Superman 650 [Spoilers]

[DBN]

Wow! This book definatly lived up to its expectations. The characters are dead on and they have actually moved Luthor's character foward and away from his previous "untouchable" status.


I highly recommend that everyone pick this run up.

[Daughter of Krypton]

That came out today!?!?!

But.. but.. I thought 649 just came out a week or two ago!

I know where I'm headed first thing tomorrow morning - my comic shop!

[Kilgore Trout]

The first couple of pages were okay but then…

What do we get?

Monologing… tons and tons and tons of monolging…

And remember how irritating the first person narrative was in Loeb’s OWAW?

Well, its back… It’s tightly stuffed between all the monologing and it’s equally as irritating...

Pick one.

Please.

Or better yet, being that this is supposed to be a visual medium, S-H-O-W it… It might be more interesting than:

Countless panels of talking heads…

Or a page wasted on Clark eating a pretzel. Why was that in there? Was it a bone to the "Clark is a human like me" crowd or just a mindless detail?

I liked the Supergirl appearance but then I remembered that this was a Superman comic…

Where is Superman?

No one knows…

And I find myself not really caring either… Wow, Superman’s missing… again… If you ask me he’s been missing for 20 years…[boring]

Okay, back to the story:

Clark has no powers. Why?

Don’t know. It’s a big mystery that will have to wait for Part 7…

Huh??? Is this the ‘new’ Superman or just a continuation of the Lois and Clark soap opera?

Oh I get it; this is just one in five of the set up issues exclusively designed for the TPB route…

The "story" will appear in issues #2 and #6...

Is writing a monthly comic really so hard or is it just a lost art form???

Is telling a story in 20-some pages that difficult? Why can’t I buy one book with one story in it?

Is that asking so much?

Alan Moore seems to know how to it without shoveling in bushels of narrative or cramming first person observations into every page...

What about the children?... Doesn't anyone care about the children???

Forget them, what about ANYBODY who picks this up and doesn’t have a clue about what happened over the last 20 years, let alone the last 2...

Yeah, good luck bud, welcome to DC Comics where the moto is: ”We did a reboot of our entire universe and KEPT all the old junk!”

But I digress…

Yes, there are many sub-plots... (this is the DCU after-all)

But what is the MAIN plot of this single story?

Is it the Wonderful Life of Lois & Clark?

Is it the Kryptonite Man?

Is it Lex Luthor?

Is it that Superman has no powers?

No one knows.

But hey, it’s a Superman comic, so month in, month-out, no one knows anyway, not even the editors…

My overall opinion?

Not good.

Here we are, a BRAND NEW day in the DCU and we're already immersed in a continuity mystery… Yep, move along people, nothing to see here…

In this FIRST story I expected to be grabbed kicking and screaming and slammed into the ‘new’ millennium of DC Comics…

Instead, its like I never left the old one… I stopped reading Superman books after FOR TOMORROW when my head exploded…

I just stopped cold turkey, and never looked back… I finally didn’t care what they did, dress him in a pink tutu, give him a kid, hell, give him a google of kids, howze 'bout shaving his butt and making him walk backwards…

Woohoo!

BUT then DC has this 'new' big CRISIS… And hey, they did it before, we got a ‘new’ Superman…

But this?

This is just more of the same… I mean, they even kept the friggin marriage!!!

For a ‘first issue’ this was a resounding DUD.

Sorry Kurt... Nothing personal... But I think I'll spend that spare 3 bucks on a specialty coffee at Starbucks... At least I can change the flavor once in a while...

Looks like I’ll be sticking to All Star Superman for my superfix…

[King Krypton]

Just picked this up. First impressions:

So Clark's got a signal watch for Supergirl. Pretty funny. It was a hoot seeing him the Jimmy role for once.

Luthor buys off the legal system to get the charges against him dropped, but loses LexCorp due to his antics and is a pariah among the citizenry? I love this. For all his money, he can't do diddly squat now, he's lost his company, everyone knows he's evil and wants him dead, and for once DC's actually gonna have to move this character forward instead of resetting everything back to the 1986 "he's untouchable and sitting on top of the world" default like always. And I'm intrigued by the Kryptonian crystal he vows to use to avenge himself upon the people of Metreopolis for rejecting him. Could this be a tip of the hat to the new movie? And just what does he plan to do with that thing?

Luthor beating up Clark as revenge for losing everything? Perfect. I love his threat to chop off Lois' arms and out out her eyes if Clark dares to stand up to him again. Now THIS is what Lex Luthor needs to be. Nakedly satanic and merciless. We need to see more of this.

The Kryptonite Man being the result of an unethical experiment to use kryptonite as a power source...I can buy it. Got a nice Silver/Bronze Age thing going on. And Supergirl's fight with him was pretty cool.

Kinda mixed on Pete Woods' art, though. It gets the job done, certainly, but it's a little blocky and rough for my tastes. I would have preferred Terry Dodson on the interiors; the cover art was superb.

I like the tone and spirit of the issue. It's got a lot of the same Silver/Bronze Age sensibility of the animated series, Trinity, and Birthright, as well as some of the nostalgic charm of the Bronze Age stories of old. Maybe this has to do with Busiek's being influenced by Cary Bates, but it's a welcome touch. Unlike a lot of Superman stories in the post-Crisis era, this one actually has a sense of unpredictability and wild imagination. It's actually FUN, and you're not sure what to expect next. I like this. We need more Superman stuff of this kind.

Overall, not a bad start to the new era. Let's see where it goes from here.

[Daughter of Krypton]

Great fun, well done, and on a personal level I'm very glad that I'll be regularly picking up the Superman titles - and enjoying them! - for the first time in 20-odd years.

So what happened to that monkey that was saturated with K-energy?

[Continental Op]

I suspect he'll be the new Titano!

[Super Monkey]

Better yet...

 :shock:

[Kurt Busiek]

So what happened to that monkey that was saturated with K-energy?

The Anti-Beppo?

kdb