GRAEME: HOLY CRAP HAVE YOU PEOPLE READ SUPERMAN #701? It’s like JMS took a masterclass in how to annoy me.
LEV: You can sign up for that at the Learning Annex now.
DOUGLAS: I don’t think anyone gets to do the “Superman talks the jumper down” story again unless they can do it better than All-Star Superman #10. Which they can’t.
GRAEME: It’s not just that, it’s the “Yeah, those drug dealers can go and sell drugs elsewhere. As long as MY backyard is safe” bit that really irritates me. THAT’S NOT SUPERMAN. It’s that simple. Superman doesn’t deal with problems by making them someone else’s problem, especially when it’s something like drug dealers. It’s such an insanely off-base idea of who Superman is that it completely stuns me that editorial – or, for that matter, Geoff Johns, who as DC CCO must have seen this early and who gets the character in a way that many execs probably don’t (He’s the one who wrote the great “I’m for everyone” line from that “Superman and The Legion of Super-Heroes” story) – let it go through unchanged. Also, poor Lois: Did Superman really tell her he was leaving her to walk across America with no idea of when he’d be back by phone? It honestly reads as if JMS looked at all those SuperDickery covers and thought, hey, THAT’s the Superman I want to see again.
MIKE: And how did Lois show up in Philly? I forget, where is Metropolis in the United States again? I always considered it NYC and Gotham was Baltimore.
GRAEME: Metropolis is wherever you want it to be. Same as Gotham… I think both are on the East Coast in the comics; I know that Smallville (the TV series) firmly puts Metropolis in Kansas.
DOUGLAS: I believe it’s been established that the DCU’s New York is the “Cinderella City,” the smaller city sandwiched between the bigger and more glamorous Metropolis and Gotham.
MIKE: Are we supposed to believe that Supes wasn’t going to catch the jumper? That was offensive-ish. I felt like I was reading fan fiction. Stick to fixing cars.
GRAEME: That’s another of my problems with the issue: for it to work, Superman has to be… not Superman. The Superman we know and love – or, in many cases, know and don’t have any strong feeling for at all – would catch the jumper no matter what. He wouldn’t give riddles about being a hero to someone who razzes him about walking across America. He wouldn’t tell Lois that he’s leaving for god-knows-how-long in a phone call. Etc., etc…. I think there are some interesting things in this story, but it’s not a Superman story. It has nothing to do with me wanting Superman to be “safe” or “comfortable” or anything like that… I simply don’t want him to be a self-righteous asshole.
EVAN: You know, I thought I was being a little harsh when we talked about JMS’ story in Supes #700. But, now, I don’t think so. It’s like I said last month. He’s clearly too in love with Superman as a symbol. That beat when he’s talking to the jumper and he’s name-checking JFK, Gandhi and John Lennon? C’mon, is that really what that girl needed to hear then? That bit of dialogue doesn’t tell me anything about Kal-El. I It doesn’t tell me anything about how JMS sees Superman. It speaks volumes about how he THINKS we should see him but it doesn’t communicate an understanding from the inside out. All it does is tell me that he’s spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of things Superman should say. But it doesn’t feel natural.
(More on Techland: The Comic Book Club: Superman #700)
DOUGLAS: On reading this issue again–and believe me, it’s like driving the spike in a little deeper every time I do–there are two possibilities for the “jumper” sequence: either 1) it means that JMS has never read All-Star Superman or 2) he’s using it to make his Superman go head-to-head with All-Star Superman and one of its most fondly remembered moments. In which case, he is, as they say, tugging on Superman’s cape. I went back and read the All-Star scene with Regan the would-be jumper, and you know how long that thing is? ONE page. Five panels. (Plus a little bit of context before that.) In contrast, this thing just dithers and dithers and dithers.
One major difference, among many: the All-Star Superman doesn’t just do good, he redeems people, from Regan all the way up to Lex. (Geoff Johns’ Superman doesn’t quite do that as much, but at least he talks about it.) Superman’s not the guy who shrugs his shoulders about Charlie the ’70s Stereotype Drug Dealer and his pals setting up somewhere else (after he’s smoked up the neighborhood by setting the stashes on fire), he’s the guy who’d convince Charlie and company to turn over a new leaf and start an effective neighborhood-watch association, you know?
EVAN: That bit with the drug dealers was so bad. It kinda just showed how ineffectual Superman would be on The Wire.
DOUGLAS: “Got to. This is America, man.”
Also, j’accuse Eddy Barrows of rampant widescreen-effect abuse. Only two pages in this issue have any panels that aren’t the full width of the page. Unfortunately, the story is all about multiple-character talking-heads interaction rather than horizontal movement, so Barrows ends up relying on lots of extreme closeups and extreme long-shots, “dramatically” tilting the angle of view, etc., and it feels like there’s no room to breathe.