What Superman Does Not Like

I was originally going to write about this story (from Lois Lane No 20) for one of our recent theme weeks, but since the funniest in the story - as well as the reason that it was appropriate for the week in question - came at the very end and would have been telegraphed too much by the giant banner at the top of the post, I rejected it.

But I just couldn't stay away, so here comes "Superman's Flight From Lois Lane" - see if you can figure out if it was rejected from Hat, Fat or Cat Week before the shocking final panel!

We open with a typical Lois and Clark reporting assignment: 

 

Yes, back in the day being an intrepid reporter sometimes meant that you were like the guys in those reality shows where they try out extreme jobs and get stung by giant Japanese hornets and the like. I think I have a comic somewhere that has Perry force his staff to recreate a Donner Party-esque doomed trek through the desert - the man would go to any lengths to sell a paper.

And of course Clark's parachute malfunctions, but it looks like it happened about five seconds after he left the plane. The ol' super-speed should give him plenty of time to fix the problem before Lois notices that anything's wro-

You know, if legitimate skydiving mishaps resulted in perfect person-shaped holes in the ground I think that we'd all feel a little worse about enjoying old Looney Tunes. 

Clark manages to cover for himself with a speedy application of super-breath, of course (and boy, did he get a lot of use out of that power in the 60s. I demand more super-breath, DC!), and you'd think that this would be one situation in which he wouldn't have to fall over himself trying to allay Lois' suspicions. After all, her eyes were closed throughout the incident, right?

Nope! That lady would take literally anything as a potential sign that Clark was Superman. I guess that you have to give her credit: she had the right man. Trouble was, the right man didn't want to be found out, and this was the last straw. It's super-power time!

Yes, Superman decides to fly into the past, endangering, I'm sure, the very fabric of space and time and abandoning more than a decade's worth of friendships and hard work, in order to make sure that a cute girl will no longer want to be his girlfriend. That guy. Not shown: Superman murdering his past self in order to take his place.

So Clark Kent: reporter is no more. What's a youngish, unattached, nigh-omnipotent man from the near future to do? Become a stock speculator? Spend a lot of time preventing wars? Go to work for a different newspaper?

Use his super-powers to ace a job interview and become a disc jockey! Hooray! This is one of those times that I am wholeheartedly behind Clark, instead of slightly off to the side, scratching my head. Just check him out here:

Imagine with me now: a world in which this was a permanent change. We might have a goateed Beatnik Superman in our past, right next to Mullet Superman. At this point, who knows? Clark might have a fart-sound-riddled morning show with Jimmy Olsen and Ron Troupe as his foul-mouthed sidekicks and a rich legacy of radio station problems - Dabney Donovan makes a DNAlien that eats vinyl! Brainiac attacks just as Clark convinces a caller to put her phone somewhere inadvisable! Morgan Edge buys the station and gives the boys an ill-advised morning show! Oh where are Elseworlds when I really need them?

But it's not all great tunes and lovely melodies for the Sultan of Song. This being the Silver Age, Superman can only go for so long without at least one of his recurring themes surfacing.

In this case, it's the fact that he can't walk four steps without tripping over a cute girl with the initials "L.L." Of course, there's always more to the LL package than the initials and the hourglass figure:

Yes, in common with many of the Double-L girls, Liza is observant enough to suspect Clark of being Superman while simultaneously deluded enough not to consider that Superman might not be overjoyed to have his carefully-kept secret revealed on a whim.

Also note that DJ SUperman has traded in his old "cowardly Clark" cover for a new "sleepy Clark" version. 

"Clark, where were you when Luthor was attacking the station?" "Well, at first I was looking for help but one thing led to another and I ended up catching forty winks in a supply closet."

Liza tries out a few of the standard tricks, like the invulnerable hair-snip test, but the cheap perfume gag shown above is her master plan - I'm not sure if she's not quite as smart as Lois and Lana or if she just doesn't have the attention span to keep thinking up new little schemes, but after Superman solves the problem in a typically over-the-top manner:

... the resulting failure is potent enough to destroy her life.

Yes, Liza's dreams are crushed, she quits her job and presumably moves back to whatever small town she was originally from, there to marry the manager of the hardware store she works at part time to pay her parents rent. She never, ever listens to the radio, because it reminds her of what might have been.

Clark, meanwhile, couldn't be happier.

But all good things must come to an end, and for this story "the end" is synonymous with Lois Lane, who comes to WMET to interview the hot new disc jockey that everyone's talking about. And here's where I start scratching my head again, because rather than sit through one interview with Lois, he returns to the future - presumably going a few weeks into the past to murder his recent-past self before he could murder original Clark and begin this whole mess - to hang out with her every day.

Now here's the theme week stuff. Do you have a guess? Write it down before going any further.

Yes, it's Fat Week for the win! Liza Landis, in the original continuum, married the station manager and plumped up! Or maybe this is one of those weird Silver Age stories where time travel has effects on the present even when it's been undone, and this is what she did after resigning in shame. Either way, despite her evident contentedness and "Wife of the Year" status, Clark reacts exactly as one might expect:

ABJECT HORROR.

Yes, Superman once again rigidly sticks to his "No Fat Chicks" policy. Intrepid careerwomen need only apply if their waistline has a smaller diameter than their head and they intend to keep it that way. 

Happy Free Comic Book Day! I'm off to... get free comic books!

John Buys Comics. Compulsively.

Stumptown No. 3

THIRD ISSUE RECAP!

Actually, I’m not sure if I’ve talked about this comic before. If I haven’t, shame on me - I am a bounder and a cad of the highest order.

Stumptown is a classic detective story, in the “protagonist just keeps following up leads no matter how beat up they get or how many people they piss off until they get their man/woman” mode, and we’ve just gotten to the point where our hero Dex has met all of the characters but still has no sweet clue what’s going on. I was going to make a crack about it being hard to follow the mystery because the books come out so far apart, but I just read the piece at the back and it turns out that they come out far apart because Matthew Southworth is adding extra pages, and now I feel like a jerk.

Speaking of Southworth, he’s been doing a heck of a job on this book, and the text pieces that he’s been putting in the back have really been showcasing just how much design goes into a project like this. Likewise, Greg Rucka has been writing some terrific characters, which is good because that’s how you make a detective book shine. It’s clear that aside from being a damage-prone but ultimately indestructible private investigator with a cool car and some bad habits, Dex is a genuinely interesting person who loves her brother and has complicated relationships and so on. Ever since I stopped working in libraries I’ve had a really hard time finding decent detective fiction among the sea of mediocre, so this is a very welcome book.

Random Acts of Violence

So… I buy a lot of comics on impulse. I figure that since I’m doing these reviews I might as well spread my net wide and so I’ll pick up a lot of first issues and small trades that look even marginally interesting. And hey, Palmiotti and Gray! Dude in a welding outfit! Okay title! Could be all right! Was not, actually all right!

In a nutshell, Random Acts of Violence is about two guys who make a comic in the torture porn style, become immensely popular and inadvertently inspire people to commit heinous murders, until the whole thing loops around and they themselves are in the sort of situations that they’ve been writing about.

And surprisingly, it’s meh. Unlike the Eighties-style horror movies that seem to have inspired Last Resort, I have no real interest in Saw and Hostel and the rest of the subgenre that’s being referenced here, mostly because they have no joy in them. So I can’t revel in the tropes of a form that I love, and I certainly can’t celebrate the fact that they’re being transcended, because they aren’t. I can’t even get too worked up about the weird misogyny of the whole thing, because the characters manage to talk it to death round about page 30 or so. I mean, that doesn’t make it go away but now I’m kind of bored when I think of it.

Most of the entertainment value that I managed to wring from this came from speculating about the aspects of comics culture that crop up in the course of the story: do Palmiotti and Gray have a super low opinion of fans? Being as this is a book made by two guys (okay, four guys. Leave me alone!) about a book made by two guys, are there analogies being drawn here? Does that make the unfortunate girlfriend Amanda Connor? Is that as disturbing as I think it is? And my number 1 speculation: would we (that's you and me) really embrace an over-written torture porn comic book hard enough to make it as popular as depicted here - one issue and its indie creators are being flown all over the country to massive acclaim? I guess we'll see.

Husk No. 1

Maybe I should start keeping up on upcoming comics, because I didn’t know what the hell this was and so almost missed it. I was almost a fool.

Just in case you haven’t been reading up on this stuff either, Husk is the first (I think? I really do need to keep up on the news) part of a team-up between Marvel and French comics publisher Soleil, the goal of which is to introduce some fine Gallic comics to North American audiences and presumably make everyone scads of money.

This is very exciting! France - heck, Europe - has an incredibly rich comics culture that we only see in dribs and drabs, and any concerted effort to bring some of it over here so that I can read it without, you know, having to have retroactively paid attention in all of those French classes is fine by me.

As for the book itself, it’s concerned with Sarah, the devil-may-care pilot of an Arnold M5 Husk, a biomechanical exosuit used by police, military and industry. There’s a lot of philosophizing about the interface of man and machine, punctuated by wicked action and big explosions. As you may have inferred from that last sentence, it has a lot in common with Ghost in the Shell, even down to the fact that there’s a brain-hacker on the loose. I have to say though: this looks a heck of a lot prettier and the philosophy is either translated better or is less impenetrable to begin with.

Garrison No. 1

It’s the near future and the US government’s obsession with security has blossomed into full-fledged paranoia, making it the “most surveilled nation in the history of the world”. Our heroine, Jillian Bracewell, works for the National Bureau of Surveillance, and organization that is getting seriously irked by title character Garrison. Why? Because Garrison has been appearing on-camera long enough to murder people - more than 150 people - and then disappearing again, all over the country that's why.

So far, so good - a perfectly fun first issue, interesting character potential, nice art. It could go any number of ways, plot-wise, so I’m going to wait a month and do a SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT, just in case.

Okay, mostly because I haven't done one in a while.

Detective Comics No. 864

I’m ignoring the fact that Batwoman is no longer in this comic, because it would unduly prejudice me against it... Okay, done.

Hey, this is a good time!

I didn’t actually read the book (presumably Batman) that had the big “Black Mask is Jeremiah Arkham” reveal, but no matter: it’s pretty satisfying to me. The idea that Arkham was just as crazy as the people under his care has been floating around for a long time now, and while it’s a concept that could comfortably exist on the periphery of the Batman mythos forever, it has in fact been the focus of way too many stories for nothing to eventually come of it.

I mean, Alfred has been made into a super-villain. Robin has (kinda). How long could an insane asylum director reasonably hold out?

The Great Unknown No. 3

MINIATURE THIRD ISSUE RECAP: I’m sorry that it can’t be full-size, but it’s been about a year and my memory ain’t quite good enough. So: Zach Feld is an inventive genius, but every time he comes close to patenting something, someone else gets it to market first. He’s become paranoid and secretive, to the point that his family has called in a reality show intervention on him. And then, round about the middle of issue two, he discovers that someone actually has been stealing his ideas right out of his head and selling them on an online auction site called imind. Now he's teaming up with a group of funny-headed Objectivists who have also been exploited by the idea-thieves and things are presumably going to get science-awesome and possibly also science-violent.

Gah. Are there no comics that I can rag on for being slow? How can I take issue with Duncan Rouleau taking a while to write and draw and presumably colour this, especially when it looks so good? And issue four comes out next month, so I can just shut my mouth.

Usagi Yojimbo No. 128 - I’d been reading the older stories in this series as per my usual compulsive-need-to-catch-up modus operandi but I just couldn’t resist the sweet sweet samurai action any longer. I’m kind of glad I did, because the fifty-issue jump made me realize that Stan Sakai is actually getting better. That’s crazy! He was already astonishingly good! But yes: check out Usagi’s facial expression, stance and movement while he’s fighting in this issue - damn that magnificent man.

Green Lantern Corps No. 47 - Things calm down on the Lantern front, for one issue, at least. A nice little epilogue issue, with two points of excitement: Firstly: Kilowog’s assertion that he just wants to be a space cop is very encouraging because that’s what I want to read about. Secondly, the “Coming this year…” splash at the end looks very promising - a whole lot of the pictured events could fit snugly into an action-packed cosmic cop adventure. I am preparing for glee, particularly if that one guy with the flaming sword is related to the space genie that the Legion had to fight that one time.

"There are dozens of us! DOZENS!"

 I’ve been recently started re-watching the late, great Arrested Development on DVD, which is always fun to do when a show carries that many layers of humour. It’s tough to pick a favourite character—everything raspy illusionist Gob Bluth does or says is hilarious to me—but I’ve gotta go with Tobias Funke, Lindsay Bluth’s probably-gay, psychatrist-turned-actor husband (played by Mr. Show’s David Cross).

 

If you are familiar at all with the show, then you probably know that Tobias suffers from an extremely rare psychological affliction; he’s a Never-nude, which means that he can’t stand to ever be completely naked. Hence his ever-present cut-off jean shorts, which he even wears while sobbing in the shower after blowing yet another audition.

 

The introduction of this character detail, however, reminded me of a conversation with a customer of mine a few years back, when said customer pointed out a comics character who also apparently suffered from the same bizarre neurosis:

 

Poor guy. I just thought he liked cut-offs.

 A footnote: while preparing to do this post, I did a Google search for the words “Kamandi” and “never nude” to see if anyone else in the blogosphere had tackled this subject already. I found a link to Chris Samnee’s blog, where he referred to Kamandi as a Never-nude in the comments thread pertaining to an amazing Kamandi/OMAC illustration he had done (do yourself a favour and check it out here). By the way, Samnee is a super-talented artist to watch out for. His upcoming Thor and the Mighty Avengers ongoing series, written by LBW favourite Roger Langridge, promises to be a lot more entertaining than most of the current Avengers franchise.

A Question of Imagination

Back in 1965, Archie Comics began publishing a comic book adaptation of The Shadow, and I have to say that it must have taken a heck of a lot of imagination to transform this:

To this:

... or at least to do so and imagine that it was a winning proposition. That's why I was kind of surprised to see some... familiar elements while reading the series. Did imagination desert them as soon as they'd hammered the Shadow into Batman Lite? How else to explain this:

Only a passing resemblance, you say? Surely two fellows would dress up in goggles and laced-up shirts, you assert? Well, how about this:

Eh? Eh? Surely someone at Archie must have known what they were doing when they created this guy.

EDIT: Phew, I got way over my head on the image formatting here. Just when I think that I am Wordpress' master, it shows me who's boss. Shield your eyes!

John Buys Comics and Writes About Them

American Vampire No. 2

I picked up the first issue of this after Dave’s review, and I’m surprised that I needed that much incentive. I mean, flapper vampires and cowboy vampires in the same book? There is only so much strength in my feeble human form, my friends.

Of course, it takes more than a simple genre mashup to keep my interest, but Snyder and Albuquerque have that covered, the latter with some appropriately terrific art and the former by spinning out some very cool ideas about vampirism.

Every week, it seems, I reveal yet another facet of the already priceless gem that is my nerdliness (he wrote on his comics blog). This week: I know an awful lot about vampires! And as anyone who knows an awful lot about vampires knows, every damn country and people in the world seem to have their own distinct iteration of the bloodsucking fiend, ranging from Dracula-style goth dudes to flying heads to crazy cow skin-looking things that live in Peruvian lakes. Any story that does a halfway decent job of explaining why the above is the case gets bonus points, even if they aren’t as well told as [American Vampire] actually is.

Snyder’s explanation - that a vampire made from someone in a new place, living in a new way sometimes just turns out differently than the vampire that made them - isn’t precisely unique, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the concept expressed so simply before, and that counts for a lot. There’s no grand mystical hogwash surrounding it, just “different land, different vampires” and that’s very refreshing.

Meanwhile, Stephen King’s backup story is very fun in a couple of different ways, but I find myself focusing on the fact that having the story of Skinner Sweet set in front of us from the beginning does a very interesting thing. We now know the depths of Sweet’s evil, so though he can play out the trope of the mysterious, roguish benefactor whose dark past is gradually revealed in his dealings with Pearl, we are already in the know. Very very satisfying reading, with people biting each other to boot.

The Brave and the Bold No. 33 - That’s two issues in a row of this that I’ve really enjoyed, after a bit of a spotty patch. Cliff Chiang drew some fantastic stuff here, and his facial expressions were in the best possible way reminiscent of Amanda Conner's. HOWEVER: J. Michael Straczynski basically finished his lovely little story with THE END with five underlines - I’d recommend stopping at the Flash ad for a slightly more satisfying reading experience, or the JLA ad if you didn’t catch the point of the story by the Flash ad.

R.E.B.E.L.S. No. 15 - I think I’ll wait a bit to weigh in on the new status quo in this book. I’m really only writing this because i want to point out that Despero’s people all have really well-groomed facial hair and it’s a look that I like in a moderately sinister alien race.

Green Lantern No. 53 - See, this is why I was so pissy about Blackest Night. I have no idea how Brightest Day is going to turn out, but a comic like this, where Johns can play and be all portentous and not have to place each distinct plot point in a new issue, this actually reads well. It might not be the Police Procedural in Space that I want, but I’ll take Rainbow Space Opera, I reckon. 

The Tick New Series No. 3 - There is nothing bad about this series. Nothing. Read it. Benito Cereno and Les McClaine have done a fantastic job with this and I will praise them much more thoroughly when No. 4 comes out and I presumably will not be so sleepy.

Good night everyone!

Friendly, Neighbourhood...Thing

I know ads for totally absurd merchandise are common place in any Marvel comic, but seriously:

 

What is this?

No, really? What is it?

These are my best guesses.

Salad Tongs.

Melon baller.

Ultra safe scissors?

Or some sort of medical tool? Foresceps? Or...uh...a speculum?

Ugh, chilling stuff.

 

Please help me out. The more I think about it, the creepier the possibilities.