Doog Yrev Ton: Action Comics #18 Review

Grant Morrison is done with Action Comics now. And I am okay with that.

I am okay with that because, with the benefit of  hindsight over the entire run, his story was meant for Superman fans. By which I mean, real, hardcore, longtime Superman fans. The kind of Superman fan who thinks Superman will never look right again now that Curt Swan is dead. The kind of Superman fan who knows, without consulting Wikipedia, that Silver Kryptonite makes Superman PCP-level paranoid, while Red Kryptonite makes him grow four dicks in each armpit. The kind of Superman fan who calls his penis “Beppo.”

Morrison’s run started with Superman fighting corrupt businessmen, as he did in the early issues of the original Action Comics, and ended with a battle with Mr. Mxyzpltk, effectively “modernizing” Superman for the New 52 by bringing him from 1938 all the way to 1965, via a mescaline bender. Sure, there was the odd stop to examine what Superman might mean to the modern world, but all in all, this series started out, and ended, as a celebration of the earlier, more out-there elements of the Superman mythos.

So, as I’ve said in other reviews of Morrison’s Action Comics issues, how you feel about Action Comics #18 will largely depend on how nostalgic you are for Fifth Dimensional imps, multi-colored Kryptonite, super-powered animals, the Legion of Super Heroes, and yet another bold statement about how important Superman is to the DC Universe and to America. You know, bold statements like Morrison made in All-Star Superman and DC One Million.

Personally? I can take them or leave them.

Normally, this is where I recap the events of the issue, but frankly, there’s so much going on that it’s hard to keep track of unless you’ve been carefully and religiously reading the preceding issues. Let’s just say that as a jumping off point, Action Comics #18 isn’t one. There’s a Fifth Dimensional imp named Vyndktvx and his buddies beating on Superman in a bunch of dimensions, using Doomsday armor and a bunch of Red Kryptonite hallucinations, while Lois, Jimmy and the Legion of Super Heroes go find Mr. Mxyzpltk, who has manifested as an elderly insult comic in a coma (as one does) to try and get his help for Superman. Then Vyndktvx connects Superman to everyone in the world, and somehow Superman gets everyone in the world to say their own names backwards which sends Vyndktvx back to the Fifth Dimension for some reason, and then people say how much Superman means to them.

Okay, there’s a lot going on here, but one of the things that isn’t going on here is a lot of Superman action. We spend a huge amount of this issue watching Superman getting his ass kicked in interesting ways – and by “interesting,” I mean he gets his ass kicked while he’s a baby, a lion, and a giant bug. Sure, he gets one or two heroic poses in the issue, but when it comes to actual superhero action, this is pretty lean… and what Superman action we do get is generally wrapped in hallucinatory imagery and cartoony iconography. When it comes to actual heroics, hell; the bad guy gets beat by a bunch of people saying their names backwards in public, and that’s only heroic if you go by Bob Bojwolb. Metropolis is a major American city guys; in the real world, you’d get everyone screaming their names backwards and one douchebag screeching, “Baba Booey! Howard Stern’s penis!” and we’d all die like pigs in a Fifth Dimensional chute.

Morrison spent as much time in this issue demonstrating the weird perceptions and motivations of beings from the Fifth Dimension as he did on Superman, which is fine if you’ve ever had any kind of burning urge to walking Mxyzpltk’s pointy clown shoes… but then again, who has? Sure, I suppose it’s kind of interesting that someone from a couple dimensions up might attack only once while we perceive it as happening over multiple times, or that he might have to suffer knowing that he will be doomed to lose in the future as present knowledge, but it’s only interesting if you have some kind of real Mxyzpltk fixation, or perhaps a peyote habit. It is intellectually interesting, but not enough to make a really exciting or compelling comic book.

And then there’s the final message: that Superman is someone who will do the impossible for us, and who is the inspiration for humanity to be the best it can be. Okay, great, except Morrison has been hammering this theme home in his Superman stories since 1999 (and he just ain’t gonna do it better than he did in All-Star Superman), so it’s not like this is some new and groundbreaking theme. And not only that, Morrison delivers it in a way that’s pretty much on-the-nose here. He has a kid flat-out say that Superman does things because they’re impossible, and he has Superman give someone the Unified Field Theory, the “one thing [that] will change the world.” Between that, and the opening sequence where Morrison himself, via a caption, just comes out and says what’s happening is, “nothing less than a new American mythology,” and this whole thing reeks of some Very Important Message on Morrison’s part. But this is not a new observation, and considering Superman’s greatest triumph in the issue is to get a bunch of Americans to stand around chanting gibberish, it’s a Very Important Message upon which the story just doesn’t deliver.

Rags Morales’ art is pretty solid for this issue, but in a lot of ways, he’s given a task that is almost impossible. What happens in this story is so all over the place that it would be almost impossible for any artist to really visually tell the story in any coherent way. Let’s just say that, through no real fault on the part of Morales, this book utterly fails the old, “read it without reading the words and see if you can still tell what’s going on” test. But still, Morales delivers exemplary facial expressions (although Superman’s grin on the final page looks like he’s busily filling his Kryptonian Battle Armor with fresh jizz), and, considering Morales is called upon to draw everything from Fifth Dimensional cartoony imps to Superman with a lion head, he shows a lot of range in the issue.

Grant Morrison has had eighteen issues of Action Comics to try to make another grand statement about Superman… but this one falls a little short. We spend a lot more time with Mr. Mxyzpltk and his buddies than we do with Superman, all to wind up hearing that Superman is an inspiration to Americans. Again. Action Comics #18 has a message to deliver, and Morrison makes sure we hear it, regardless of whether or not the story tells it on its own. It’s sure as hell no All-Star Superman, and while I can appreciate that Morrison was at least trying to shoot for the moon with his run, I think I’m ready for some new blood on this book.