Back in 2011 I read a few issues of the "New 52" revision of Superman's myth in ACTION COMICS, executed by writer Grant Morrison and artist Rags Morales. However, despite my general respect for Morrison's contribution to DC Comics generally and to the Superman myth specifically (particularly in his strongest ALL-STAR SUPERMAN story). I didn't keep reading. Now I've read all eighteen collected issues, which includes some non-Morrison backup strips as well.
Morrison's self-described writing-pattern of using free association has provided a valuable counterpoint to the prevalent Marvel Comics trope of "heroes with soap opera problems." However, the downside of free association is that at times Morrison's scripts can become overly scattershot, losing the coherence that appears in his better works. Even ALL STAR SUPERMAN, which did a fine job of updating the appeal of Silver Age Superman comics, resorted to the old chestnut of "the hero's impending death" to provide a tenuous unity between the diverse stories. Morrison's ACTION run, however, doesn't manage to be anything but a bunch of loosely contiguous stories-- though once again, the writer works in a possible "hero's death" here as well.
SUPERMAN AND THE MEN OF STEEL proves the best of the three collections, for all that there really aren't more than two such "men," the Metropolis Marvel and his fellow crusader Steel. There are a bunch of robots unleashed by Brainiac, but they obviously aren't "men" as such.
The early issues were promoted at the time as giving an alternate take on Superman as patterned on certain early Golden Age stories by Jerry Siegel. I've heard some fans lament that these "social justice" stories didn't become the main focus of the developing SUPERMAN corpus. Of course, with a hero as powerful as this one, a certain monotony would have set in, since there would have been no challenge to Superman regularly duking it out with wife-beaters and dangerous drivers (to name a couple of Siegel's targets during his social-justice phase). Golden Age Superman tales thus became dominated mostly by tricks-- villains trying to trick the Man of Steel, or vice versa. But I'm sure Morrison knew that modern readers wouldn't accept that alternative, and so the social-justice stories soon default to spectacular action-scenes between super-beings. Morales does a nice if not exceptional job of rendering the hero's first encounters with the super-weapons of Lex Luthor and the robot hordes of Brainiac. The first plotline is reasonably coherent but toward the end of the collection Morrison spins out a fevered crossover of Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes that makes little sense.
The second collection, subtitled BULLETPROOF, is even more chaotic. There's a boring sequence in which the hero meets an updated version of the fifties DC hero Captain Comet, and the return of a minor Siegel creation, Lois Lane's grade-school niece Susie Tompkins. Slightly better is one in which a wife-beater whom Superman punishes in Volume One becomes the new Kryptonite Man.
The final collection, AT THE END OF DAYS, goes off the rails with a lot of stuff about Superman's impending death-- supposedly his second death after his fate at the hands of Doomsday-- but it comes to little. Morrison challenges Superman with a small coterie of new villains-- the revised K-Man, Nimrod the Hunter, The Evolver-- and also squeezes in a few whose identities he doesn't bother to delineate. The Legion gets involved in some of this folderol as well. The strongest trope involves a plot about Superman facing off, not against his pest-enemy Mister Mxyzptlk, but a more deadly enemy of Mxyzptlk's. (To be sure, this character appears throughout the run in the guise of a strange little man who offers Faustian bargains to various characters.) One of the oddest things about this sequence is that Morrison takes pains to resurrect one of the hero's most obscure foes, Ferlin Nxyly, whom he apparently wanted to work into his Mxyzptlk cosmology because of the name similarity. But this revival, like the Captain Comet one, seems forced and sterile-- not something I normally find in even the lesser Morrison works.
2 comments:
Your point about the nature of the tales growing stale is well taken, but I suspect that the change in Superman's focus away from the social ills of his time (and ours it still seems) was motivated by the focus his owners had for other issues. He became a corporate brand and so to no small degree a part of the problem and not the solution. (Though admittedly slugging landlords and corporate execs is likely not the best way to effect solid social reform.)
Sure, the main concern of DC editors was always making money, and they shied away from anything that might prove risky. And I'm not even sure how devoted Jerry Siegel was to social issues. I've read one of those stories where Superman meets JS's creation Susie Niece of Lois, and remember thinking it was pretty dire. Possibly DC editors encouraged Siegel to write more vanilla fare, and maybe even convinced him that was good for his own bottom line. Or maybe he would have written that type of melodrama even if he'd kept all rights to the franchise. If he and DC had shifted away from social issues and started losing money when doing the "sitcom and mysteries" format, maybe Siegel and DC editors would have been more venturesome. But if looks to me like the audience was willing to buy Superman no matter what dopey things he was seen doing.
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