Comics! Avengers Assemble, volume 1!

Our book today is the great graphic novel collection Avengers Assemble,Volume 1, originally published in an oversized hardcover a decade ago and now at last re-issued in paperback. I owned and often re-read the hardcover (an indulgence I seldom make for graphic novels, but this one was well worth it), but alas, it failed to survive the ravages of my Summer of Homelessness, and since in the meantime the thing had never appeared in paperback, I assumed the worst and figured it never would.

But we live in the great age of comic book reprint collections, and so here it is - a burstingly colorful volume featuring the first nine issues of the title's late-'90s relaunch, written by Kurt Busiek and drawn with mind-boggling mastery by George Perez.

This relaunch happens in the wake of Marvel's disastrously poorly-conceived attempt to 'coolify' some of their most venerable titles by giving them entirely into the hands of a few fan-favorite artists and having a kind of company sack-race to see who could dump the most crap on the market in the shortest amount of time.

The Avengers and lots of other Marvel heroes (but not the X-Men) had voluntarily sacrificed themselves, you see, by leaping into some kinda void in order to defeat a boringly all-powerful bad guy named Onslaught. This gave Marvel a chance to do two things at the same time: 1) finally have a continuity that was mutants, mutants, and more mutants, and 2) launch a series of books set in a new continuity, where the origins of titles like the Avengers or Captain America could be entirely re-thought. It seemed like win-win. But even a win-win scenario will quickly head south if it involves boneheaded and blasphemously untalented fan favorite artist Rob Liefeld, and this one did. Liefeld is the most notoriously inept artist to get regular work since Herb Trimpe, and he's not only inept but droolingly adolescent, so obsessed with his ability to draw huge boobs that he infamously even gave a pair to Captain America.

So this relaunch continuity quickly descended from crappy-but-bearable to unbearably crappy to so-crappy-we-want-our-old-crap-back, and Marvel learned once again that it had some fans of things other than its best-selling books (sadly, the company apparently needs to re-learn this lesson every decade or so - witness the lineup of the current Avengers, featuring Spider-Man, the Thing, four clones of Wolverine, President Obama, and some free tacos). An event was concocted - Heroes Return - and the divergent reality was scrapped in favor of re-starting a handful of flagship Marvel titles starring old favorite characters as fans remembered them, not as a comics convention full of overgrown drunken frat boys felt like making them.

Hence, this Avengers #1, written by Kurt Busiek, drawn by George Perez, and opening in a rare moment of complete peace and quiet for Marvel's most powerful super-team. They're back from their alternate-dimension adventures, yes, but they haven't fully adjusted and aren't even officially a team again - just a small group of friends sitting around talking in stately Avengers Mansion, wondering about the meaning behind the day's outbreak of attacks on many Avengers past and present by various beings that seemed plucked from Norse mythology. Norse mythology, you say? Why, that sounds right up Thor's ally - except Thor disappeared in the super-confusing lead-up to the switcheroo, and his own title didn't get a relaunch with the others.

But he soon appears, looking ragged and telling a tale of having found himself alone in the ruins of Asgard. It turns out several of the city's most powerful magical do-hickeys - including the Twilight Sword and the Norn Stones - had gone missing ... only we learn they're now in the hands of Morgan le Fay, the centuries-old sorceress and dedicated Avengers-hater. She uses those talismans - and the reality-altering powers of the Scarlet Witch - to create yet another new reality: this one a warped variation on the medieval times Morgan loves so much, in which a huge team of temporarily re-imagined Avengers serve as her brainwashed personal bodyguard. Seems like the perfect plan - since this IS reality now, there's no chance of anybody opposing her.

It's a daring move on Busiek's part, re-launching the book with just the kind of alternate-reality storyline that raised fan ire and caused all the mess in the first place. But it's an entirely justified gamble, since a) Busiek is a very strong comics-writer who generally doesn't set challenges for himself that he can't meet, and b) he's joined here by the aforementioned legendary George Perez, whose artwork on this Avengers run (this first volume of "Avengers Assemble" and the two that will - hopefully quickly - follow it in paperback) is the best of his entire career. The result is a triumph of good old-fashioned superhero comic entertainment.

Morgan is eventually defeated (she's fighting about forty Avengers, so she didn't have that much of a chance), and the team eventually settles in back at Avengers Mansion to do that most quintessential of all Avengers activities: picking a new line-up. Busiek is a lover of comics essentials - a firm believer in the 'if it ain't broke' school of writing that's all but vanished from comics these days - so his new team has no Gilgamesh, no Doctor Druid, no Rom the Space Knight ... instead, we get Avengers staples: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, and the Vision, plus a wild card, Warbird, and two requisite new additions - Justice (who spends the entire run pumping his fists in excitement and generally tripping over himself) and his girlfriend Firestar (who spends the whole run, girlfriend-style, moping and criticizing him).

There follow some really fun issues full of Perez's amazing artwork (with one fill-in annual by Carlos Pacheco) and Busiek's spot-on characterizations - the highlight of which is certainly "The Court-Martial of Carol Danvers," in which the Avengers are forced to deal with the fact that Warbird likes to drink while super-heroing.

My only quibble? Well, apart from the fact that a super-team that faces such world-class dangers as Kang or Ultron would never voluntarily saddle itself with a pair of dim bulb third-stringers like Justice and Firestar, I in fact do have a very small quibble with this first volume - really, with just a touch of Busiek's dialogue. At one point when the extended team has gathered to discuss the threat of all those Asgardian attacks, somebody asks the Black Widow her opinion - and Busiek has her say "I'm not sure my record entitles me to speculate" - surely a reference to the string of issues where she lead the team back in the 1990s. Those issues were written by Bob Harras and drawn by Steve Epting, and in my opinion they remain the least-appreciated great arc in Avengers history - well deserving of a couple of nice graphic novels just like this one.

But those are pretty minor quibbles - the Black Widow is just one panel, after all, and the Avengers have always had dippy third-string members mixing with their A-listers. On the whole, this big volume does nothing but delight. Avengers fans should snap it up right away and then wait impatiently right along with me for the subsequent volumes.

JLA/Avengers!

Our book today is JLA/Avengers, the graphic novel collection of the epic four-issue collaboration between comic book giants Marvel and DC in 2003 and 2004, now finally out in a trade paperback in a bookstore near you.

For many comics fans (myself certainly included), this story line is a kind of dream come true: an elaborate and highly detailed team-up/fight between the greatest super-hero team of the Marvel universe, the Avengers, and the most iconic super-hero team of the DC universe, the Justice League - here written by a comics fan who manages to 'get' just about every one of the many characters he's writing, and drawn by a comics legend and fan favorite. The comic-reading public had been promised some variation of this collaboration at every fan convention and trade show for the last thirty years (artist George Perez slips in funny visual references to all of them in the course of this story), and here popular writer Kurt Busiek is finally given permission not only to have the core members of both teams meet, but to have them fight - with a couple of actual winners and losers (non-comic fans have to realize how very, very rare that is in the comics world).

Now that all four issues have been collected, first in a deluxe slipcased hardcover and now in a handy trade paperback, it's easier to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the story - it has plenty of both. In any mega-thingamabob like this, the organizing plot device will be a Maguffin of massive proportions, and in that JLA/Avengers doesn't disappoint: a cosmic super-baddie from the DC universe, Krona, wants to know what came before the Big Bang. He wanders through one alternate universe after another (destroying most of them in the process, as cosmic super-baddies tend to do) in search of the answer, until he gets to the Marvel universe, where the cosmic chess-player The Grandmaster tells him he knows of a being who pre-dates the Big Bang - he offers to make introductions, IF Krona can best him in a game of cosmic chess, using the super-heroes from two alternate universes as living chess pieces. Instead of immediately eviscerating The Grandmaster, Krona agrees - and so the Justice League and the Avengers are pitted against each other!


This presents Busiek with his first major problem, because he's enough of a comics aficionado to want to use only the quintessential members of both teams as his key players. For the Justice League this is comparatively easy: it's the roster even most non-comics fans will know by name - Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Aquaman (to which add that perennial unknown, the Martian Manhunter, and Busiek's quite appropriate addition of Plastic Man). For the Avengers it's much trickier - you want a roster that has a good deal of physical power but that also represents the team at its best. Busiek picks a great central core: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hank Pym, the Wasp, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, and Quicksilver.

Comics fans can spot the problem right away, at least in terms of having the two teams of chess-pieces initially square off against each other: the Justice League would mop the floor with the Avengers. The Justice League roster includes three characters with world-class super-strength, four characters who can move at super-speed, four characters who can emit energy-beams of some kind or other, five characters who possess (or can summon) some form of invulnerability ... etc. By contrast, the Avengers contingent has two characters who are entirely dependent on technology (and one who is a piece of technology), two characters with no super-powers at all, only two characters with any degree of invulnerability, and only three characters with any degree of super-strength (and only one of those, Thor, has it in comparable degree to that possessed by half the Justice League team) ... etc.

If this thing were being handicapped by Las Vegas bookies instead of written and drawn by comics fans for comics fans, the resulting fight between these two teams would take about five minutes. After those five minutes, Thor would be the only Marvel character still standing - and he'd be facing Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and the Martian Manhunter, so he wouldn't be standing for long.

But that's never how things happen in the world of comics, and Busiek knows it (you can tell he knows it by the two absolutely priceless scenes in JLA/Avengers where he bucks against it - once by having Batman 'spend fifteen minutes beating up some loon in kevlar' offstage - i.e. the allegedly badass Punisher, and once by having Captain America handily demolish the allegedly badass Prometheus ... while uttering my single favorite line from the book, "Try fighting the Wehrmacht, mister - it teaches you FOCUS!" Hee). So the battles between the two teams in his book are more prolonged and even-sided affairs.


Of course long-time comics fans will have dreamt of some of those battles, and they'll disagree with some of Busiek's outcomes. Some of the fights he orchestrates are iconic in their own right: Batman and Captain America, for instance, are each respective company's most popular and well-known non-superpowered character, one a grim nighttime avenger of wrong, and the other a flag-wearing champion of right. How on Earth can you call a winner in such a fight? On his side, Captain America has not only the super-soldier formula coursing through his body (and making him, at least according to The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, virtually incapable of getting tired) but has years of experience fighting all kinds of opponents. And on the other hand, you have ... Batman, the least beatable of all super-heroes, powered or otherwise.

Busiek solves this particular problem cannily (he makes them so experienced they don't need to fight - they become the ones who realize both teams are being used as pawns in a bigger game), but that still leaves him with lots of others. DC's Flash is just plain and simple faster than Marvel's Quicksilver. DC's Green Lantern has access to technology (his ring) that just plain and simple outclasses the technology of Iron Man's armor. DC's dark-eyed emotionally-controlled team 'outsider' Martian Manhunter has all the powers of his Marvel equivalent, the Vision, and lots more besides. And who on the Avengers even approaches the balance for a character like Wonder Woman - as powerful as Superman and with five hundred times his fighting experience?

It's to Busiek's credit that in addition to side-stepping some of these problems by getting the two teams co-operating on the double, he also shifts his focus onto the differences in the two teams - and by extension the two universes and the two companies. At one point Aquaman comments to Superman that the heroes of the Marvel universe seem generally less powerful than those of the DC universe ("and," Aquaman points out, "their world is stacked against them"), and although this doesn't cut any mustard with Superman (he's portrayed throughout as interestingly disdainful of the Marvel heroes' inability to inspire the populace), it's a great motif running throughout the book. We're told that the Marvel Earth is smaller than the DC version, and louder, and less healthy (Superman's senses note harsher sunlight and higher blood pressure) - and this perfectly reflects the more hardscrabble, more human kind of superhero that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko wanted to create forty years ago, specifically as a comment on DC's larger-than-life icons.

At one point when the Avengers' expert marksman Hawkeye rejoins his comrades, the Wasp warmly welcomes him with a friendly peck on the cheek, and it's a winning, natural moment - and unthinkable in DC's more Olympian cast. Busiek puts little moments like that everywhere in his sprawling cosmic epic, and they all work.


The whole book largely works, and by far the most moving moment comes when our combined heroes are faced with a choice: go on living in the fantasy-world caused by the forcible combining of their two worlds, or fight to separate those worlds and restore both their realities. In order for them to make an informed decision, The Grandmaster shows them a kaleidoscope of key moments from their respective realities - a guided tour of the very worst things that comics readers have seen happen to these characters over the last twenty years. It's a surreal moment, as long-time readers realize all they've been through with these characters ... and when it's over, our heroes do just what heroes always do: they choose to suffer for the greater good.

Again, JLA/Avengers mostly works, and reading it again after a lapse of years allowed me to pick out not only more of the delectable little character moments Busiek includes but also more of the fantastic, fanatical, insanely detailed penciling work of George Perez, who manages, in the course of four issues (and all at once on the cover of the fourth), to draw just about every major and minor character in the entire history of both Marvel and DC. Virtuosity like that becomes almost scary, but in a good way.

And at the end, of course, the door is left open for other such epic adventures! To which I have an obvious suggestion but one nevertheless I'd love to see: the full cast of Golden Age characters from each company, fighting and then teaming up against Hitler, the Red Skull, Per Degaton, and whatever other baddies come to mind. JSA/Invaders! Who's with me?

comics! World's Finest What The Eff?

Two comics for myself this week, and they don't come any more basic: Superman and Batman. Despite what some of you out there might think, this is not rote loyalty on my part. I've almost never followed any of the various Bat-titles. I've only decided to follow this one for the same reason I ever do: the fantastic artwork. Andy Kubert's work here is so damn good, so wonderful in layout and execution, that every time I see him up his game (which he, unlike so many brand-name artists out there, consistently does) I'm tempted to bring up the Forbidden Subject: is he - or his almost-equally good brother - actually BETTER than their revered father Joe Kubert?

The answer's still no - Joe's work portraying Tarzan (perhaps the only other 'superhero' as iconic as Superman and Batman) has a worldly wisdom underlying it that neither of the sons has - yet.

True, I am the world's biggest Superman fan - but buying that title wasn't rote either! There've been plenty of times I stopped buying the title (um, shoulder length hippie hair? Um, big blue energy-being? True, I stuck around for John Byrne - but that was the equivalent of being mesmerized by a horrible highway accident). But Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco are doing such a fantastic job with this title that - despite our rather bumpy courtship - I'm completely hooked.

Both issues were wonderful, and, oddly enough, both issues had a great big What The Eff moment that left me jaw-dropped and hovering between pity and outrage.

The Moment happens at the end of this current Batman issue - the storyline is hugely promising: a boy claiming to be Batman's son by Talia demands to be let into Batman's life. He's brought to the Batcave, where - since he was brought up by the League of Assassins - he proceeds to attack everybody with a pulse, overcoming Alfred and Robin and provoking a lot of Bat-yelling from the big guy. Using the element of surprise, the boy badly wounds Robin (this week's Stevereads award for the most inadvertently creepy detail: the Cave has its own private blood supply), so Batman has no choice but to take him along to Gibraltar, which, um, Talia wants to take from the UK.

Batman and the boy show up to foil the plan, and there's lots of great action, and Talia offers Batman a chance to 'convert' her to the cause of good - a fascinating twist I'm amazed nobody's thought of before. Everything is tense and balanced to go either way. And then ...

BOOM! Our writer, Grant Morrison, slams a British torpedo into Talia's ship, and the issue ends with Batman watching the burning wreckage from shore, and with Stevereads saying, you guessed it, What The Eff?

We can assume that both Talia and the boy survived and will be back (after all, in comics nobody dies but Bucky ... grrrrrr), but even so, what is such an ending but Morrison basically saying 'Mmmmmmm, I'm bored .... I'll come back to this later.'?

Over in Superman, a delightfully snotty Arion is detailing a post-apocalyptic future to our cast, a future in which a small handful of unlikely heroes led by Lex Luthor are making their way through a nearly destroyed world.

And what's responsible for this apocalypse? Why, our second What The Eff moment, that's what!

Or rather, that's who - a new super-villain named Khyber, who's clearly intended to be comics first Islamic villain - certainly the first major villain who's Islamic identity is the biggest part of his villainy.

I know, I know - in the issue, Khyber is never explicitly described as Islamic himself, only as using strife between Islamic extremists and the West to further his own plans. But the wording is so delicately ambiguous that we're clearly meant to make some heavy-duty associations, and I think those associations are dead wrong.

I know, I know - it's been done before. During WWII, wildly prejudicial anti-German and anti-Japanese were all over comics, and there's nothing very subtle about villains like the Yellow Claw.

But this is different. No goose-stepping Nazis ever waved their lugers around Times Square, and no bayonet-wielding Viet Congs ever boarded planes at Logan. Creating a sooper-evil Islamic villain who beats on Superman and causes the end of the world ... well, in its own small way, it's intensely irresponsible. Islamic extremism is the fastest-growing social movement in the world, and it has two salient characteristics: it's unchecked by geographical borders, and it's very, very touchy. Creating a character like Khyber encourages ignorance just to tap into a little topicality, and I wish Busiek had gone a different way in adding to Superman's rogues gallery.

Anyway, I passed on Teen Titans, Green Arrow, 52, and a bunch of other things this week, but I'm sure Elmo and my nemesis Pepito will furnish the gaps in due time. You must be patient, my little marmosets ...

(by the by, for you techno-heads out there, I tried for 30 utterly wasted minutes to find a copy of the cover of the current Superman to post here, totally without success .. if any of you can find such a holy image, feel free to tell me where, so I can avoid giving preferential treatment to a non-superpowered character.... yech ...)

Comics! Superman and Spider-Man!

15 July 2006

COMICS

Only two comics this week, amazingly enough: Superman and 'The Sensational' Spider-Man. Each company's long-standing icon, and each icon at a turning point.

Sensational Spider-Man #28 - "My Science Teacher is Spider-Man!!" - follows a little of the fallout in Peter Parker's life in the wake of his nationally televised coming-out as Spider-Man (it features a GREAT cover by the wonderul new-to-me artist Clayton Crain, whose names sounds like a Stan Lee secret identity name). In this case, what would happen to a really bright kid in one of Peter's classes, once it was revealed that his science teacher is a super-hero. The issue was really good though predictable, and my favorite moment wasn't the one very good writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa planned it to be, the rousing final page where we learn that the kid is going to be fine ... no, my favorite moment was when the writer remembered that this isn't the first time Doctor Octopus has seen Peter Parker dressed as Spider-Man (although the previous time he wasn't dressed in the new stupid gay-ass bright red hotsuit like he should be called Afterburn and be working four nights a week at the Bun Factory... geez) - when I saw that Aguirre-Sacasa had even gone to the trouble of mimicking Stan Lee's original hyperventilating multiple-exclamation points .... well, I smiled.

Not much to smile about with Superman #654, "On Our Special Day," and that shouldn't have been true - the thing is written by Kurt Busiek, one of the best Superman-writers of all time, and it's drawn by Carlos Pacheco, one of the most gifted comic book artists in comics history. I was extremely gratified to learn that DC was bringing its A-team to its flagship character, but hoo-boy, this first issue left me waiting for that to happen.

Let's start with the cover - great iconic Superman pose, but what about the REST of it? The bad guys seem not only beaten but ... well, BEATEN, like they're begging us to pull the big guy OFFA them before he KILLS them - hardly the tone you want in a Superman comic (and what's with that bizarre WWII-era insulting Oriental crouching beneath the Western Imperialist dog? Me so solly, but that sort of stuff just doesn't fly anymore).

Then there's everything on the inside.

Page 1: Who the Hell gets up at 7 if they've got a staff meeting at 8:10? What were Lois and Clark going to DO with that honey-nut toast and fresh-squeezed juice and eggs florentine? Power-eat them? And where do they live? Actually IN the Daily Planet building?

Page 2 -3: OK, I like the fist-marks all over Neutron's containment armor ... but mommy, why does Superman have a mouth full of ragged fangs? Is he the devil?

Page 4: First reminder of the issue: Superman is not Cyclops. You can tell by the flying, and the big red cape. His heat vision makes things HOTTER - it doesnt shatter them.

Page 5: OK, I LOVE the 'science police' bit, but, looking at panel 1, I'm moved to ask: who the Hell is that in the Superman costume? Why doesn't he look anything like the ten or twelve other faces Pacheco tries in the rest of the issue?

Page 6: Um, people who 'establish' themselves as "erratic, prone to irregular absences" get their asses fired.

Page 7: Yeesh. That line "Lana? I'd been wondering what she'd do with her life, but this is a surprise" couldn't be a bigger writer-copout if it read "Lana? I'd been wondering what the writers would do with her life, but this is sure a totally out-of-character mindfuck." Lana Lang as CEO of Lexcorp! Or, as it's known in the DC bullpen: Busiek drunk off his ass!

Page 8: Hard-nosed is one thing, but Perry White is coming off here as a J. Jonah Jameson-style a-hole with no redeeming qualities at all.

Page 9: I miss Clark Kent's blue suits. And I could do without Lois Lane's frickin belly button flashing in the newsroom.

Page 10: Um, just wondering here, but why would you NEED your crack camouflage squad with their specially-designed light-refracting invisibility suits if you're planting frigging glowing spheres in frigging broad daylight?

Page 11: OK, panel one is a great, compacted action-scene, but ... reminder number two: Superman is not Cyclops. You can tell by the flying, and the big red cape. His heat vision MELTS things, it doesn't knock people unconscious (or anything else that isn't melting). And also: so you've got this glowing energy-sphere and you have NO IDEA what it does, but what do you do? You hand it over to a Metropolis cop - but hey, you make sure to give him a helpful warning: "be careful ... it's almost pure, compacted energy"... love that 'almost' ... (also love the fact that Superman is clearly still holding the energy sphere in his hand as he flies off ... what, don't Busiek and Pacheco even get drunk TOGETHER?)

Page 12: So let me get this straight: the villain on the water-sled is yelling to his unarmed scuba-buddies "Kill him! Kill him!"? And that's what kind of writing, again? Where is there ANYBODY, and I mean frigging ANYBODY, who yells "Kill him! Kill him!" to his buddies when they're fighting Superman? It's so nonsensical it's annoying.

Page 13: So Jimmy's spent the whole friggin morning obsessing on what anniversary Lois and Clark are celebrating? But Clark's the one fighting for his job? And shouldn't somebody tell Lois she's got an oilslick on her head?

Page 14: OK, aside from that 'focus my hearing forward' bit of nonsense, this page kicks ass, especially the last two panels. But even in the midst of enjoying them, I'm bombarded with the concentrated bullshit of "The building's shielded with an energy field that gives off the spectrographic signature of lead paint." Just think about that for a minute. Just wait ... it'll come to you. Trust me, you haven't read a sentence that dumb all day.

Page 15: Awesome page - a real good twist.

Page 16: Um, I counted 12 scientists monitoring Mannheim on page 15 - wouldn't Superman be, um, interested in, you know, saving them or something? I mean when the friggin building collapses on top of them? Just a thought.

Page 17: Oh great .... so in addition to not saving the aforementioned scientists trapped under the building's rubble, Superman is now ENTOMBING them by slagging the rubble to hamper Mannheim's feet. What's next? Repeatedly X-raying little orphans' scrotums until they get testicular cancer? Welcome back, big guy!

Page 18: Curses! Superman could have used his telescopic vision to SEE who was behind Mannheim's transformation if he'd only ... LOOKED UP! Oh well, Mannheim foiled him this time, but next time, he might just MOVE HIS FRIGGIN HEAD.

Page 19: So let me get this straight - when it comes to energy-spheres made of almost pure compacted energy of unknown design or function, Superman can't stick around, but when it comes to booby-traps (which he could, um, LOOK for) or 'damaged weaponry' (whatever the hell THAT means), he's got to hang around and miss his deadlines and his anniversary?

Page 20: Just a little note on journalistic ethics for all you little turnips out there who might be thinking of becoming news-people: Superman saving millions of lives is not the same thing as Lois using a forged edit-code to lie to her publisher. They're not even in the same ballpark.

Page 21: So let me get this straight: Lois is a little worried that if Clark holds the apartment door open too long, 'old Mrs. Schwartz' will peep in, but she's not concerned about FLYING over friggin Metropolis in the arms of Clark Kent, the famous newspaper reporter? And Clark's not worried either? Isn't there a chance that, oh, I don't know - somebody might be LOOKING OUT THEIR FRIGGIN WINDOW right at that moment? Or that the weirdly-obsessive Jimmy Olson might have their place staked out?

See, the fact that I only unabashedly LIKED one single page from this issue points out the problem with this bi-annual Superman relaunches: they always stink. And they always stink because they're so obviously not thought-through for any length of time ahead of time, by any of the people involved. If I had to guess, I'd say the inspiration for this issue - filtered through lots and lost of beer - was the first issue of Busiek's Astro City, in which a decent but harried Samaritan is seen as the busiest guy in the world, only instead of his peaceful dream of flying, our Superman gets the real, secret-identity-endangering thing.

But that's half the problem right there: this is Superman, the guy of whom Samaritan is a pale copy, not vice versa. AND this is Superman just coming back from a massive, life-altering event: a PERFECT time to re-invigorate the character. This issue shouldn't feel like a tired re-tread of Busiek's earlier work ... and if it did when it was presented to the DC powers that be, it should bloody well have been rejected, regardless of whose names are attached. My super-genius young friend Elmo could have come up with four different, totally involving ways to relaunch this title, AND still had time for some bird-watching in the afternoon.

So here's hoping the next issue will be better. Sap that I am, you know I'll be there.