It’s been over two weeks since I started writing this entry. I still can’t figure out why I can’t say anything about these issues, although the three rough drafts suggest that there is something to say, even if’s to provide an excuse to italicize as many words as possible. There seem to be three threads running through these drafts. Let me summarize them:
- Explaining why I would begin collecting a comic after I had stopped collecting it.
- Explaining the editorial shift in the Superman comics circa 1999.
- Analyzing the relationship between Superman and Wonder Woman. Again.
So let’s start with the first one. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, or if I’m just remembering something in a previous draft from this column, but I think, broadly speaking, there are two types of comicbook fans. The first is the one who reads for the characters, and the second is the one who reads for the creators. Of course there’s plenty of overlap, but there’s no denying that there are comicbook collectors who will sit through years of shitty stories just because they love the character. Whatever their idealized version of a character is, it’s strong enough to compel them to read every adventure published. Every mini-series spin-off Elsewords-esque one-shot whatever that comes to market gets gobbled up because of that love of the character. And then there’s some people that will follow the creator—Byrne’s Faithful Fifty Thousand, Warren Ellis’s cult, and God knows what you’d call the perverts and degenerates who devour anything by Grant Morrison (I should know, that one’s me; hell, they’re all me). Because in those cases, we like the way the story is told more than we like the character that’s in them.
This is why I went back to Action Comics at the end of 1999. Joe Kelly was taking over the writing chores, and I had become a big fan of him thanks to his run on Deadpool. We’ll delve more into this whenever we get to that title, but in a nutshell, Kelley had a knack for sympathetic characters and a wonderful sense of humor. So it didn’t matter that the last time I read a Superman story I was bored to tears; if Joe Kelly could make a third-rate anti-hero into a compelling character, then I figured he could work wonders someone with a more iconic pedigree.
Mind you, Kelly wasn’t alone in putting a fresh coat of paint on the Superman. In the late ‘90s, the Powers That Be At DC had decided to overhaul the entire Superman line. The same month Joe Kelly took over Action Comics, new creative teams took over the other Superman titles. Unlike the Byrne-led revamp of ’86, the 2000 model Superman was more of a make-over. In the broadest sense, the new team of Superman writers would bring back a sense of optimism and wonder to Superman’s adventures. The idea was to restore a sense of wonder to Superman’s adventures, to return to his status as a symbol of hope and the sense that all things are possible.
(Of course, in their quest to shake things up, the DC brass didn’t want to go too far. They torpedoed a much more ambitious revamp of Superman proposed by Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Mark Millar and Tom Peyer although if you read the hyperlinked synopsis and read what hit the stands in late 1999, you’d see that some ideas were cherry-picked, leaving the more radical elements behind. Some of the more radical ideas in that proposal would come to pass, thanks to The Grant God Morrison, but a story for another time.)
Anyway, reading these stories 12 years later, I can easily see why I was happy to start collecting the series again. The first three issues in particular showcase all the strength’s of Joe Kelly’s writing that I mentioned before. From the opening gag in issue 760 with the hilariously pathetic Dr. Spectro, and that glorious splash page by artists German Garcia, with Superman floating in the air tall and confident, this was a Superman returning to greatness, shrugging off the layers of “grim’n’gritty” storytelling that coated the stories I read before. This was a Superman who could travel half-way around the world in 5 seconds; who could fight a thousand-year war in another dimension but be gone only for a few hours in “real” time; who saves Christmas from a demon run amok. It’s corny but it’s true: these stories put the super back in Superman, and I enjoyed it immensely.
The characters became believable again. Lois and Clark felt like a couple very much in love, their banter was witty, and overall Kelly wrote them as two people who treated one another like equals—even if one was a mere mortal and the other could crush planets. The supporting cast does get pared down and are back to being strictly supportive, but their interaction with the main cast feels natural, with no melodramatic subplot required to justify them being around.
And, what’s more, Joe Kelly is funny. Not that this title became Slapstick Comics once he took over, but Kelly made sure to through in at least one decent joke an issue, and he indulged himself quite a bit in that first issue. From the afore-mentioned Dr. Spectro to the other intentionally-third-rate villains, and a great scene where an annoyed Ra’s al Ghurl tells Superman that he’s not as smart as “The Detective”, if you weren’t laughing out loud, you were at least cracking a smile.
Which makes it all the more a shame that I only lasted for seven issues. See, part of the appeal in returning to the Superman books was the promise that the inter-connectedness of the titles was gone. But it wasn’t. In fact, there were interlocking sub-plots starting with the first issue of the make-over, which leads me to think I must have been mistaken to believe each Superman title would be a stand-alone set of adventures. (Around the same time as these issues, the Batman titles were genuinely self-contained; I wonder if time and memory has confused the two.) So three months after Kelly took over there was the inter-title cross-over even “Y2K”, a zeitgeist-riding storyline where a future incarnation of Braniac came to destroy Metropolis, only in the end it transformed the city’s architecture into this pseudo-futuristic style (remember when the year 2000 was “The Future”? Ah, how quaint.)
After that was the horribly contrived “Lois Hates Clark” storyline. Without warning, Lois was suddenly cold, and then cruel, to Clark, eventually leaving him. It was a horribly abrupt personality change, especially considering Kelley spent the first three issues of his run creating this wonderful, loving relationship between the two. To do a complete 180 smacked of gimmick. Mercifully, this plot lasted just two month before the other shoe dropped in the revelation that the Lois of the last few issues was actually the Parasite in disguise. But it left a very bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps, if the storyline progressed slowly over time so there was more believability in Lois falling out of love with Clark, it would’ve worked. Instead it just seemed like a ham-fisted storyline done for the shock-value of it. So between that and the fact that once again the storylines were continuing in other titles (titles that I was not collecting this time around), I decide it was better to cut my losses and stop. Fittingly, my last issue was issue 766, which wraps up the Lois-is-mean storyline with Superman dying.
(It also had a fairly cool guest-appearance by Batman. I wasn’t impressed by Kelly narrating the story in Batman’s voice because of the detective-noir narration style felt heavy-handed, but Kelly did a great job in exploring the light/dark dynamic between the two heroes though their dialogue.)
This, of course, doesn’t explain why just three months later I was back again for the “Superman Arkham/Emperor Joker” storyline (issues 769-770). Remember a few paragraphs ago where I indicated that by 1999 I was more-or-less buying comics for the creators and not characters? Well, I lied. Because I was still willing to give an interesting story a shot, even from a title I stopped buying regularly. (Like the poet says, I am large I encompass multitudes.) “Superman Arkham” started out with Superman in Bizarro World—Bizarro was the world’s greatest hero and Superman was locked up in an insane asylum. It sounded just interesting enough to be worth checking out for the one month run of the story (plus, they used a neat concept for the cover art). Action Comics’s part of this series was the final chapter and led—completely unknown by me—into the next event, the “Emperor Joker” storyline, where the Joker gets the power of Mr. Mxyzptlk. So it’s really one giant story in two parts, since the reveal at the end of Arkham was that it was the Joker responsible for the whole thing.
I enjoyed both parts—thanks to Joe Kelly’s knack for comedic writing, there was actual (absurdist) humor in these stories. That said, I don’t think the idea of the Joker wanting to remake the work in his own image really makes sense for that character. The Joker is a psychopathic mass-murderer, and that’s not the usual sort of being Superman deals with. Which explains why you had the fantastical premise of the Joker gaining these incredible powers: it brought the Joker up to Superman’s level. But it only goes so far as you’re willing to believe what a psychopathic murderer would do once he’s omnipotent.
Clearly, none of this made enough of an impression on me to stick around. Having already decided to quit Action Comics, nothing in the “Superman Arkham/Emperor Joker” storylines convinced me it was worth collecting the series just to see which gimmick-storyline the writers would come up with next.
It’s a shame Kelly couldn’t just write a self-contained title. As I mentioned before, those first three issues where Kelly got to play with Superman’s world and build his own little addition to it were enjoyable enough. But it seems that by the year 2000, Superman was less a creative force than a means to an end: the aim was to continue the viability of the commodity (ie: what keeps sales going). Obviously, that’s the purpose of any commercial entertainment property. But by 2000 I was looking for other reasons to keep collecting. Considering that at this point I was just a few years away from stopping my collection, perhaps it was also a sign of my dissatisfaction with super-hero stories as a whole.
I think that about covers things. I know I haven’t talked about the Superman/Wonder Woman dynamic. But this is getting pretty long as is, so let me simply say that if you ever want to hear me compare how Joe Kelly handled the relationship between these two in comparison to how Byrne did it back in Action Comics #600, well, that’s what the comments section is for.
Next Issue: Would you believe we still have a few more issues of Action Comics to go? Join me next time as we see Superman claim the moral high ground against some Authority analogues, and we spend a few more anniversaries with the Big Blue Boy Scout.
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