This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up talking about what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk, Mike Williams, Evan Narcisse and Graeme McMillan discuss Superman #700 and Bart Simpson #54, spoilerishly.
DOUGLAS: Superman #700: not a good comic. The James Robinson/Bernard Chang story is eight pages of obligatory “Superman and Lois missed each other” wrap-up plus a fight scene tacked onto the front of it; the Dan Jurgens story reads like an inventory piece that could’ve been published any time in the past 25 years. And then there’s that Straczynski/Barrows piece, which… let me note a couple of things that don’t work about it on a plot level:
1) The idea seems to be to mirror the Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 thing where somebody challenges the hero for being too out-of-touch with human concerns and he responds by deciding that he’s going to travel across the country to understand those human concerns better. But Superman already has something that’s pretty well established as doing exactly that: he is a newspaper reporter.
2) Not only could the nameless woman who slapped Superman have easily been answered with “yes, and if he hadn’t been off in space, your husband would still be dead, and you would be too,” but I think we’ve seen more than a few “Superman can’t save everyone, and he feels bad about it, but that’s how it’s gotta be” stories over the years. (I recommend Hitman #34, for starters.)
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That said, the preview of Paul Cornell and Pete Woods’ Action does look pretty promising. Perhaps by #900 it’ll even have Superman in it again!
And the best part is that when I downloaded Straczynski’s story on the comiXology app (after the DC app kept crashing), it asked me if I was interested in Irredeemable. In Mark Waid’s words, “you will believe a man can walk.”
MIKE: Meh. Superman loves Lois Lane and Earth. Also, he loves helping Robin do his homework. If I were Superman, I would have gone to New Krypton and never come back. I’m assuming that Kryptonian architecture designed by yellow-sun-influenced engineers would be free of things like roads and mass transit. The landscape would be made for a race of people that were invulnerable and could fly at hypersonic speeds.
I would have made it about a week as Clark Kent, walking through the Planet’s hokey revolving doors. Walking! But I suppose that’s the point they are beating us over the head with here. Superman needs to walk amongst his adopted people. He needs to feel the crumbling infrastructure beneath his feet and really get a whiff of that homeless guy over there. That’s the good stuff.
Now we readers can call DC and ask that one of the towns that Supes visit be our real-life home town? And what, I must ask, is Kal going to do in any one of thousands of suburban towns? How is he going to solve over crowded schools or underfunded hospitals? What is Superman going to do with a local court system backlogged with domestic violence cases and petty drug charges?
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GRAEME: My problem with Superman #700 is that it makes Clark — yes, we’re on first name terms — look like a dick. In the Robinson/Chang story at the start of the issue, Lois is all “I missed you, promise me you’re not going away again for a long time,” and at the end of the JMS/Barrows story, he’s like “Well, time to leave Lois again, this time to find America!” Either story, taken individually, wouldn’t have been that offensive to me — well, I am constantly disturbed by Barrows’ very gummy smiles — but when smooshed together with only a “Robin, guest-starring Superman” story in between (and, yes, I agree, Douglas — it felt very like an inventory story, and not necessarily one done for a Superman book, either), it underlined that Superman hasn’t really been allowed any status quo for quite some time. I get that DC and JMS want to get Superman reconnected with America, and I don’t even think that’s necessarily a bad idea, but this feels too much, too soon, after the last, what, two years of New Krypton stories.
EVAN: JMS’s story bears out my worst fears about his take on Kal-El. He seems just too slavishly devoted to the idea of Superman as symbol. It’s the Bryan Singer problem: if you come at the symbolism too heavy, it just looks embarrassingly insecure. “Hey, everybody! Look how deep Superman is!”
The problem with this approach is that he’s gotta be a character first and I feel the investment isn’t there yet. This story does too little to put us in Superman’s head as to what drives him to make this decision.
DOUGLAS: Meanwhile, over in Bart Simpson #54, we’re getting an “indie cartoonists” issue, with stories by Peter Kuper, Sergio Aragonés, Evan Dorkin and Carol Lay. Kuper’s story is the most effective one here, I think–Bart’s trip into the machine is obviously a homage to the gizmo in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, but is it me or is the final scene a variation on a bit from Marc Hempel’s Gregory? (That’s a comic I never hear anyone talk about any more!) Or are they both variations on something else?
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The Dorkin story is surprisingly bland and unfunny for him, though, and its central gag (video game packages are too hard to open!!!) is Andy Rooney stuff. That Carol Lay piece seems like a premise in search of a functional gag, too.
GRAEME: Bart Simpson was just… odd. The Carol Lay story is about a future chainsmoking Maggie who travels back in time to tell Bart his future? Really? That and the Peter Kuper story just felt off, in a way that the Evan Dorkin and Sergio Aragones stories didn’t. Yeah, I get that the Dorkin story may have felt a little soft compared with some of his usual solo work, but I could see a throughline between, say, Milk and Cheese and this. (The Sergio story was… well, a Sergio story. It didn’t have anything particularly Simpsonsesque about it at all.) While I like the idea of letting “alternative” cartoonists loose on this most mainstream of cartoons, the results were just kind of bland.
DOUGLAS: They’ve done it before a few times, especially in the annual Treehouse of Horror specials. Last year’s was by the Kramers Ergot crew, and was as far over the top as I was hoping this would be. Gilbert Hernandez has done a couple of Simpsons stories, too.
MIKE: I really failed to see the appeal here to anyone of any age or background. This is technically marketed as a children’s title? The first story, where Bart is incapacitated for the majority, came off as a bad trip. Douglas, you know better than I do about references to Chaplin, but if this was an homage it was a love/hate letter to psychedelic drugs.
The one-pager by Sergio immediately transported me back to my childhood where I would read every single inch of any MAD magazine I could get my hands on. Of course, the tiny margin cartoons in that mag were much, much racier than baby Maggie having sandbox adventures. If nothing else, the nostalgia was a nice experience.
Finally, the Comic Book Guy story. This is pure fan service. As the tubby protagonist reenacted various famous pop culture death scenes, I was wondering how many of them would be relevant to a young child? Who is this book for?
DOUGLAS: I suspect the intended audience for Simpsons comics is pretty much the same as the intended audience for the Simpsons TV show–which is to say that it’s meant for adults, but is more or less kid-friendly. And of course the Comic Book Guy preview is fan-service: I don’t think some of it would work on the TV show, but anyone picking this up in a comic book store would be likely to get at least some of the jokes. (And I know I missed some of them.)
MIKE: Didn’t mean to say I didn’t like Comic Book Guy dressing up as a detonating Death Star. Easily my favorite panel of the whole book. Had a very “Be Kind, Rewind” feel to it. What did they call it? Sweding?
EVAN: Like most everybody else, I was disappointed by the Bart Simpson issue, too. I like Peter Kuper’s work a lot but it seemed to be missing the angularity that I usually enjoy. Aragonés always makes me giggle, though, and I thought the manic energy of his line makes a good match for the Simpsons universe.
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