Action Comics, #583

Now that I’ve reveled in Superman’s first story, let’s flash-forward forty-eight years later, to 1986 and read the last.

Continuity is the boon and the bane of superhero comics.  There’ll be plenty of occasions for this blog to ruminate on how stories were created, then contradicted or ignored, then attempted to be reconciled only to have those reconciliations be contradicted, ignored, or further reconciled. These revisions and the collateral damage they cause are part and parcel of reading comics, and it can drive you crazy trying to figure it all out. But I think was something elegant in DC’s mandate that, rather than reconcile everything, they would just pretend it never happened. They saw the futility in untying the Gordian knot and decided to simply slice through it.
 

In 1986, DC Comic’s superhero universe was undergoing a radical change. The editorial powers-that-be had decided that 50 years of stories had weighed down its characters with complex back-stories that prevented their comics from attracting new readers. They decided to streamline the shared universe by literally re-writing history, and give their major characters a bit of a face-lift. The series Crisis on Infinite Earths started the ball rolling in 1985, and when that was finished the DC editors turned their attention to their individual properties, starting with Superman. Mid-1986, John Byrne was about to become the main creative force behind Superman, and he planned to update the premise, re-starting Superman’s story from the beginning, and the previous 48 years of Superman stories would no longer be considered stories that “actually” happened.

But before the final cut was made, Julius Schwartz, then-editor of the Superman comics (Action Comics and the eponymous Superman) decided to bid farewell to everything that had come before. If the Golden and Silver Age Superman was about to end, Schwartz wanted to give him a send-off worthy of those stories that entertained and inspired so many people. He originally wanted Jerry Siegel to write it, seeing how it only fitting that the man who wrote the first story would be the one to write the last, but the legal battles Siegel had with DC and parent company Time Warner made that impossible. So Schwartz went instead with Alan Moore. For the art he chose the legendary Curt Swan, perhaps the most revered Superman artist of the Silver Age of Comics, with inks by George Perez and Kurt Schaffenberger. 

Together they created “What Ever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” and it told the story of Superman’s last days; his final battle with his most dangerous enemies, and the end of Superman himself. It was actually presented in two separate comics: stating in Superman #423 and concluding in Action Comics #583. Since I’m reading my collection alphabetically, I’m going to ignore part one and focus only on part two, which sees Superman and his closest friends (Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White) holed up in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, waiting for the final attack of Superman’s deadliest foes: Lex Luthor (controlled by Braniac), Kryptonite Man, and the Legion of Super-Villains. 

In many respects, the story is told in a way very similar to the “dark and gritty” type of story-telling that would begin to take over the comic industry. As this issue opens, the sense of desperation is palpable; when Superman is afraid of something, you know you’re in trouble. As the bodies starts to pile up, you start to wonder if Moore’s story is just an excuse to let his sadistic side run wild. But Swan’s pencling style, so rooted in a time when comics were primarily for a younger audience, off-sets the doom and gloom of Moore’s scripts. It helps root the story in a specific time and place, albeit one whose time and place are gone. To have the story drawn like the old era while written in the style of the new makes perfect, if slightly incongruous sense. And, lest you think I’m criticizing Moore for his body count, let me say that, as someone who no real connection with the supporting characters of Superman’s world, I felt Moore’s script handles each hero’s death with gravitas and even dignity, and I felt the loss their deaths are supposed to have. 

I do think the story suffers a little with the introduction of Mr. Mxyzptlk. Firstly because I don’t think Swan was up to the challenge of rendering what Moore had in mind for the finale. I don’t mean this to be a knock on Swan’s talents. Every artist has their own strength, and Swan’s was rendering the wonder of an earlier time. Moore’s idea of a horrific, blood-thirsty, five-dimensional being is a concept suited to artists with a penchant for dark fantasy, not Silver Age whimsy. Given that we already spent twenty pages watching villains of equally benign design wreak their havoc, Swan’s rendering of the “real” Mxyzptlk is a bit anti-climatic. But Alan Moore was walking a fine line, paying homage to a different era of storytelling while using his  deconstructionist approach to heroes to make a larger statement about Superman and everything he represented. If he loses his balances a bit at the climax before recovering for the denouement it’s not an egregious fault. And the story does end on a strong note. After all the death and sadness, the story ends happily, with a smile and a wink, and a fitting farewell to the past. 

The creators referred to this story as “an imaginary story”, a reference to the Silver Age tradition of writing stories that took place separate from the “real world” that Superman and his cast of characters inhabited. There is a definite irony in being told that a story doesn’t count. In opening “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”, Alan Moore wrote: “This is an imaginary story . . . aren’t they all?”  And of course they are. Just as “Whatever Happened…” exists in its own world, regardless of what came before it after it, so do all stories.  This is the larger point Moore was getting at. Just because someone decides a certain story “doesn’t count” doesn’t discount that story. Continuity, or a lack of it, doesn’t rob a story of its poignancy and meaning.

Up Next: We continue with Action Comics, first for a 50^th anniversary celebration featuring a little lip-locking between Supes and a certain Amazon with a bondage fetish, then ruminate on the pros and cons of a weekly anthology title.