Action Comics #14 – Review

By: Grant Morrison (story), Rags Morales (pencils), Mark Propst (inks), Brad Anderson (colors)

The Story: Is the god among men ready to face the legions of heaven?

The Review: Like a lot of people, I imagine, I was immediately struck by the covers to this issue.  You have Superman assailed by a flock of angels—with wings and togas and flaming swords, the whole deal.  How can you look at that and not think, What the what? or some more vulgar equivalent?  That there, my friends, is the very thing that gives Morrison a big name among comic book writers: an unwavering commitment to the wondrously strange.

As it turns out—spoiler alert—these angels actually represent the Multitude, which has laid waste to various worlds, rebuffed only once by Jor-El of Krypton, and now targeting Earth.  True to any Morrison concept, the Multitude requires a great deal of abstract imagining on your part, for it is “all one thing—a single weapon with countless points aimed at us from a higher, 5th dimension.”  That’s comparatively tame when you consider some of the truly crazy ideas seen in other Morrison projects, but nonetheless, a worthy challenge for Superman.