Action Comics #900 – Review

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

The Story: Lex Luthor is about to bring fun, love, and joy to all the people of the universe—the crazy part is I am being totally serious right now.

The Review: Say what you like about Superman: he can be overly naïve, overbearingly preachy, arguably antiquated, and a hopeless optimist.  But any character who can support a title through 900 issues is doing something right.  This unassailable milestone is evidence that Superman remains a deeply embedded icon in our culture.  To be rid of him, our society would have to drastically change—and not necessarily for the better, as this issue demonstrates.

Paul Cornell wisely downplays the Big Blue’s return to his original title to finish off his epic Lex Luthor storyline in grand fashion.  In attempting to break down Superman by forcing him to experience the depths of human emotion, Lex reveals his own under-appreciation for humanity.

Superman already knows more about being human than most of us ever will, while Lex’s quest for his own divinization constantly sets him apart from his fellow man.  He squanders his chance to bless the universe with true, eternal bliss and gain ultimate power by his need to irrevocably prove himself superior to Clark Kent, best man of Smallville, of all people.

The grandeur of this plot gets blemished by the constant distractions from the Reign of Doomsday storyline, which seems obviously forced on Cornell.  He tries to accommodate it as best he can by using it as Lex’s “bait” to get Superman to come to him, but even so it comes off a clumsy, ill-conceived, far more superficial plotline (a grim portent of the material we’ll be getting in upcoming issues) in comparison to Superman confronting a godlike Luthor in space.

Action Comics #899 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (writer), Jesus Merino (artist), Brad Anderson (colorist)

The Story: My, those are some big black balls you’ve got there, Lex Luthor.

The Review: It’s been a long, wild journey we’ve had, following Superman’s arch-nemesis on his quest for ultimate power.  He’s faced off against some of the baddest of the baddies in the DCU’s canon of villains; had numerous near-death experiences; and traveled some of the most exotic locales on the planet.  Considering the epic scale of his story so far, it’d be a waste for the conclusion to be anything less than enormous.

Cornell certainly delivers a pretty grand finish, what with an ultimate showdown between Luthor and Brainiac in (deep?) space and the appearance of some Galactus-like entity from a giant Phantom Zone portal.  And you surely can’t say you expected any of what happens in the final pages.  And definitely Cornell has things set up so Superman will already have a huge task at hand when he finally returns to this title.

All very impressive, but to be honest the whole thing comes so out of the blue that it feels a little too convenient somehow.  It’s not just that this cosmic being is entirely brand new, so you had no way of predicting its coming.  Cornell had dropped all kinds of vague clues about the power at stake in Luthor’s quest, but none of them, in retrospect, led very naturally to this creature.  The plot threads don’t really gel together as well as they could have.

Maybe you just get thrown off by the confusing logistics Cornell throws at you.  There’s a lot of re-explaining of past events, like the reason why Luthor plays right into Brainiac’s hands is Robot-Lois injected nano-worms into Luthor’s bloodstream when she treated his head wound six issues ago.  It has the same feeling as when comics characters die and then come back to life, saying, “Well, what really happened is…”  You have to humor it to let the plot unfold.

Action Comics #898 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (writer), Pete Woods (artist), Brad Anderson (colorist)

The Story: Something went severely amiss in Larfleeze and Lex Luthor’s upbringing, as they seriously need to learn to share.

The Review: As far as I know, the guest star is a feature exclusive to television shows and comics.  In television, the guests have pull from their celebrity status, but for comics, the characters themselves have the star power.  As fun as these crossovers can get, more frequently you have cases where the guest character distract from the story at hand, occasionally poaching the spotlight from the title character.

Cornell’s plot device of featuring a new guest villain every issue of his Action Comics run has been notable for using them effectively.  As much personality he brings to their roles, they always serve to reflect or contrast our star character: Gorilla Grodd for Luthor’s intellect, Vandal Savage for his far-reaching ambitions, the Joker for his love of mind games.  This issue, Luthor’s base desires get brought out by Larfleeze’s mutual greed for the energy spheres.

Kudos to Cornell for giving us a Larfleeze who not only singularly pursues whatever’s on his wish list at the moment, but also has a lot more smarts than he usually gets credit for.  He’s savvy to Luthor’s ploys to get the sphere he’s collected, and is remarkably perceptive to when his chain is being jerked around.  On top of this much-needed depth, Larfleeze gets some growth, as his firsthand experience of the sphere teaches him there are a few things even he doesn’t want.

It’s worth mentioning again that Luthor remains the star of this storyline.  His hunger for the Orange Lantern ring he once grasped demonstrates why he got chosen as one in the first place.  But in the end, his view of the big picture of power allows him to resist even the ring’s allure, though not without casualties.  We’ve been avoiding the issue for a while, but Luthor’s purposeful, unrepentant shooting of one of his own serves as a pretty good reminder of why he’s still atrocious as a human being and a villain worthy to be feared.

Action Comics #897 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (writer), Pete Woods (artist), Brad Anderson (colorist)

The Story: It’s the World’s Un-Finest!  Can the world’s greatest mind keep up with the world’s sickest wit?  Yes and no, honestly.

The Review: In the DCU, there can be no two personalities more complex and inscrutable than Lex Luthor and the Joker.  Either one of these on their own can be a nightmare to write; they’re just not motivated by the usual things in life.  You can boil them down to their essences—Luthor, power-hungry, Joker, psychotic—but that’d be missing the incredible richness of their characters.  To serve them best, a writer has to respect their legacies as much as those of their heroic counterparts.

Paul Cornell has certainly proven to be a terrific Luthor-writer, and in this issue he shows his chops in writing a wildly complicated, hideously compelling Joker.  Joker tends to be characterized as more clever than brilliant, but as all the double-talk in his dialogue indicates, there’s definitely a genius lurking behind the veneer of madness.  Cornell does a terrific job letting the killer comic veer randomly between tomfoolery and lucidity, and either way, the Joker sounds pitch-perfect.

The caliber of gags most writers give Joker tend to be groaners of the Wah-wah-wah variety, but his humor in this issue is solidly based on satire.  My favorite bit has to his response to Luthor having the cameras disabled: “And please, those cameras are differently abled.”  This is one of the rare occasions Joker has some genuinely funniness, rather than just black comedy.  And when he sobers up, there’s almost a frightening sense of logic to his twisted views of the world.  You begin to see how he uses his humor to provide a backbone of order to a universe he deems completely nonsensical.  You almost feel something like sympathy toward him, and that’s an accomplishment in itself.

Like Luthor’s encounter with Death, this issue features little action, but intense, thought-provoking dialogue.  What’s brilliant about the repartee between Luthor and Joker is how much information gets exchanged beyond what is explicitly said.  Even though it may seem nothing has happened other than Luthor retrieving yet another black sphere, there are a lot of clues laced throughout Joker’s ramblings about the ultimate mission/challenge/destination Luthor’s headed towards.  Also worthy of note is Robot-Lois’ increasingly inexplicable behavior.  She’s become a kind of Trojan horse for this storyline, and it’s thrilling to speculate what final role she’ll play in Luthor’s grand adventure.