Action Comics, #601

So here’s a hypothetical for you: You publish the longest running comicbook in America. It features one of the most popular/recognizable fictional characters of the 20^th Century. You’re about to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of both the comic and the character, and you want to do something to commemorate the occasion, beyond a single “special anniversary” issue. What would you do?

If your answer is: “I’d turn the comicbook into a weekly anthology featuring second- and third- (and occasionally fourth-) tired characters and put the previous main attraction in a two-page back-up,” well, you were obviously working at DC Comics in 1988.

 Comicbooks started out as anthologies. When Action Comics came out in 1938, Superman was just one of a handful of stories that filled the pages. The idea of a comicbook featuring only one character wouldn’t come out until 1939 (not-so-coincidentally, that title was Superman). Anthology titles sold well for decades, into the ‘70’s. By the ‘80’s, though, the popularity of anthologies was on the way out. So it’s quite the mystery to me as to why DC would turn one of their legacy titles into a dying breed.

In the accompanying text piece to this issue, editor Mike Gold states:

In Action Comics Weekly we don’t have to worry about giving you a mere eight pages a month. We can give that to you each and every week . Given our weekly release pattern, we can cut down or even dispense with recapping. We assume you will remember what happened last week; if you can’t, we have failed in our primary task of providing an interesting story.

I do admit, there is an interesting idea there. If you take a monthly comic’s 32 pages, break it down into four-eight page sections, you can basically tell four, five, even six comics worth of stories in the space of one month.  That’s not a bad deal. And, as was often the case with anthologies, you could experiment with different stories and characters that wouldn’t normally be risked as a monthly series. 

But at $1.50 a pop (double the cost of a normal comic, even though the title did include double the normal page count) it was prohibitively more expense than reading other titles. It also didn’t feature any particularly popular characters. Oh, sure, the first issue’s lead story is a Green Lantern story, but there’s a reason why the casting of the title character of the next Superman movie makes headlines and the casting of Green Lantern went to Ryan Reynolds. Despite boasting some very good creators, none of the writers or artists on the title were exceptionally popular, so there was very little to draw the interest of people that would otherwise not care about, say,  a new Secret Six story.

(If only they had included Man-Bat, like the previous issue did. Because you can never go wrong with Mat-Bat. He’s a man! Who’s also a bat! Yes, I’m making this joke now because I forgot to do it last time.)

But let’s get to the stories themselves: the first features Green Lantern, and it relied heavily on stories that began in his recently cancelled title.  It’s written by James Owsley who would be better known, ten years later, as Christopher Priest and write such well-regarded but little-read series like Black Panther  and Quantum and Woody. Priest/Owsley is a phenomenal writer, but this story does him no favors. It starts with the villainess Star Sapphire dismembering an effigy of Hal Jordan and ends with Star Sapphire dismembering Katma, ex-the wife of Jon Stewart.  

I have problems with this, if nothing else than because of the rapid procession of events. In not quite two pages, Star Sapphire appears in the apartment she knows Hal Jordan is residing in, finds Katma instead of Hal, and in three strokes she slices Katma to death and leaves. Then Hal returns only to find his friend Jon crying over his wife’s corpse and laying the blame at Hal’s feet. Which is a fair-enough plot but, as someone who knows nothing of the past history of Star Sapphire or Katma, none of this means anything to me. Katma’s earlier appearance in the story is mainly to complain about having too many housemates, so to say her death lacks gravitas is putting it mildly. And while a senseless death can have its purpose in a story, this senseless death is purely to provide conflict between Hal and Jon, which seems like a horribly cruel way to go about it. Also, to have Jon blame Hal strikes me as one of the worst “innocent bystander dies from someone hoping to kill someone else” cliché’s in the book. Intellectually I understand what’s supposed to be taken from all this: in this story, Hal, a normally by-the-book guy, flies to Apartheid-era South Africa to take some diamonds from an abandoned diamond mine so he can make a little cash. It’s pretty obvious that Katma’s death is the “cost” of Hal’s flirtation with dubious morality, but because it’s so blatantly obvious, it’s hard to believe the moment.  

Ironically, while the death fails to create an impact in terms of the plot, it is very effective visually. What’s so remarkable about it is that we don’t really see Katma’s death. The murder is shown in close-up, with Star Sapphire swing her arm down, the up, then down again, and Katma’s screaming “EEEEEEE” under-imposed behind Star Sapphire’s body. In the final panel we see Sapphire walking out the door, glancing behind her to gloat over her handiwork while Katma’s hand sticks up in the foreground, blood dripping off the finger tips. It’s actually a wonderfully executed scene, because it leaves the death squarely in the imagination of the reader. That’s probably why this scene is so visceral to me—what I’m imagining when I think of someone being eviscerated to death is undoubtedly more memorable than anything artist Gil Kane could have drawn. But despite the technical proficiency, the story itself only leads up and leaves you with a senseless death that has no resonance. (Although I’m sure the legions of Katma fans will disagree with me. All six of them.)

Senseless violence seems to be a theme in this comic. The next story, about a third-rate vigilante called Wild Dog, is even more deplorable in its use of violence. The whole story is this: a radical group takes over a city council session. Wild Dog sneaks in, kills the radicals and leaves. I was actually appalled that this was the plot of the story. After six pages of semi-interesting build-up (the police fret over how to defuse the crises, we watch as Wild Dog sneaks into the building), all we get is a mass-murder by the supposed (anti-)hero. There’s no characterization here—hell, Wild Dog himself has no dialogue in this issue—and the tension is moderate at best. He apparently kills simply because he can. The sole purpose of this story seems to be the thrill of senseless violence. I know “grim’n’gritty” was all the rage in the late ‘80’s, but this seems gratuitous and pointless even by the standards of the day. At least Star Sapphire had a a reason, however twisted, for her murder.

The third story, featuring the Secret Six, is an improvement only in so far as the senseless death occurs to kick off the story, as opposed to being the story. The original team was introduced in a short-lived series in the 1960’s, so I was fairly confused as the story simultaneously reunited the original Secret Six team while also bringing together a whole new one. But what really stuck with me was that cold open: two girls trying to get home from school during an acid rain storm. One girl does not make it. In one panel we see her lying face down on the ground as the acid rains falls on her;  two panels later, we see her skeleton as the acid rain continues to fall. It’s a shocking moment, and it would almost be tragic if it isn’t so absurd to think of acid rain being that acidic (though to be fair: in 1988 that was the slippery slope people argued). It may be the only memorable moment in the story, but as memorable moments go, it’s pretty damn effective.

I'm amazed at the level of violence in these stories. Not that I’m about to launch into some tirade over the affect violence has on kids; obviously reading these stories when I was 13 didn’t turn me into an uncaring sociopath. I think I’ve made it clear that each death is handled in different ways and provokes different reactions based on each stories context. But there’s definitely an undercurrent of desensitivity about all this, that these stories were bundled together and  nominally aimed at a fairly young audience (no “for mature readers” label on this comic, unlike other “for older readers” titles that DC was publishing at the time). I can’t help but wonder if any of this crossed Mike Gold’s mind as he oversaw this issue. I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been done, but I think it raises questions I doubt this comic was intended to ask.

The rest of the stories--a two-page Superman strip, purposely meant to evoke the old-style comic strips of a few decades ago, a Deadman story, and a Blackhawk story—are less violent, but also less interesting. I couldn’t tell you what happened even after I read them (although the Blackhawk story gets points for taking place in a Japanese brothel). It’s not that they’re bad, but they’re just not particularly interesting. They rely on a reader’s interest in the character more than making the story itself interesting. Of course, part of that is due to the fact that these stories can only tell so much in eight-pages, but most of these stories read like someone took a 32 page story and just handed in the first quarter and made the last page a cliffhanger.  

Given all this, it really isn’t a surprise Weekly lasted 42 weeks before joining the dust-bin of noble failures. After a month or so off to give the new creative team some lead time, Action Comics dropped the Weekly, returned Superman to the forefront and resumed a monthly schedule, which continues to this day. Not that I stuck around long enough to read it. I picked up the first issue of the new format, probably for the sole reason that, if the weekly format was a success, the first issue would someday be worth money. As it turned out, all I got out of it was a pathological fear of acid rain.

Up Next: We continue with Action Comics, I promise to break this vicious cycle at last and review more than one issue.  So I’ll cover Clark Kent revealing his identity to Lois, Superman battling a homicidal remnant of Krypton, and semi-random alien invasion of Earth #67,325,774 all in one entry. Can it be done? Well, if you ask me, this looks like a job for. . . .