Continental Op
Superman Family
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« Reply #36 on: November 19, 2005, 05:07:46 PM » |
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I can see this will not be a very popular opinion here, but I found the first issue to be a little underwhelming.
I know that nothing could really live up to all the pre-release hype of this series, so I was prepared for that. It wasn’t that I thought it was BAD, either; it’s just that I found so many of Morrison’s writing choices and Quitely’s artistic choices to be too obscure or inappropriate for what the series is supposedly trying to do.
Quitely is a fantastic artist of his kind, I just have a hard time warming up to him as a “dynamic superhero action” artist. That’s not really his style despite his “widescreen” layouts. The closest he comes in that genre was the JLA: EARTH-2 graphic novel, which I did like. But his art style is in a more European comics vein that I don’t think translates as well to the straightforward superhero stuff.
Plus, his anatomy doesn’t appeal so much to my eye, which has been “trained” to accept the 1970s Curt Swan/ Neal Adams model as definitive. That’s not his fault, I guess; it’s mine. As Super Monkey pointed out, the art is all subjective.
The ALL-STAR series was described as using a “classic vision” of Superman calculated to have the maximum appeal to everyone who might be enticed to pick up and read a Superman comic. I don’t know that is what they have achieved here. As I said , many of their stylistic choices seemed too obscure or inappropriate to appeal to a general audience.
It may be my own faults as a reader (although I like to think I can read a comic better than the average “outsider” that ALL-STAR is supposed to attract). But too often I found myself asking “why?” when reading this comic.
<SPOILERS AHEAD>
Why does Lois Lane wear a skirt so short that Britney Spears wouldn’t be seen in it?
Why is Metropolis the kind of unrelatable futuristic neo-city where Jimmy Olsen commutes to work with a JET-PACK and floating anti-gravity BUSES roam nearly deserted streets? (This kind of Metropolis is one of the things I hated most about the Cartoon Network version and the post-2000 Superman comics… despite being a fantasy figure, Superman should live in something closer to the real world!)
Why is Superman’s neck as wide as Lois Lane’s waist? Why does one panel show his body with a torso a third the length of his legs?
Why do ALL African-American males in this world have shaved heads? Why does the guy cleaning up Luthor’s office at the end look EXACTLY like the adult version of the little kid with the dog? Has Quitley only ever seen one black guy?
Why does Lois have brown hair and Perry White have black hair instead of vice versa? Why does Jimmy have that weird tall, spiky hairstyle?
Why is Steve Lombard working at the Daily Planet? In the old days, he was a sportsCASTER, never a writer, and he had no actual talents outside of playing football, engaging in sexual harassment and partying.
It was convenient that the Doctor Whowilly Wonka billionaire guy had a tiny little piledriver capable of exerting 200 quintillion tons worth of force, but WHY would he have such a thing available, and WHAT could he have previously needed it for? Superman has his flying power to keep from being simply driven through the floor by that much pressure, but anything else WOULD be, no?
Why would a U.S. army general, who must have more combat experience than you can shake a stick at, stand there lazily and allow Luthor to choke him?
Why are Willy Wonka… I mean Quintus… and his DNA Chocolate Factory using Solomon Grundy and Bizarro as models for their bio-engineered Oompa Loompas, when such creatures have a history of going on the rampage?
WHY wouldn’t a better chosen “All-Star Superman” team be, oh, perhaps Elliot S! Maggin and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to tear the whole story down with my little nitpicks, even though I probably sound as if I am. I understand that Morrison’s heart is in the right place and I understand what it is that he is tryng to achieve here. Morrison wants to restore some of the reader’s sense of wonder, the rapid introduction of countless pulp science fiction concepts, the coolness factor of an imaginatively limitless Super-mythos,… the kind of stuff that is often mischaracterized and attacked as “Silver Age goofiness”. I’m just not wild about how he’s going about it.
And there WAS a great deal I liked about ALL-STAR SUPERMAN, too. From what little I had to go on in this story, I thought that Morrison’s take on the personalities of Clark and Superman were perfect. He’s the first Superman writer in many years who really seems to get it. His Superman is CONFIDENT. He isn’t an insecure mess who needs Lois or Batman to issue instructions on every problem.
Confidence, minus arrogance, plus a way of just OOZING benevolence, WITHOUT being a naďve man-child, IS Superman to me. Morrison nailed it precisely.
Best of all, Morrison chose a (sort of) endearing clumsiness, instead of an annoying cowardice, to make the Clark personality an effective disguise.
Morrison really does seem to be steeped in Superman’s rich history and is mining it for inspiration without engaging in pointless rewrites of what was done better by others. I couldn’t help but think that some of the dialogue sounded as if it WAS straight out of Kirby’s DNA Project stories (“She’s one of our SENSITIVES—genetically attuned to ALL life!”). Quintis vowing to continue Superman’s legacy brought to mind an old Leo Dorfman story of the 70s, where scientists of the future kept cloning new replacement Supermen as each one died in action. Luthor’s water rights scheme was a tribute to Gene Hackman’s real estate swindler in the SUPERMAN movie. And his fake reformation plot was no doubt inspired by Jerry Siegel’s original “Death of Superman” imaginary tale.
So you see my feelings are somewhat mixed. Maybe they will change as the next issues gradually come out and I get more used to the Morrison / Quitley approach. Right now I give an A-minus for effort and a B-minus for execution. That is not meant to take anything away from anyone else’s enjoyment of the series. I am glad new Superman material, here and in INFINITE CRISIS, is finally generating some excitement.
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