The Man of Tomorrow, Tomorrow: Action Comics #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, it’s Superman! Strange visitor from another planet! With spoilers and ruined story notes far beyond those of mortal men!

I was initially skeptical about Grant Morrison’s take on the new early days of Superman in Action Comics – the only attractive thing about an urban hipster blogger with a mad-on for corporations and a Justin Beiber haircut is that when he’s also Superman you won’t do any time if you hit him in his John Lennon glasses with a fucking pipe.

And truthfully, the concept of a Superman who takes on slumlords and capitalists is a wonderful idea, provided it’s 1939 and nobody’s invented Brainiac yet. Even a partially-depowered Superman against, say, a CEO is like deploying a fuel-air bomb against Cookie Monster. As a power fantasy for the unemployed it might be fun, but from a storytelling standpoint, it presents the same problems as a 12 to 2 Red Sox / Brewers blowout: fun, but sure as hell not exciting. Particularly when you stop for a second and realize that you can kill your average American CEO by putting a plate of prime rib at the top of a flight of stairs.

It turns out that Morrison seems to realize this, so in just a couple of issues, we’ve transitioned from Superman as hippie anarchist to Superman as fuckup.

The CEO he chose to mess with back in the first issue has sent the cops after Clark Kent and has planted the story with the media that Superman is an alien invader. Clark’s landlady discovers his secret identity by penetrating his Fortress of Solitude – his filthy gym bag (“His pants” would have made a funnier joke, but Morrison doesn’t even let him wear any for almost a quarter of the story). He gets scooped on a story by Jimmy fucking Olsen, and he fucks up saving a cat from a tree. If there is such a thing as “competence porn,” then this is incompetence porn that would chafe and dehydrate Beavis and Butthead.

If this sounds like a shitty deconstruction of Superman you might be right… except in the margins, Morrison is ramping up new versions of Lex Luthor, Brainiac and Metallo: The Man With The Kryptonite Heart. And he’s doing it in ways that are looking like they’d challenge the Silver Age Superman. So as much as I generally dislike decompressed storytelling – and make no mistake, this is decompressed; Superman appears in costume in two panels of this book – this one is feeling like it’s actually going somewhere.

When it comes to the art, well… this is part of the problem with many of the New 52 books: they’ve stacked a bunch of them with some high-toned creators whose work you’re already familiar with. Rags Morales is Rags Morales. If you saw his art and liked it in Identity Crisis, you’ll like it here… maybe a little too much.

Look! It’s the Elongated Man! No wait – Jimmy Olsen! Or maybe it’s Harry and Rupert chugging lo main and Butterbeer! The point is that Morales’s art is strong with exceptional attention to facial expressions. He’s also excellent at action sequences… too bad there aren’t any in this book.

The more I think about Action Comics #3, the more I feel excited about the coming story of a callow Superman suddenly in way over his head against what the Marvel Zombies would call Omega Level Threats, and how Morrison and Morales will show us how Superman overcomes them. The problem with this book is that none of those things are happening yet. This is very much a middle chapter of what Morrison seems to clearly intend to be read as a long-form trade paperback.

Which is frustrating enough, but which becomes even more frustrating when you stop and you realize that this is one of DC’s few $3.99 books… and for that four bucks you get 20 pages of story (19 if you count the two-page splash of Kandor being bottled)… and nineteen pages of in-house ads and hype for other DC Comics books. Plus one page hyping The Big Bang Theory on TBS. All for a story part that only features Superman on two-sixths of one page. That’s pretty close to obscene, DC. A nutcutting, corporate profit-maximizing move. The title character in the book featuring it would be furious.

Look: being a few issues in, I can see that this is going to probably wind up being a very satisfying story, with very good art backing it. But unless things start seriously moving along in the fourth issue, I’m going to start recommending that you hold off for the trade. Because if I wanted to spend four bucks watching hipsters ineffectually bitching about The Man, I’d hook a bus downtown to Occupy Boston. At least there I could find some Superman-looking prick to smack with a pipe.