Action Comics #9 – Review

By: Grant Morrison (story), Gene Ha (art), Art Lyon (colors)

The Story: This is a president who can honestly say “Yes, I can” to just about any situation.

The Review: It’s a fact that a lot of people had high hopes and expectations for this series, not the least because Morrison had writing duties.  This was the same man who did wondrous stuff with our hero in the now semi-required reading, All-Star Superman.  When you think of the truly awe-inspiring ideas that story contains—arm-wrestling with Atlas, solving a Sphinx’s riddle, the intelligent black sheep of Bizarro World—you have ample reason to expect the same here.

Thus far, however, much of what Morrison has written has been functional, but lacking the inspiration he demonstrated before.  The stories have been either weirdly straightforward or just straight-up weird, failing to hit that perfect balance of imagination and accessibility we enjoyed in All-Star, not to mention the sheer energy you felt (and still feel) in the former work.  Mostly, it feels like Morrison’s been scraping his brain for enough leftover ideas to cobble together a story.

So it is with pleasure and relief to find this issue bucks that trend.  In what is quickly becoming a great week for parallel universe stuff, we get to revisit the Earth of black Superman, AKA President Calvin Ellis, whom we first (?) met in the last issue of Final Crisis.  At the time, he seemed almost like a gag personified, a way to poke fun at real-life President Obama’s heroic image and perhaps make an indirect bit of commentary about race in comics.

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Best of the past week: American Vampire #26 – This issue was a real treat.  For one thing, it introduced me to a wonderful fill-in artist in Roger Cruz.  I’d love to see more of his work after this AV stint is finished.  Seriously….how is Vertigo able to continually find guys of this caliber to fill in when most comic series are only able to get a B-lister (at best)?  The story is also really compelling.  Scott Snyder’s story about a black vampire in 1950’s Alabama has just enough depth and complexity to be interesting if you scratch the surface, but not require you read the comic 10 times and still be confused or have to wait 5 years for the pay-off.  Runner-up: FF #17 (for accomplishing the rare feat of making me laugh at a comic book).