Action Comics #23

I've never seen a threat to the universe take a punch so poorly. "Owwwww! I'm telling!"

I ended my last Action Comics commentary with this statement:

Come on, Scott Lobdell! I truly, truly believe in you! I think you can write a decent comic book but you just don’t fucking care. You want to be a writer and you want the check. But you don’t seem to give a shit about the art! Prove to us that you have it in you! PLEASE! Spend some time crafting a fucking story! Take a few months and give up on “the Marvel Way.” Write the script, the page layouts, the dialogue! Form the fucking story before hand. Don’t worry about whether you’re surprised by the story or not. Worry about surprising (and pleasing!) the readers! Fuck me, Lobdell. I know you have it in you. I know it! Please try. Just fucking try. Don’t you long to do something like V for Vendetta! Where’s your passion to produce something as revolutionary as The Dark Knight Returns? Be meaningful, you fucking asshole! Please! I’m just so fucking tired of your hackneyed bullshit. I’m willing to fucking believe in you. I know I’m just a shitheel internet nerd. But prove me wrong, you glorious bastard! PROVE ME FUCKING WRONG!

And since that commentary, Scott Lobdell has written the three best comics of his New 52 career! Do I really have that kind of power? Am I a God amongst nerds? Should I be using this power for the good of mankind? Oh wait. Getting Scott Lobdell to write better is for the good of mankind. So, you know, you're welcome!

I just hope Scott didn't Lobdell this comic. I'm afraid to turn to the first page to see, "His name is Jimmy Olsen. He's a photographer for the Daily Planet. He's also Superman's Best Friend!"

The first three pages are composed of two panels (you do the math!) of review material so that the reader can learn the names of the characters and catch up on what was happening. The space creature who came in peace last issue but then began beating shit up and threatening people is Straith. Then there's Superman who I, but not the narrator, suspect everybody knows. Lourdes is the leader of these aliens that have come to use Earth as a base to battle some creature called Lexus that threatens Omnithing. Lourdes brought along two toadies, Seamus and Ordling. Superman just got his ass kicked but his main concern in this confrontation is to make sure that nobody thinks he's gay.

Superman resorts to threatening the aliens with a time out if they don't do as he asks. Well, he also punches them all over the moon but he can't be hitting them that hard when the aliens are engaging in reasonable conversation with each other as they fly through the non-air.

At least stick some exclamation points on these sentences so I feel some sense of emergency or surprise.

I suppose the big metal creature on the cover is Lexus. It's a threat to the universe because it's really, really big and it's made of metal and Straith has mentioned that it's a threat to the very universe itself. So once again, Superman must punch something into submission to save the world. He'll probably also spout some really unfunny dialogue that may or may not make me soil myself in frustration.

Wouldn't it be awesome if humans shit in response to overly emotional situations? I wonder if pants would ever have been invented if that were the case? I bet fashion would have only gotten as far as skirts and disposable underpants.

The Non-Certified Spouse and I were at the Lincoln Zoo many years ago and as we were watching the Lemur sit upon a branch, it began to scream it's bloody head off. As it did so, it just began pooing and pooing as it screamed. I turned to The Non-Certified Spouse and said, "Wouldn't it be awesome if humans screamed like that when they shit?" Imagine a business meeting with a dozen professional men and women all trying to impress each other when one excuses himself and heads down the hallway. A few seconds later, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" I just think we'd all be a bit less uptight if we weren't all sneaking off in secret for our bowel movements, trying to hide the sound and the scent even though we all do it and we all know what we're all doing. But hush hush! Nobody needs to mention it! I'd rather live in a world where shitting is no big deal. I guess I could move to another country that does act that way! In China, I walked in to quite a few public restrooms with men just squatting over a hole in an alcove making eye contact with you as you wandered by to find an alcove hole of your own. When I first saw it I thought, "Can't they at least face the wall?"

Apparently Scott Lobdell didn't think Superman was powerful enough because now Superman needs a club to battle the Pax Galactica! This is some Hal Jordan bullshit here. "I'm Superman with some of the greatest powers the universe has ever seen! But what this situation calls for is...A CLUB!"

At least it's a super duper atomic mace. That makes up for its stupidity.

No, I thought about it again and it doesn't make up for its stupidity. Why does Superman need a fucking club?

Oh! Remember how in Superman #22, Superman noticed a robot made out of Infintium? That was pretty fucking stupid, hunh? But not as stupid as Superman's decision to wield an Atomic Mace!

Lourdes decides to compromise with Superman. Instead of killing him for disrespecting her, she decides to let him not kill her and help her defeat Lexus, The Destroyer of Life Throughout the Universe!

Oh fuck me. Did it just say "faux"? Anybody want to ditch this comic book and go get dessert and coffee at The Pied Cow? Anyone?

You might not be able to tell by the scan but Lexus is about the size of a moon. He taunts Superman and ignores Lardo and Golbraith and Shamus and Fingerling because Superman is obviously the one among these creatures that is capable of kicking his ass. So he's getting all psycholojiggy on Superman's ass. But Superman is too stupid to fall for mind games. Plus he has a fucking mace, you metal monster!

I wonder why he's called Lexus? Did Lobdell get some kind of advertising kickback for using the name?

Even though Superman just defeated the entire Pax Galactican Army, Lourdes decides that he isn't needed in the battle against Lexus.

This might be why you can't defeat it, you ding dong.

Lexus vomits a sickly green energy at Pax Galactica but Superman, knowing how weak the idiots are, jumps in front of them to block the vomit blast. That's when the Narrator decides to impart a bit of philosophical wisdom on the reader. It goes something like this: "Superman thinks he's invulnerable but he isn't because, you know, nothing is." I'm paraphrasing and making it sound more serious than the Narrator is making it sound. This Narrator might be the same asshole snowman that Narrated The Year Without a Santa Claus because it sounds like he really wants to teach somebody somewhere a fucking lesson of some kind. Jesus. That white ass snow man even thought he needed to teach kids how to open fucking doors in that one! Excited for the Holiday Season and the Christmas Specials and then that fucker decides to hurt my feelings while telling his bullshit, racist propaganda!

After all the tension of Superman being hit by a blast that nobody in the universe can withstand and the Narrator explaining how haughty Superman accidentally became to believe that he was invulnerable and after Superman plummeted to the surface of the moon, felled by the magic blast, this is Superman afterward:

"Pffffft. I'm fine." Way to fucking undermine your whole point, Lobdell. Fucking jerksack.

I'm fucking ashamed that I was beginning to give Lobdell the benefit of the doubt as regards to his writing. I think he had a ghost writer for Superman Annual #2! Or Dan Jurgens did most of the fucking work.

Lourdes asks Superman if he's okay because she needs to get back to saving the Omniverse pretty quick here. When he says he is, she doesn't rush back into battle urgently. Instead she tells Superman a story about how Lexus the Evil Destroyer of All Life Throughout the Omniverse came to be.

It turns out Lexus the Metal Monster of Ultimate Destruction is Lourdes's brother. And it also turns out (unsurprisingly) that Scott Lobdell doesn't know how language works. Here's what Lourdes says:

Though his body was born twenty-three years ago on the day of my birth, the evil that consumed my brother had infected his heart long before he began to practice the dark arts.

The first half of that sentence has no relation to the rest of it! It sounds like she's trying to say that her brother began to practice the dark arts before his body was born and the evil infected his heart long before that. I'm beginning to think Scott Lobdell might be a Panda Bear eating Scrabble tiles so that he can later poop out his scripts. Is DC Comics headquartered in the Bronx Zoo?

So her brother became evil. Though Racoons are masterminds of their urban domain, Lexus's father cut his heart from his body.

Evil is not a sentient thing! It's a fucking concept, people! I'm especially talking at you, Soy Rakelson!

Evil keeps the heart alive because that's the weird kind of way that evil works. Apparently Evil is some kind of web stretching out across the universe, controlling people and using it for its own ends. My friend Soy Rakelson used to always try to trump me in debates by getting me to say that I believe evil exists. And every time, I would have to tell him that I don't think of evil in the same way he's thinking of it. He's picturing some capital "E" Evil running amok with its own ends, manipulating people to its service. While I just see it as a concept or a way of describing something truly horrible done by a sentient mind for their own desires. So Soy would say, "Hitler was Evil." And I would say, "Hitler did a shitload of evil things." And then Soy would ask me where my faith is in that super special condescending way people who think they're saved speak to people they know are stubbornly going to Hell.

Superman takes Lourdes's Enchanted Sword and flies up to threaten Lexus right to his face. I guess since Superman knows this creature is mostly made up of space junk and one tiny little evil heart that should be dead anyway, he can kill it.

Murderer!

The Narrator's explanation for Superman's logical belief that this wasn't murder basically amounted to "Lexus was sentient but he wasn't really that sentient, right?" When it comes to DC Heroes that don't kill, there is an addendum to that rule: If the person has already been killed once, it's okay to kill them a second time. So don't become a super villain if you've ever died on the operating table and arrogant doctors brought you back to a seeming state of sentience and humanity. Because you aren't really human; you're just an undead monster.

Because Superman has saved the Pax Galactica, they become indebted to him. He is now the ruler of Pax Galactica and can command them as he pleases. It's more like he's the leader of a party of NPCs in Dungeons and Dragons. He's got Straith the Barbarian, Lourdes the Paladin, Ordling the Thief, and Seamus the Bard. And everybody lives happily ever after except for me because I still have two questions. The first question is this: why the fuck did it begin with Hector Hammond finding Straith in space and Superman acting like he was fine working with Hammond? That question probably doesn't have an answer since Lobdell probably didn't know where the fuck his story was going at that point either. And my second question:

What was Superman responding to and what the fuck was he going to say when he said, "My false--?" I think Lourdes was first scripted as saying, "Your false humility does you a discredit, my liege." But somebody thought better of the line and forgot to fix Superman's response.

The back-up story is the final chapter of The World of Krypton and fuck it because it's shit.

Action Comics #23 Rating: -4 Ranking. This story began nowhere and went nowhere and did nothing. Although it was what I generally expect from Scott Lobdell, so I'm glad to see he's back in a place where I can understand him. Finding his last three comic books were decent or better was just unnerving. I'm much more comfortable with this piece of shit comic book in the world.