SUPERMAN #9 & ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #432

“TO LAUGH AND DIE IN METROPOLIS”
Story & Pencils: John Byrne | Inks: Karl Kesel
Letters: John Costanza | Colors: Tom Ziuko | Editors: Michael Carlin & Andrew Helfer

The Plot: A fake Superman robs the Metropolis Diamond Exchange. When Superman responds to the robbery, the imposter reveals itself as a robot with a nuclear bomb in its chest. Superman flies the robot into space, where it explodes, then returns to Metropolis to find that the Joker was behind the robbery. Joker calls on Superman with Jimmy Olsen’s signal watch, revealing that he’s captured, Jimmy, Perry White, and Lois Lane, and is holding them hostage in lead-lined coffins around the city. But Superman easily determines the coffins are empty, then tracks down the Joker, saves his friends, and brings the Clown Prince of Crime to jail.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: Clark receives a package in the mail at the Daily Planet, containing his mother’s scrapbook which was stolen by agents of Lex Luthor in issue 2. Soon after, in Smallville, Lana Lang is approached by a strange probe which knocks her out.

Upon returning to Earth after disposing of the bomb, Superman attempts to fly and falls flat on his face, furthering the sub-plot about his powers periodically acting up.

Maggie Sawyer puts in an appearance, allowing Superman to explain to her that he and Batman are not friends. Moments later, Superman notes that Jimmy created his signal watch himself, and muses that the young man is destined for great things.

My Thoughts: Okay, so you’re John Byrne. You’ve rebooted Superman. You’re having some fun introducing him to certain characters for the “first time”. You decide it would be really cool for Superman to cross paths with the Joker. Sounds like a great idea!

So you have Superman thwart Joker’s plan with minimal effort in the span of just a couple pages, and then have him chidingly explain to the villain that he doesn’t understand how Kryptonian powers work.

Congratulations, John Byrne. You’ve successfully phoned in an entire issue of SUPERMAN and squandered a fun story idea.

“GANGWAR PART ONE: FROM THE STREETS, TO THE STREETS!”
Writer: Marv Wolfman | Artists: Jerry Ordway & P. Craig Russell
Letterer: Albert de Guzman | Colorist: Anthony Tollin | Editor: Mike Carlin

The Plot: Superman helps put out a tenement fire at a building owned by Lex Luthor in Metropolis’s Suicide Slum. Jerry White is found at the scene, but his guidance counselor, José Delgado, with whom he’s staying, clears him with an alibi. Later, Lex Luthor announces a new charity to help at-risk youths such as those believed to have caused the fire. However Luthor’s men actually take the kids off the streets in order to train them for tasks such as armed robbery.

Lois meets with José, but he ducks out on her in a hurry to go to a rug warehouse and confront some street gang members. Meanwhile, Superman thwarts a subway robbery perpetrated by a group of teens with LexCorp-manufactured weapons, and Jerry is among their number. Superman confronts Luthor over the incident, but the tycoon says that the troubled teens were, in fact, more trouble than they were worth, and they stole the guns when they left his program.

The gang sets the rug warehouse on fire, intending to let José and Lois, who followed him, burn, but Superman arrives and saves them both, then puts out the fire, realizing as he does so that the building also belongs to Lex Luthor. While José is taken to the hospital with Lois, Superman vows to take Luthor down.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: Shoddy inter-title continuity strikes again! Superman claims he nearly didn’t get to the fire in time because he was finishing up with the Joker… but Lois and Jimmy are at the scene of the fire, and they were also there when the Joker adventure wrapped up in SUPERMAN #9. I assume John Byrne and Marv Wolfman weren’t communicating much as they wrote their respective titles, but you’d think one of the two editors would catch oversights like this!

When Superman arrives on the train, he begins to recite the Miranda Rights to the young robbers, reminding us that, as established in THE MAN OF STEEL, he’s still a duly deputized officer of the law.

My Thoughts: Well, we’re 2-for-2 on stinkers this week. Byrne’s story may have felt phoned in, but Wolfman’s just feels sloppy. Here, that’s due to the fact that a fire happens, the next day Luthor establishes a charity to deal with troubled teens, and apparently the day after that, the troubled teens have been fully trained in committing crimes and departed with a bunch of guns to do same. This is stuff that should have happened over a number of weeks, spread out as sub-plot pages in around six or so issues of the series!

But this is par for the course on Wolfman’s ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN. Byrne’s stories aren’t all winners, but they’re generally solid action stories, if nothing else. Wolfman’s stuff feels weirdly disorganized and unwieldy, like he’s trying to cram way too much story into a single issue, and as a result he winds up with something borderline unreadable.

I had similar problems, as I recall, with the very earliest issues of NEW TEEN TITANS, in which Wolfman and George Pérez seemed to struggle with pacing for a while before they finally got it straight. Considering that the same thing is happening here and the only commonality is Wolfman, I can’t help wondering if it was actually Pérez who kept him on track in TITANS, and this is just how a Wolfman unencumbered by a strong co-plotter always writes.

(Though I read Wolfman’s AMAZING SPIDER-MAN run some years ago and found it fine… It seemed lackluster to me in terms of stories, but the plotting and pacing always felt perfectly readable — so who knows?)

Next Week: Superman and Big Barda, uhh... make a porno in ACTION COMICS #592 and 593.