Superman's most deadly foe cannot be a man in a purple and green leotard with a bad stache. He kind of looks like one of Jack Tripper's friends down at the Regal Beagle. Or maybe a more current pop culture reference.
Forgive me if I don't put any great effort into commenting on any of these annuals. It just seems like extra work for extra long half-assed stories. With Sholly Fisch writing, it's like I'm paying five dollars for an extra-long back-up story. They're not even worth the extra dollar they normally cost. Plus this one is about Superman and I've never really been a fan of Superman. Why? Because he's Lawful Good, that's why! Although if I were writing Superman stories, the conflict would probably revolve mostly around ethical dilemmas since he can overpower anything that comes into physical conflict with him. And when he has trouble battling a foe, the writer has twist logic into a pretzel to make it any way believable.
Unless Superman's foe has Kryptonite Fists!
I guess being crazy helps as well. What the hell is a "bopuifs"?
Project K-Man needs test subjects as they try to create a defense against Superman. Their first plan is to irradiate some poor volunteer with Kryptonite to see if it'll give him any powers. That poor jerk is, of course, the guy with the mustache. Ramsay. The process is supposed to take weeks but being that this is their first trial and I'm really beginning to suspect that nobody involved on the project is an actual scientist, the process is completed in a few seconds.
Science! Fucking with things we don't understand since, well, never you mind since when. It's been a long time, okay? And how do you expect science to understand things if it only fucks with things it understands? Get off our back!
Unless you're Clay Ramsay or some other wife-beater. Then Superman just looks like a holier than thou jerk butting his head into business that doesn't concern him. Although I do have to wonder about Superman's choices in stopping the abuse. He throws Ramsay out of a window and into the river. He tells Ramsay that he knew the fall wasn't enough to kill him. But it was enough to break both of his legs. Isn't that one of those decisions that keeps Batman up at night? Superman has all the power in the world to stop one normal human being (yes, he's a dick but that's beside the point right now!) and he chooses to risk that human's life while capturing him. Superman may have figured the fall wasn't high enough to kill the man but every injury has the possibility of ending a person's life, especially broken legs.
I don't really see what Superman did as that much of a problem. He is still young and reckless and his ideologies and beliefs are still greater than his control of his emotions. Hopefully he'll learn from this, though. No matter what Superman tells himself or Ramsay, he was careless with Ramsay's life. Whether or not Ramsay deserved any care is a completely other conversation that will probably end with everyone believing he deserved a little bit of his own medicine. And by medicine I mean fists in his face.
Now Ramsay is the great K-Man! And he and Superman are both realizing that K-Man's proximity to Superman is making Superman weaker and weaker. So Superman is lucky that Metropolis has another hero that I don't particularly care for!
Steel is basically Cyborg that can still fuck.
And have I mentioned no wonder I though K-Man's look was so trashy? It's because he's a fucking wife-beater! I tend to forget to tie up some of the comments I make! Like in Batman Incorporated #4 when I began the issue wondering who Wingman was and if the alias was for a recognizable DC Hero. And then Damain begins wondering who he is as well! And then everyone learns that Wingman is...well, I won't spoil it here! I should really only try to spoil the comic in the title of each commentary, just in case someone hasn't read any of the others from this month. Lazy!
By the way, Superman knocks out K-Man. And then he and Steel hang out on the corner resting from the fight and getting to know each other better.
Yeah, two boring heroes! Metropolis sucks!
I guess I'll just have to believe Luthor knew about Krypton since nearly 700 comic books later, I just can't retain every little bit of every single book I've read!
A short back-up story follows that shows the origin of The Atomic Skull. He's also a wife beater except he beat his wife to death before escaping onto an experimental STAR Labs submarine which crashed and exposed him to some kind of radiation which led to him being able to yell purple until his face eventually falls off. The end!
Action Comics Annual #1 Rating: This was a good Annual that does what annuals are supposed to do. It showed off some of Action Comics main characters and told a stand-alone story for potential readers. I also like how it shows some important parts of the history between Luthor and Superman so it makes the Annual worthwhile for regular readers of the series as well while not forcing it to be mandatory because it's tied in to the regular series story arc.
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