Action Comics 1-19, 0
DC Comics
Grant Morrison, Rags Morales, and various
Writer Morrison reboots Superman as part of DC’s line-wide relaunch.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to reboot continuity, and in 2011 DC Comics nailed the wrong way. Batman and Green Lantern were seemingly unaffected by a universal reset, even though all their friends started from scratch. There were constant allusions to past events, but nobody seemed to be clear on what actually happened in the past. In a couple of cases, characters have already been re-rebooted. It’s a mess. But the one thing that made it look like some thought had gone into the reboot was the new Action Comics. Not only was the book that launched Superman starting over with a new first issue after seventy years and more than nine hundred issues, but it was in the hands of writer Grant Morrison.
Since the late 80s, Morrison has been one of the most creative voices in mainstream comics. He’s resurrected long-dead properties and provided defining stories for some of DC’s biggest characters. Recently, he wrote the twelve-part All-Star Superman, which I’ll point to as one of the best Superman stories ever. Stripping the Superman mythology down to only the basic elements that anybody in the world can identify, All-Star is an absolute gem. But with Action, instead of shedding extraneous continuity, Morrison would be establishing the new continuity. The premise was that Action was set in the past and detailed the early days of the rebooted version of Superman.
Having Morrison establish continuity for the company’s flagship character was a potentially risky proposition. He is, and I mean this as a compliment, a weird dude. He’s the guy who, over the course of a lengthy run on various Batman books, established that every Batman story is in continuity, even the ones that contradict one another. He turned Wile E. Coyote into a Christ figure and wrote himself into his last issue of Animal Man to apologize to the lead.
He’s written two of DC’s big summer crossovers, which are usually events where creativity goes to die. One of them involved an incursion into the 853rd Century, a tyrant sun, and a baffling time loop. The other had Batman shooting an evil god with the idea of a bullet, collapsing realities, an anti-matter vampire, and Superman saved the multiverse with music. He leaves behind great ideas for other writers to exploit, but they tend to lay fallow. (His X-Men run was retconned the month after he left the book.) He’s not one of those writers who breaks all the toys on their way out, but it seems like nobody wants to directly follow up on any of his ideas, so they just leave them to sit.
Sure enough, what Morrison ultimately did was deliver a treatise on just who Superman is, and he tried to preserve as much of the Man of Steel’s weird continuity as he could possibly cram in. Opening five (or so) years ago, we have a young Clark Kent, just starting to get into the superhero game. His costume consists of jeans and a Superman t-shirt (and yes, there is an explanation for why t-shirts with the Superman logo exist for him to wear). He’s got the personality and power set of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s original creation. Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. And that’s it. The heat vision hasn’t happened yet; he can’t even really fly. Just like in 1938. And he’s got the scrappy social crusader outlook of the earliest Superman stories, back when he spent more time roughing up slumlords and reckless drivers than fighting killer robots.
Morrison’s never one to pass up tapping into the zeitgeist, so his earliest issues play Superman as an inspirational Occupy type. He’s there for the downtrodden, motivating them to stand up against a corrupt upper class. Provocative, especially in 2011, but the fact is that Superman was a New Deal Democrat at his introduction and arguably a Socialist. (Not that I want to have that argument, because that seems like the most boring thing.) But the intent is clear – Morrison is building that long-ago characterization into modern continuity. (And since, like it or not, the Smallville theme song is a thing that happened, one of the first lines of the first issue is a person calling out “Somebody save me!”.)
The first arc rolls in the characters we all know – there’s Lois Lane, whose marriage to Clark has been retconned straight to hell, and Jimmy Olsen. The two of them seemingly defy anything more than cosmetic attempts to update them. That’s what happens when you tie a character’s supporting cast up in newspaper publishing. The Daily Planet sticks out like a sore thumb, but Morrison makes it charming. Perry White’s beloved paper seems like a stubborn old SOB, ignoring the collapse of the industry. Superman has so many outdated elements built into his backstory, but it would seem wrong to replace them. (Of course, the non-Morrison written Superman had Clark Kent quitting his job at the paper to, sigh, become a blogger.)
Lex Luthor hits the scene early, and Morrison tries to use the best elements of his past characterization, which is to say he’s mostly the animated series version: a beloved but corrupt businessman. His time as a mad scientist is gone, as are his years as the President. (Though I wouldn’t have minded if they went back to old-timey Silver Age Luthor who was arrested so often that he never bothered changing out of his prison uniform. That will never fail to delight me.) The best non-Joker villain in comics hits the ground running with the benefit of hindsight. Instead of the original “Superman made me bald” justification for being a terrible person, he begins as a guy who won’t trust an alien (in early issues, he calls Superman “it” instead of “he”) and can’t deal with the fact that there’s somebody who’s better than he is.
But Luthor doesn’t dominate the book, and in fact, only appears sporadically in Morrison’s run. He’s got 70 years of continuity to invoke, so Lex has to step aside. Oddly, Luthor hasn’t appeared anywhere else since the reboot, so his role in the modern-day DC Universe is strangely undefined. And Lois Lane has been marginalized so much that her only real contribution to the New 52 (ugh) is introducing her boyfriend and then hanging out in the background.
Over the course of 20 issues (which includes a zero issue, because comics), Morrison takes Kal-El on a rapid-fire journey through his revised history, doing his best to call back every era. The Legion of Superheroes stop by from the 31st Century, Krypto fights the Phantom Zone criminals, Superman inspires a man to don armor and become Steel. And in the final issues of his run, the storytelling jumps through time to establish as many landmarks as possible. The death of the Kents, an incursion from the Fifth Dimension, even Superman’s death at the hands of Doomsday. Yes, that 90s sales ploy survived a reboot of history, so intent was Morrison to preserve everything he could.
Overall, it’s not as successful as All-Star Superman or even Morrison’s nearly completed run on the Batman titles. Part of it comes from the way that the “New 52” universe is still so poorly-defined. At the time, Superman was appearing in three books and didn’t seem to be the same person in any of them. That’s not Morrison’s fault, and it’s less of a problem reading his run in isolation. It also hurts that the compressed time frame means that everything is happening at more or less the same time, so Steel is inspired by a Superman who’s been around for maybe a couple of weeks, and it has the unfortunate effect of making everything seem exactly as important as everything else. It’s better than Smallville, which made Green Arrow serve as Clark Kent’s inspiration, but it robs Superman of a little of his in-universe status.
Like many of DC’s relaunched titles, Action suffers a bit in the art deparment. Most of it is quite good, and the majority of the issues are drawn by Rags Morales. Morales is talented, and he draws some great superhero material (his Hourman series from the 90s remains close to my heart), but he doesn’t seem to be able to convey some of Morrison’s weirder ideas. Some artists are a perfect fit for Morrison’s non-linear “this is a thing that’s impossible to convey visually but give it a shot” style. Frank Quitely, Chris Burnham, Doug Mahnke, Cameron Stewart – these are artists who make a meal of Morrison’s scripts. Morales does a great job with the early issues, including some excellent emotional scenes, but once we get into the five-dimensional war that wraps things up, he seems to be struggling.
More problematic are the fill-in artists – to keep the book on schedule, many issues have pages completed by other artists trying to ape Morales’ style. In other cases, entire issues are drawn by other artists. It’s a solid line-up, but it does hurt the overall presentation. At times, multi-part stories were broken up by fill-in issues. On the one hand, it’s nice to have Morales draw all three parts of a three-part story. But it’s weird to have a completely unrelated issue stuck in between parts two and three, a problem only compounded in the collections. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it can be distracting.
Of course, it’s those breaks in the story that provide some of the best moments. I’m all for Superman fighting Brainiac to liberate a tiny Metropolis from a bottle. This is, in fact, awesome. But what sticks with me is the issue about Krypto in the Phantom Zone. When Superman frees his dog from the interdimensional prison, resurrects him, and then tells Krypto he’s a good boy, I sob like a grieving widow. I can’t even tell you how happy I am that Superman’s dog from Krypton is in continuity. It’s a nice addition that means that despite other writers trying to make Superman edgy, he still has a Super-dog that he loves very much.
Another of those interlude issues is something that I still can’t believe DC published. Not only does it introduce parallel universes into their streamlined New 52, issue 9 has an Obama-esque President Superman meeting an alternate version of Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen. These dimension hoppers create the idea of Superman, but need help to bring him into existence (“Our first attempt lived for twenty-five glorious minutes. Not a single second of his brief life was wasted, as he used it to articulate a code of ethics so pure and simple and good we all wept. Ten minutes later, none of us could recall a single word he’d said.”) The executives at Overcorp help them bring their creation to everlasting life, in exchange for all the rights to Superman. (“We’re taking all the risks.”) The result is a twisted and damaged Superman who destroys his creators in the service of Overcorp.
See, at the time of publication, DC was involved in ongoing litigation with the heirs of Joe Siegel over the ownership of Superman. And there’s one of their flagship titles with a story that identifies DC as the bad guys and sides with Superman’s creators. I don’t know if they didn’t want the publicity of angering Morrison by spiking the story or if nobody in the editorial office is good at reading between the lines, but they published a comic indicting them for exploiting Siegel and Shuster’s creation at the cost of the men behind it.
(Sidenote: I believe that the entire New 52 reboot was just a smokescreen to update Superman and remove as many of the legally contested elements as possible. Everybody has a stupid costume now because getting rid of the red trunks weakens the Siegel estate’s case. This is just my theory, you understand.)
On the one hand, these are some of the best comics that DC has published since the relaunch. But on the other, it’s impossible not to hold Morrison to a higher standard. His previous long-form work with Superman was a legitimate classic, which make it at bit of a disappointment when his follow-up is only the third-best Superman run of the last 25 years. That’s not exactly fair, and if you divorce Action from any expectations created by All-Star Superman and just enjoy it, what you get is a celebration of Superman.
The final arc ties together all of the seemingly unrelated plot elements and spells out just who Superman is now. All of the characters introduced have a role to play, and not only does Superman win (not a spoiler), but he needs the help of humanity to do it. It’s a concept that always works, and it’s one that Morrison has revisited from time to time. His acclaimed JLA run ends with everybody on Earth getting super powers and using them to help Superman defeat the Anti-Sun, and All-Star Superman is ultimately about a flawed world’s attempts to replicate the one person who never let anybody down.
Morrison’s Superman is an inspirational figure who makes the world better simply by existing. And no matter what other writers may do with the rebooted Superman (and it’s been pretty dire so far), we still have the Superman of Action Comics to inspire the world.
