SUPERMAN #4

“BLOODSPORT!”
Writer/Penciler: John Byrne | Inker: Karl Kesel
Colorist: Anthony Tollin | Letterer: John Costanza | Editors: Andy Helfer & Mike Carlin

The Plot: A maniac calling himself Bloodsport shoots up a diner occupied by Jimmy Olsen, who summons Superman to help — but by the time the hero arrives, Bloodsport is gone. Superman tracks Bloodsport to a bowling alley, where the madman is on another spree. Superman nearly stops Bloodsport until a new gun materializes in his hand and tags the Man of Steel with a Kryptonite bullet. Jimmy arrives and gets Superman to the hospital, where doctors remove the Kryptonine shrapnel.

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor, the man behind Bloodsport’s weaponry, realizes his experiment has gone haywire and dispatches his men to deal with the crazed vigilante. Superman catches up with Bloodsport first, but the latter’s weapons are still too much for the Man of Steel to handle alone. Luthor’s security forces soon arrive, but Bloodsport makes quick work of them as well. Finally Superman realizes Bloodsport is teleporting his guns in from another location and disables the teleporter by ionizing the air around the villain.

Bloodsport is about to kill himself and destroy ten blocks of Metropolis with a bomb when Jimmy arrives, having deduced Bloodsport’s true identity based on his words and the fingerprints on one of his guns. With Jimmy is Bloodsport’s brother, Michael. He convinces Bloodsport to stand down, and the massacre ends at last.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: First, a quick note about the cover: DC had "modernized" Superman's logo at some point prior to Byrne's reboot, curving the bottom of the "U" and the front of the "R", and generally thickening all the letters. But for whatever reason, during the production of this issue, it looks like they broke apart the previous logo, with a "jagged" "U" instead!

We learn this issue that Jimmy is dating Lois’s sister, Lucy Lane, and that in the post-CRISIS contunity, he still has his famous signal watch to summon Superman in times of crisis.

Detective Maggie Sawyer makes her first appearance here. I’m only familiar with the character’s SUPERMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES incarnation, so I’ll be curious to see how she’s handled under her creator, John Byrne, going forward. At the very least, it appears the original comic book Sawyer had brown hair as compared with her cartoon counterpart’s platinum blonde.

Per Jimmy, Bloodsport — real name Bobby DuBois — ran off to Canada to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam war, leading his brother Michael to take his place. Michael lost his legs and arms during his tour, and Bobby went insane as a result, ultimately leading to his being recruited by Luthor as a test subject to draw out Superman.

My Thoughts: Not too long ago, commenter David P. noted that John Byrne’s Superman run really went to town on “nameless innocent bystanders […] biting it pretty casually,” and I have to guess that this issue was one that he had in mind when making that observation. It certainly fits the bill, at least, as Bloodsport guns down an entire diner full of people (except Jimmy and Lucy, who miraculously escape), and then shoots a few people at the bowling alley before Superman arrives.

And while Byrne harbors some scorn toward the “extreme” Image-style comics which permeated the output of both Marvel and DC in the nineties, this issue makes it pretty evident that he must shoulder some of the blame for comics eventually reaching that point. Madman with a “kewl” name? Check. Gratuitous, wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians? Check. I’m sure Byrne would argue that “Bloodsport!” is a morality play, an examination of one man’s fragile psyche, and any number of other concepts to distance the story from those overly violent and shallow stories which would come later, but it’s impossible not to see some influence here on later stories (“Maximum Carnage” for example, off the top of my head).

Honestly, I didn’t really like this issue all that much. Making a statement about the Vietnam war, about our country’s treatment of veterans and draft dodgers, or whatever else is fine — and that’s not exactly sunny subject matter. But even taking that into consideration, Byrne’s tale here is way too grim and just doesn’t fit Superman at all. As noted previously, my understanding that Byrne was brought in to sort of “Marvelize” Superman, and while it’s true that Marvel stories were generally considered to be more “grounded” than traditional DC fare, I don’t really think anyone was clamoring for Superman to fight a mass shooter. (Or at least, to fight one and not save most of his targets!)

All that said, let's end on a high note: there's a great page in this one where Byrne illustrates Superman's speed in a pretty novel way. There's barely any depiction of him moving and no words, either. It's just a sequence of panels as we see how far apart Bloodsport and Superman are, following by Bloodsport preparing to pull a trigger, and then suddenly Superman is right in front of him, knocking the gun from his hand. I thought this was really cool:

Next Week: Wolfman and Ordway return for ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #427 and 428.