Lois and General Lane seem to be the same as they have been in the comics since the John Byrne reboot. Metallo is given a past romantic history with Lois, which makes his story a little more relevant to that of the other characters (he's basically a soldier who volunteers to get roboticized in order to fight Superman and impress Lois).

Brainiac is sufficiently alien and spooky; in fact, I don't think we see "him" at all, just various robot puppets and programs.

I don't think I've seen enough of this Luthor to really get judge him. Morrison's previously written great Luthors in JLA, where he was the ingenius corporate mastermind with a hobby in supervillainy, and All-Star, where he was the traditional renegade scientist.

Here he looks younger and slightly paunchy, and swills power drinks constantly, which seems to a visual signifier that he's a much younger and much douchier Lex than we usually see. As is so often the case with modern Luthors, his motivation for being anti-Superman is a sort of zealous humanism bordering on or spilling over into xenophobia, although Morrison gives him a pretty cool speech to justify his wanting to eliminate the strange visitor from another world as quickly as possible:

The Brown tree snake. Introduced to the U.S. territory of Guam right after World War Two. Caused Dozens of indigenous birds and reptile species to become extinct.

The cane toad, sent to Australia as a pest control agent, decimated local biodiversity.

Non-native strains will destroy entire ecologies given the opportunity.

I'll buy that.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about this new Steel, either. I'm glad he still exists, but I don't think this version is quite as impressive as the one that originally emerged during the "Death of Superman" cycle of stories.

That Steel had his life saved by Superman, who told him to do something with that life if he really wanted to thank him. After witnessing Superman give his own life to save Metropolis from Doomsday, Dr. John Henry Irons decided to stand-up and do the impossible: To become Superman. Like Batman, he was just a normal, every day guy who, through his own smarts and force of will, turned himself into a superhuman and ultimately joined the fraternity of demigods that patrolled and protected the DC Universe.

He also had a cool costume, resembling a literal man of steel with a big sledgehammer-tipped staff and a striking red cape.

This Irons is working on the same project under Lane that hired Luthor and ultimately made Metallo; he had his Steel suit already made and waiting in a hidden closet in case he ever needed it (which doesn't quite ring true, given this is a world without a concept of a superhero yet).

He's still inspired by Superman to do good, but in a piteous way: Watching Luthor and the military torture Superman, he resigns, not wanting to be party to it any longer. When Metallo and Brainiac being to wreak havoc in Metropolis, he suits up.

That suit is rather unremarkable. There's no cape, obviously, but there also isn't any kind of mask either. He's just a dude in a metal suit with jet-boots and hammer. The mess of metal coiling that forms his muscles are kind of cool (they're left-over from an earlier Steel design), but he looks kinda...wrong without a helmet or face mask of any kind, especially given the stuff he gets up to. I'm not sure I understand how a genius would create a suit of super-armor that covers everything except the part of the body that needs the most protection.

*********************

Artwork aside, this read quite well in trade. Something Morrison talks about in both his prose book Supergods and the back-matter of this collection is how action-packed the first Superman story of Siegel and Shuster's in Action Comics #1 was, how their Superman ran and leapt from set-piece to set-piece in a breathless, relentless story.

Morrison sort of mimics that, but he can't do it in a single issue, so there are starts and stops between these set-pieces, he does it in the first storyline though, so read in a trade like this, he accomplishes an effect similar to that one he describes as something he admired; he also does a good job of escalating those threats, as the story opens with him jumping to the top of a building to fight bodyguards and the police and ends with him having to jump into outer space to fight a planet-destroying robot menace.

It must have been horribly frustrating to read as it was originally, serially published however.

Something I didn't realize until just now, when I sat down to write this and looked it up in order to untangle the art credits, was that the first story arc was originally published out of order.

The book opens with a six-issue story arc containing the characters and events I've mentioned above, but DC published the first four parts in Action Comics #1-4, then, in Action Comics #5-#6 they published a two-part story illustrated by Andy Kubert set after the events of the incomplete first story arc (it's a Legion of Super-Heroes team-up, and the "present" is set after the events of Action Comics #8, although the distant past is also covered). Then the first story arc finishes up in Action #7 and #8. This collection publishes the story in the correct order: #1, #2, #3, #4, #7, #8, #5, #6.

Additionally, while this is Superman's "Year One" style origin, the story of who the new Superman is and how he came to be, how he got his powers, how he got his costume, where he came from and how he found his place in the world, DC was simultaneously publishing Superman stories set after this.

So while it took eight months to tell Superman's first story, Superman was appearing fully-formed and with all of his powers and his final costume in JLA #1 (published before Action #1) and in Superman #1-#8 (all also set after Action #8)...and I'm sure he was appearing in other books, as well. I remember seeing him in Justice League Dark #1. I heard he was in Swamp Thing #1. I'm pretty sure he was in the first issue of Supergirl.

Surely that sucked a lot of the drama and excitement out of this storyline purporting to be the story of Superman. Rather than starting over from scratch, it must have read like a choppy flashback to readers who were widely sampling the rest of The New 52 ("Fun" fact: Before Morrison, Morales and company could even finish their origin of the new Superman, sister title Superman was already on its second creative team, with the writing team of Dan Jurgens and Keith Giffen taking over for the quite-frustrated George Perez, and Jurgens handling pencils).

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The Kubert-drawn two-parter is probably a more Morrisonian story than the one that precedes it in this collection; it's certainly the sort of story that reads like a comic book more so than a comic book version of a blockbuster movie.

It opens on Krypton (and here we meet the saber-toothed Krypto who totally isn't dead like DC announced, but is actually in the Phantom Zone) and shows Superbaby being rocketed to safety...in a story narrated by the rocket.

Then villains from the future travel back in time to the present to steal the Kryptonite engine from the sentient rocket, these villains being The Anti-Superman Army, composed of the likes of The Kryptonite Men, the robotic Terra-Man and The Little Man (whom this story really made me think is a Mxyzptlk), who are hiding out in a microscopic HQ inside Superman's brain. The Legion of Super-Heroes and a future Superman, from a point in their history where it's Cosmic Man, instead of Boy, travel back to the present in order to thwart the villains and save the rocket ship. Via telepathy and rocket-delivered narration, we see a bit of Superman's childhood in Smallville, including meeting his dad and discovering that he was Superboy (although it's not clear if he was publicly Superboy or not).

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Also included in this collection, grouped all togetherafter issues #5 and #6, are the back-up stories that appeared in each issue. These are written by Sholly Fisch, a really great writer who has done some truly incredible writing for DC's canceled Batman: The Brave and the Bold comics, and drawn by Brad Walker or Chriscross, the latter of whom is working in a stripped-down style that, as colored by Jose Villarrubia, looks like the work of an entirely different artist than the Chriscross you might imagine.

These are "Hearts of Steel" and "Meanwhile..." in which Steel battles Metallo and deals with fall-out form Brainiac's city-napping (and it's revealed that Nat still exists in the New 52 too), "Baby Steps" in which we see Superbaby's arrival on earth from the perspective of the Kents (who are Baptists) and, finally, "The Last Day," in which Clark's Smallville friends Lana Lang and Pete Ross see him off to Metropolis.

They area all good stories, well-told, but I don't think they quite work in relation to the main story. If they were collected as printed, between each chapter of the main storyline, they'd be annoying asides and digressions, and yet they also expand on the stories somewhat; for example, in at least one instance the main narrative references events in the back-ups that a collection reader wouldn't have even seen at that point.

I'm not really sure the best way to handle collecting these, beyond maybe saving them all up for a collection published separately at some point.

Ideally, DC wouldn't be doing them at all, but would just be publishing the main comic for $2.99, but I imagine there is some economic reason that the publisher wants to sell $4 comics, and adding 10-page back-ups by creators who come a little cheaper than those making the first 2/3 of each issue is better than simply going the Marvel route, and making a $3.99/20-page book.

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Look at this:

That's the miniaturized Glenmorgan trapped in one of Brainiac's bottles seeing the hand of the full-sized Superman reaching into bottle to grab the contents of that truck. Look at how he's looking at the hand in the next panel. Damn, that's some good comics-making right there.

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It's probably worth noting that the villain of this piece, Brainiac, is an insidious collector whose life's ambition is to preserve and file cultures on his list—in "mint condition," no less—and the nature of his conflict with Superman is that the superhero refuses to lay down and be collected in eternal stasis, but instead continues to fight against collection, to move, to change to live.

When rattling off the list of names by which he is known on other worlds, he gives a telling detail that made me snicker upon first read:

We are the colony of the Collector of Worlds. We know everything there is to know.

On Yod-Colu we began as C.O.M.P.U.T.O.

On Noma they called us Pnumenoid...On Krypton--where you were born--we were Braniac 1.0.

On Earth--We were Internet.

That's right, comic book readers who use the Internet! We're the true villains! Again.

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I've really, really hated Superman's new Jim Lee-designed costume. Just hated everything about it.

In this story, we learn exactly where it came from. It's some kind of super-sciencey Kryptonian garment that starts out white and...conforms, somehow, to the user, which changes its color. It's a pretty neat scene, even if it doesn't really explain why it has to look like armor (The artists who draw it here, it should be noticed, don't make it look like the solid metal that Jim Lee's renderings make it look like).

At one point, Superman grabs a space artifact, and his costume chameleons into the Golden Age Starman's costume.

Is that allowed, now that the Golden Age has been severed from the DC Universe...?