More on blurbs, a last word on Superman: Doomsday

Remember a couple of weeks back when we discussed the unblurbable Wonder Woman story arc Jodi Picoult wrote, the one which DC opted to promote by using a completely neutral blurb that only drew attention to the fact that apparently nobody anywhere said anything remotely positive about it?

Well, it appears that Jeff Smith's recent reimagining of the Captain Marvel franchise didn't have that problem at all. Here's the house ad for that trade of Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil that DC's been running:



They've got not one but two different blurbs, which is always a good sign, as it means more than one person/venue liked the work, and gives the impression of consensus opinion.

And these are two very good sources for blurbs, each at least as prestigious as Wonder Woman: Love and War's USA Today. I'm not sure what the circulation numbers of the three venues are, or which is the most widely read, but I know Entertainment Weekly and The Onion are both pretty mainstream, and, even if they are less widely read, they're known for their criticism (Or, at least, are known for devoting a great deal of space and resources to criticism).

EW's been doing comics coverage for years now, but the fact that they cover all forms of popular entertainment makes them very much a part of the mainstream media, so to hear them raving about any comic book always has the impression that it's something of a rarity (Just compare the real estate of the magazine devoted to comics versus that devoted to movies, television or music).

And as for The Onion, they're known for being a tough audience, so a good grade from Onion critics carries a little more weight than it might from elsewhere.

As to the content of those blurbs, both make fairly strong arguments that Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil is a book that ad-readers should seek out.

EW says that it can be be "savored" and "admired," like it was part delicious meal and part Founding Father, and the all-ages nature of the work is incorporated into the line in such a way as to sound positive rather than negative (which is how I feel "all-ages" is too often interpreted by too many comics readers). It's not just kids or prudes who will like it, but "everyone" from kids "to the most sophisticated graphic-novel devotee." The most sophisticated graphic-novel devotee? Hey guys, that's us!

The Onion or, in actuality, The Onion's non-parody AV Club list a string of positives—"slick, bright, emotional and witty"—before calling it "everything superhero comics should be." You don't get much more positive than that.

As for the rest of the ad, it points out that the book is "critically acclaimed" (it is) and that its author is "award-winning" (correct) and the creator of another graphic novel success story that anyone who knows anything about comics has likely heard of, and heard great thngs about.

The only downside of the ad I see is that it goes ahead and spoils the appearance of Mr. Mind, but then, I guess if you haven't read it yet, you wouldn't know that, so maybe it doesn't really spoil it (And the appearance of Mr. Mind wasn't played up so dramatically in Smith's version of the "Monster Society" story as it was in the original anyway).

Moving on to another DC house ad in last week's comics, you may have noticed this:


What a weird, weird ad.

The film having been created as a direct-to-DVD release marketed at hardcore fans, I wouldn't be surprised if DC hadn't sent many or even any copies of it to critics (I haven't seen reviews of it run in any non-comics press places, but then, perhaps I'm just not reading the right newspapers/magazines/websites), so perhaps there weren't any reviews available at the time of the release to pull quotes from to run as blurbs in the ad.

But still, why pull a quote from Lex Luthor?

Now, running a non-blurb quote in an ad for something isn't all that unheard of—remember the Oscar Wilde quote that ran in the house ads for Starman, for example?—but quoting a line of dialogue from the work being advertised, and then attributing it to that fictional character? That just seems all kinds of weird to me, and I honestly can't figure out what the fuck it's doing there, or what message it's intended to convey to someone coming across this ad.

I mean, if they thought it was a cool line that totally encapsulates what the story is all about, they could have always just put that phrase on the top of the ad, without the quotes and the attribution. It's not like Lex Luthor is going to sue them for stealing his quote and failing to properly attribute it or anything.

Also, below the image, in randomly capitalized lettering, appear the words "A New Movie inspired by the The Best-selling Graphic Novel of all time THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN." The TV ad made the same claim (only it left out the double "the").

I don't know for a fact that The Death of Superman isn't the best-selling graphic novel of all time, and while I suppose I could poke around the Internet or send some emails in an attempt to find out, I don't have that much interest in the question (or motivation to answer it). But I would just like to point out that the claim seems pretty damn fishy.

Is this really the best-selling graphic novel of all time? Better than Watchmen? And V For Vendetta? And The Dark Knight Returns? And The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes? What about, like, Naruto Vol. 1 or Persepolis or the more popular Tintin and Asterix books? I don't know, I'm asking. But if so, I find that pretty damn shocking. Particularly since that material is now available in various larger collections and omnibuses. It seems like its shelf-life is constantly being cut into by different "cuts" of the story, and it would therefore have long ago been eclipsed, whereas people wanting to read Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns are going to keep buying those same versions of the graphic novels.

We could quibble over whether or not The Death of Superman even is a graphic novel* too, I guess, but me, I'm just surprised that that particular collection of that story is really the best-selling gn ever. Certainly if I wanted to read the story for the first time, I'd gravitate toward something like this.

But I guess as far as Western trades go, DC also publishes the most likely contenders** for the top spot, so they'd know if it really was or not.

Of course, they should also know how goofy it is to quote Lex Luthor in an ad, and that someone should really copy-edit the hell out of the ad copy before going to press, too.






*There is a distinction to be made between a trade paperback collection of a serially published comic book story taken from an ongoing—or several ongoings, in this case—and an actual graphic novel intended to be a graphic novel, but the term "graphic novel" is used so indescriminately between the two that arguing about the distinction seems pointless.

**I'm guessing. I don't think Maus, lauded as it is, moves as many books as Dark Knight Returns, and those Jim Lee X-Men were partially driven by the speculation on the value of the singles, and thus I'm assuming the trade collections containing those issues don't do such astronomical numbers. But again, this is just a series of guesses and assumptions

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.