Action Comics #4 – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: Man of Steel, meet Man in Steel.

The Review: I’ve become a bit wary of DC’s backup and co-features over time.  The fact they hang on to a bigger, stronger storyline definitely poses some drawbacks.  Only rarely do they have a charm and intrigue of their own.  More frequently, they either serve as dead weight or lackluster sideshows to the main event.

Sholly Fisch’s “Steel” backup leans more towards the latter.  It doesn’t break out John Henry Irons by any means, nor does it offer much of a realized identity.  Fisch relies too much on obvious beats (“It wasn’t until after my parents died that I finally understood why they chose my name.  They wanted me to grow up to be like John Henry.”) to flesh out John’s narrative, and repeats them to the point of embarrassing predictableness (“I’m a steel-driving man!”).

It’s a problem all these smaller features run into, sooner or later; with such limited space, writers feel the pressure to tell their stories rather than show them.  For all of John’s quirks (including a genuinely odd fixation with scientists who play bongos), he does little more in this issue than take down a second-tier villain so Superman can handle the real enemy at hand.  Besides rather admirable art from Brad Walker, this backup is mostly a forgettable “bonus.”

As for the real meat of this issue, Grant Morrison makes good on the series’ title and delivers plenty of action.  The animated mechas from last issue, dubbing themselves “Terminauts,” don’t go out of their way to harm people as their Kandorian counterparts did, but their very presence creates quite a bit of chaos in Metropolis anyway, and that’s before the city gets shrunken and bottled up by an entity with centipede limbs and a fondness for pairing pink with green.

Action Comics #3 – Review

By: Grant Morrison (writer), Rags Morales (penciller), Rick Bryant (inker), Gene Ha (guest artist), Brad Anderson & Art Lyon (colorists)

The Story: Corrupt people rabidly spouting nonsense on TV—what will fiction think of next?

The Review: Anybody who’s read much of Superman has wondered this question at some point: which is the real alter-ego, Superman or Clark Kent?  For most superheroes, their secret identity serves as a mere cover for their vigilantism; their true selves emerge when they spring into action.  For a while now, interpretations of Superman have gone the opposite route.  When Clark slips on those tights and spit-curls his hair, he’s still Clark at heart, only more so.

In this issue, we spend most of our time with him out of costume, getting to know him beyond the proletariat grandstanding he does when he’s got his cape on.  If anything, Clark the man is even more stridently principled than Clark the Superman.  As a citizen, his powers can’t come into play, so his indignation becomes more hot and vocal: “You need to be the cop you wanted to be when you were a kid…  Back to cop school, guys!”

It makes perfect sense that at this younger segment of his life, Clark would be rasher, bolder, and more competitive, all of which makes him a more compelling figure now than the endearing but slightly straight-laced reporter of DC past.  You just relate to him more, like when he says in exasperation, “Aliens on the news!  This is what I’m saying…”  If you’re a reader who finds the media at large a mind-boggling place to be these days, you know what Clark means.

Actually, that line builds upon a mystery from last issue, namely how much Superman knows about his origins.  Judging from his scoffs at the sensational reportage of “space monsters,” he really seems to have no clue.  This, of course, explains why he demonstrates such a singularly human lack of self-restraint in his temperament, and why he has such passionate, folksy ideals.  Once he learns the truth, he’ll have to re-evaluate both these qualities, and it may be rough, especially since the public negativity has him already doubting this whole Superman thing.