All Star Superman: Volume One
By Grant Morrison (W) and Frank Quitely (A)
DC Comics, $19.99
Take a quick stroll around the comics blog-o-sphere. You’ll see plenty of variety, but if there’s a common theme, it’s the Review of the Goofy Old Comic. There are plenty of sites that rely entirely on making fun of the misadventures of Jimmy Olsen or whoever. It seems like all we ever hear about classic comics are how absurd and dumb they were. Yeah, these books could be pretty ridiculous, but it’s too simplistic to write them off as tongue-in-cheek amusement and nothing more. No one makes that point as well as Grant Morrison in All Star Superman. He’s writing not so much an ode to the Golden and Silver Age comics, but a book that plays by those rules and is the better for it. Comics can be absurd and great all at once. That’s the real lesson here. Now, I think my rambling introduction has gone on long enough.
The Plot: Superman is dying. That’s the gist of the story and the common thread to these first six issues, now released in nicely packaged hardcover. For the first five issues, Superman plays out the Burt Reynolds role from The End. Except he doesn’t hire Dom DeLuise to kill him. And he doesn’t have sex with Sally Field. He does try to shag Lois Lane, though, and plenty of other weird stuff goes on. Grant Morrison’s chemically cultivated imagination sprouts all manner of oddities, the pinnacle of which is Jimmy turning into Doomsday to stop Superman after he becomes the All Star version of Bizarro. The last issue backtracks to Clark’s earlier years and a run in with Supermen of the future, coinciding with Jonathan Kent’s death.
The Positives: I called Morrison the most overrated writer of 2006, a title I still stand by. This guy gets as much praise as anyone, and too often he doesn’t deliver. In All Star Superman, though, he’s at his best. Call me silly, but I’ve always thought writing Superman isn’t too hard, since his character is so well defined. What makes a Superman book great is when the surrounding characters are well done. Led by Lois and Jimmy (and Lex, of course), every character who enters into the story is drawn very fully and carefully. The dialogue is fun and crafty, the settings are great (Moon base!) and the pacing moves fluidly. For how complicated every story is, it feels very easy. Also, unlike ASSBAR, this book shows how creative freedoms can be used skillfully to recreate a well known character (such as the new twist on Bizarro and Jonathan Kent’s death).
And, of course, Quitely is beyond great. His very best moment comes in Clark’s visit to Lex in prison. After a riot breaks out, Lex reveals how much power he still holds, and Clark is left powerless because he can’t reveal who he really is. A poignant moment becomes, well, goofy when Lex realizes an eyebrow has rubbed off (All Star Lex apparently is hairless). So when Lex gives his villain sneer, he has a re-drawn eyebrow that slants at a ludicrous angle. It feels like a nod to those silly old books without being a caricature.
The Negatives: The book isn’t very dense, in large part because Morrison and Quitely haven’t kept to much of a schedule (issue seven just came out this week). But, it’s sort of hard to criticize that here, because trades are the ideal way of avoiding that delay issue. Still, I couldn’t help but worry over when I would ever see the next trade as I was reading this one.
The Grade: A There is a dreamy innocence about this book, and it’s a feeling that’s far too rare among today’s books, whether it’s Marvel’s Civil War or DC’s World War Three. It is character driven, fun and touching. It should remind all comics fans that goofy isn’t a four-letter word.
Of course not – it’s five letters.
-M