The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1513: Adventures of Superman #600, March 2002

Sorry I've been behind. Getting some stuff ready for the Fan Expo and Fairy Tales festival. I'll try to keep on top of things from here on.

A big one today! Though the series is titled Adventures of Superman, this is actually the original Superman series that debuted in 1939. The title was changed when John Byrne rebooted Superman in the 80s and started up a new eponymous title. It, too, must be coming up on a 1000th issue, though Action got there a little quicker by way of a weekly series for a while.

The last few issues have been parts of larger events, hence my reluctance to write about them. We make our way through "Our Worlds At War," the epilogue of which does deserve a moment's attention. The comic, #596, arrived in stores the day after September 11th, 2001. Chillingly, the second page features a panel of Lex Corps twin towers in ruins, victims of an alien attack. The similarity to the tragedy in New York was chilling. The comic was made returnable, and for a little while there was a ghoulish speculator interest in the issue. These days I think it pulls in about the same as any other issue from this run. Following that was a crossover issue with the "Joker: Last Laugh" event. It was good, but somewhat anticlimactic without the denouement of the main series.

After today's issue, the story becomes much more self contained, as far as I can recall. One of the things that does remain throughout the Super-titles is the problem of Lex Luthor as President. That's the subject of today's story, as it's revealed to Superman that Lex has been missing for three weeks. Superman finds him, sort of, and some very interesting things are revealed about the Man of Steel's nemesis. There's also a lovely retelling of his origin in full-page pin-ups, a fitting tribute to this iconic tale.

Superman's adventures always continue. He'll be around long after any of us are gone. He'll be telling the same kinds of stories, inspiring the same kinds of people, growing more and more legendary as the years, centuries, pass. Ironically, we're going to take a break from them for now. I've recently added some interesting things to the collection, so I'm going to poke about at those, and then we'll come back for another chunk, and I think the superior chunk, of Joe Casey's Superman.

"Once upon a time, a strange visitor came to Earth..."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1507: Adventures of Superman #594, September 2001

I've never been a fan of Doomsday, or his role in the death of Big Blue. Big as the story might have been, and earnest as its writers might have been (watch Louise Simonson talk about it in Secret Origins - she was broken up by this), I've always found this story to be a bit too contrived for my tastes. Granted, it was the early 90s, and comics were very different back then, but to me Superman shouldn't die in a punch-up. That's beneath him. As is this creature.

That said, it's full of beautiful art, and of excellent commentary on the extraordinary measures countries will go to while they're at war, regardless of the cost once peace has been "won."

But it's also the middle of a crossover that I have no interest in following. I think tomorrow's comic is the last part that impinges upon Adventures, so hopefully the alien bad guys will be defeated, and Superman will come out on top.

"Once freed...it was...primal...brutal...now I understand how it  could've done...what it did...to you..."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1506: Adventures of Superman #593, August 2001

I forgot to mention yesterday that we didn't actually skip an issue, jumping from #590 to #592. There was a four part crossover called "Infestation," penned by Marv Wolfman, that I didn't track down as I was grabbing up all of Casey's Superman. I may go back to it, though, as I've recently read some of Wolfman's old Action Comics, and they're really good. And thinking back to Crisis, his work with Superman in that title is also pretty great.

Regardless, we're jumping into another crossover, though I won't be reading too much of this one. "Our Worlds At War" may have seemed an appropriate storyline in the early 2000s (remember, this is pre-9/11), but these days I wonder why we have to have so many stories about interstellar war. I think it reveals a really deep-seated fear that anyone, or anything, that we eventually encounter out in space will be so much like ourselves that we'll inevitably go to war with them. Isn't that depressing?

The crossover delves much more deeply into the issue faced a couple of days ago by the Man of Steel, that of President Luthor. It must irk Superman so much to have to be on the side of his greatest rival, but it also speaks to the idea of the common threat uniting all of humanity. My great fear is that it's only in the face of a world-ending event that we can actually come together as a single people, finally. Though, given the state of climate change, perhaps even such an event isn't enough to bring us together.

Humans really do suck sometimes.

"I vill reduce your alien flesh to protoplasmic slime!"

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!