The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1505: Adventures of Superman #592, July 2001

It was quite a shock when Mike Wieringo died in 2007. My main exposure to his work had been his extremely (ha! pun!) brief time illustrating Alan Moore's Youngblood. That title's link to Supreme made it stand out for me, though his art certainly grabbed my attention as well. On his Wikipedia page, Wieringo notes that his philosophy behind his art is to keep things fun. And his art certainly does this.

One of the ways of discerning a great comic from a merely good comic, or a great artist from a good one, is to look at backgrounds. While the focus of the story is always the characters, the actions they're undertaking, those characters and actions are not, for the most part, the only things happening in the shared world. Unless, I suppose, it's one of those Flash stories where he's moving really fast and no one else appears to be doing anything.

When we look at the backgrounds in this comic, be they Metropolis after the EMP or Jimmy Olsen's apartment, there is something going on. There is acknowledgement from the creative team that the main character is not the only character in the world, even if they are the focal character in a panel. I truly appreciate this. There's a lot of talk about realism in superhero comics, mostly these days from Zack Snyder, but I don't think realism has to have anything to do with grittiness, necessarily. Sometimes it has to do with acknowledging that a world is a constantly moving place with many moving parts. It's seeing those parts, the background bits that readers, were they characters, are really more likely to be involved in. If the superhero (and I dispute this) is really wish-fulfillment, the background action is the reality upon which the wish is founded.

One other thing. I'm not going to put a sentence in today, since the one I want to use really needs the panel with it. I know it's perhaps unintentional, but doesn't it look like Clark's about to wake up Strange Visitor by grabbing her ass? And from her reaction in the next panel, I'm not sure I'm wrong!