The New 52 is DC Comics latest experiment, doing what they are calling a “Soft re-boot”. Basically they’ve developed selective memory, discarding certain elements of their Superheroes history and keeping the stuff they like. This is nothing new, of course, fans of comics, films and television series have an amazing ability to block out the bits they don’t like from their mind. (The Naked Now didn’t happen, do you hear me? It didn’t happen.)
To be honest, it’s a mixed bag and I can’t help but read Superman #1 and wonder if what they should have done was to either just tell a new origin story or carry on from the fantastic Superman: Secret Origins. Calling your comic #1 does suggest it’s a beginning and as someone who doesn’t read a huge amount of Superman, I couldn’t help but feel lost, like I had jumped into the middle of a story. Why was the Daily Planet building being demolished? Why was the paper now under a new owner? Since when has Lois Lane worked in television? Isn’t she suppose to be a newspaper reporter? Why is there so much emotional baggage attached to these characters when it says #1 on the cover.
Oh, the cover. Take a look at it:
Every New 52 comic I talk about will be getting a bonus point added to the non-existent scores for getting rid of the silly and outdated underwear-on-the-outside look. If my life was a film, Ode to Joy would have started playing when I looked at that cover. But then I looked closer...he’s wearing armour! If there’s one superhero who should never need to wear armour, it’s Superman. You know, the Man Steel. The one whom bullets bounce off of.
Inside the comic, I found things to be very wordy. There’s nothing worse in a comic when a writer feels the need to fill every panel with words. A good writer knows when to shut up and let the artist tell the story. A good writer will know to take a red pen to the first draft to trim the fat and tighten up the dialogue. I am far from a professional comic book writer, but I’ve read enough good comics in my time to notice flabby writing. Even I couldn’t help but edit it.
Click for a larger image:
Superman #1, page 3
Let’s go through it panel by panel:
- Panel one has the Mayor finish up a two page narrative about the Daily Planet. I’ve scored out “As Mayor of Metropolis” because it clearly says “Mayor Rob Morrisroe on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. There is no need for repetition. The Mayor then says “I take great pleasure in introducing a man who needs no introduction.” That’s just plane lazy writing. I cut out the second half of that sentence and added it to the next panel so that it now reads: “I take great pleasure in introducing a man without whom Metropolis might very well have lost the Daily Planet forever.”
- Panel three is a waste of time. It has a commentator talking about the mayor turning the podium over to Morgan Edge, who is now the owner of the Daily Planet. But doesn’t the Mayor say that in panel two? Everything this commentator says is pointless repetition.
- Panel five, the line “But to paraphrase and mutilate the works of William Shakespeare:” is to flabby, I cut it down to “But to paraphrase Shakespeare.”
- Panel six is another pointless panel that I’ve scored out. It has the characters reacting to a joke that doesn’t exist.
Am I being too picky? Maybe, but I don’t think it makes for a good comic when the reader can see ways to improve upon it. I could have done it with just about every page, page three was just where my frustration with this comic set in.
The first half of it jumps about a lot from one scene to the next. Pages six and seven starts at the Astrodome, then moves to Superman flying, then to a flashback of a fight between Lois and Clark, back to the speech from Morgan Edge from a few pages earlier, back to the fight, then back to Superman flying. It’s such a jumble and the only reason it isn’t a mess is because the artist and colourist do such a great job of making each section feel visually different so that you know you have switches from one scene to the next.
The second half of the comic is a very bog standard fight between Superman and a fire creature which is very heavily narrated in what I think is a report written by Clark Kent for the paper the next day. It tells us what he’s doing, but because it’s Clark writing an article, the narrative never lets us in on what Superman is feeling so the whole action sequence becomes emotionless. The fire alien has the potential to be interesting, especially since it keeps saying the word “Krypton” over and over again. But once the readers are told about this fact, it is never brought up again. The fire alien is eventually defeated by Superman throwing it into space to extinguish it, which is painfully reminiscent of Superman Returns, the climax of which was a giant rock being thrown into space. And god knows how much I don’t want to be reminded of that film.
To be perfectly honest I wouldn’t recommend Superman #1. The story is flabby, badly written and would have been convoluted had it not been for the great art and colour that helped to clear things up a bit. This is probably part of an ongoing story despite not ending on a literal ‘to be continues’ and as such sets the scene for thing to come later on. But as a stand alone comic it’s a jumbled mess and I have no desire to pick up issue two.
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