DC's New 52

[Brightonian]

Just picked up the #1 issues of the re-launched Action, Detective and Justice League comics. Fittingly for the new Depression, Grant Morrison has taken Superman back to his 1930s roots as a quasi-socialist brawler - you almost expect him to have an IWW card in the back pocket of his jeans. I think I may continue with this one, but probably not the other two. I never really followed the League, and anyone who tackles Batman nowadays seems to end up re-writing The Dark Knight Returns.

[admin]

Supreman as a socialist! I love it! Shades of George Bernard Shaw.

[Brightonian]

There are a couple of neat references to Siegel and Shuster's era, including Det Sgt Blake who failed to arrest Superman in 1939 and is still trying 62 years later ... (see Superman #1, facsimile reissued in 1979). Interesting that the idea of superhero as a public enemy goes right back to the early days.

Grant Morrison's Superman can't fly (yet), but he sure as hell can outrun an express train and leap tall buildings with a single bound.

[admin]

I looked over a copy of Action #1 (Mountain Empire comics was sold out, but allowed me to look at a copy out of a customer's box). When Superman says, "I'm your worst enemy," I decided not to buy a copy. Avoid cliches like the plague.

[Brightonian]

The line is actually "I'm your worst nightmare" ...

It does get better after that - well it could hardly get worse could it?

[Brightonian]

Just got Action #2 - seems to be morphing from Siegel and Shuster to JMS's Supreme Power, in that the bad guys (the federal gov't of course) have somehow got hold of the spacecraft that brought Kal-El to Earth, which is singing to him just as Hyperion's did ...

[admin]

How meta-retro can you get, when DC relaunches by imitating an imitation.

[Brightonian]

Issue #6 and it's all over the place - Morrison is now cannibalising his own All-Star Superman with a group of time travellers from the far future who visit young Clark on the farm. He seems intent on sprinkling as many pop-culture references as he can - Superman wonders how a time machine can be "bigger on the inside than the outside", and one of the future people tries to explain it using the term "tesseract" (from Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time). I'm sure for every one of these references I pick up, dozens go over my head.