Action Comics #12

Superman versus The Dirty Spaceman.

Superman begins this issue in a fugue state. He relives living the farm and his first exciting days at the Daily Planet when he still believed he had a shot with Lois Lane. The fantasy continues with the beginnings of the Justice League. He compares them to a new Camelot which is just tempting Daemonite fate. And then he experiences the Future Yet To Come where he's married to Lois Lane. He then turns to the deathly ghost and says, "I can still change it, right?! I can still change it!" But before Superman can run to the window and throw Jimmy Olsen a sack full of coins for the fattest goose in the market, he is inexplicably pulled from his fantasy.

I'm surprised he even feels this.

It turns out the Dirty Spaceman is mind-controlling everybody so that he can kidnap Lois's niece without any trouble. But just hitting Lois with the truck was enough to distract Superman. He doesn't even seem to notice the girl being taken by the weird burned face Spaceman. He's desperate to save Lois's life.

While Lois being near death has distracted Superman, it's also caused Lois's niece to struggle and escape from the Dirty Spaceman. Her mental powers seem to be amplified by close contact to the Dirty Spaceman which enables her to break free and fly herself to Lois and help her with the pain. Annoyed, the Dirty Spaceman uses his mental powers to throw a car at Superman which Superman easily deflects.

Et tu, Superman?

See? Now that's an appropriate response to the "Is that all you got?" attitude.

Pretty sure this is actually Grant Morrison's reaction to writers using the "Is that all you got?" cliche.

The Dirty Spaceman's identity is actually Captain Comet.

Here he is in the early nineties with a cleaner face and his tighty whiteys on the outside of his costume.

The Who's Who says Captain Comet was born on a farm in Kansas to parents named John and Martha. Wait. What? No wonder Grant Morrison decided to use him as a foil for Superman. Adam Blake (Captain Comet) was created in 1951, well over a decade past Superman's first appearance. But he's not an alien so the story wasn't completely plagiarized. Captain Comet was born as a comet was passing across the sky. In this version of Action Comics though, it looks like it could have been when Superman crashed to Earth. He's apparently some kind of mutant with the mental and physical powers of a human evolved 100,000 years past the current model. Superman knows more of Adam's background since he got a glimpse of Comet's mind when Comet invaded Superman's mind.

He's only the first Superman because he was showing off at a much earlier age.

Later, Captain Comet was visited by the Oorts, a race that collect Neo-Sapiens to turn into warriors. They collected him and now they want to collect Suzie, Lois's niece.

"Adam! Adam! Be thou not afraid! No harm will come unto thee. Your efforts are needed for the survival of all Earthlings. Come, I shall showeth thee...."

Oh! I remember why I know Captain Comet! I have an issue or two of DC Presents with Superman and Captain Comet!

Earlier, Suzie made mention of Captain Comet telling her about "the Cuckoo's Nest". This may indicate that the neo-sapien persona replaces the sapien persona that Suzie was meant to have. So it wouldn't be a mutation at all. It's actually a Cuckoo, kicking the old personality out of the body, in effect killing it, so that the neo-sapien can live and grow.

Meanwhile, the firefighters are busy clearing the streets when they find one of their fellow fighters dead, disfigured and eaten from the inside by the Metalek creatures. And then they find Johnny Clark's helmet and assume he's been vaporized. So there goes another one of Superman's secret identities!

Superman begins to battle back against Captain Comet. Adam Blake just has too many tricks up his sleeve. He's about to shoot Supes with a psychic bullet that would make him incapacitated by guilt when Suzie blinds him with her powers. Between the two of them, they force him to transport back to his ship which is 40,000 Astronomical Units away. I think that's pretty far.

The last thing Superman needs to do is save Lois. I mean, the last immediate thing he needs to do. He obviously needs another secret identity! Or his old one if Batman figured out how to fix that. I'm sure he'll create some ruse that has Clark Kent gaining amnesia from the blast and waking up in some ghetto hospital in Metropolis until he slowly remembers who he was.

Anyway, Lois has about thirty minutes to live but the surgery to save her will take hours. So Superman reads all the medical texts and then goes to work with actual doctors assisting him as he sloppily operates on Lois. It has to be sloppy, right? He's not going to be an amazing surgeon just because he read a bunch of text books! Maybe he did some practice surgeries in super speed as well. And just how fast can Superman do things? Is he as fast as The Flash?

Of course Superman successfully saves Lois's life and the doctors all quit their jobs and go home to get drunk and beat their kids.

Later that night...

Does that mean Batman needs a longer Bat-grapple here? Or it could mean he could use a fucking elevator some day.

Batman doesn't actually do the work for Superman. He just brings a flash drive containing everything Clark Kent did once he came to Metropolis.

I'm not sure how effective that Bat Tracker will be on a suit that dissolves and rebuilds itself with some kind of nano-technology. Unless the underlying structure is that white suit and it just changes the look depending on a Kryptonian's need for the occasion. To learn more about Superman's suit (but not much more), read Superman #11!

So Clark Kent returns to his apartment to discover that his landlady is actually from the Fifth Dimension. He learns that she can grant him three wishes and one of those wishes will to make everyone forget that Clark Kent ever died. I guess that'll work just as well as my amnesia plan! He also learns a little bit more about her and her nephew and the little man with the mole that I thought was her nephew all this time.

The Little Man must be the Envious One from the Fifth Dimension. So at least I was in the right dimensional ballpark when I guessed Mxyzptlk.

And then The Envious One appears in Suzie's room to do Jor-el-knows-what!

Action Comics #12 Rating: +1 Ranking. Why can't the worst of the New 52 read the best of the New 52 and take some pointers. Hey, bad writers! You don't have to steal anyone's style! Just look at how they tell a good story, you dumb bastards! See how many Narration Boxes were in this comic book? ZERO. Z-FUCKING-E-FUCKING-R-GODDAMNMOTHERFUCKING-O!