Action Comics #38

Oh god. This comic book just keeps getting scarier and scarier.

Because my father never paid any attention to me, the world now has this blog! And the only thing I've learned from it is that maybe my father was right! I'm not worth paying attention to! I don't know if I'm emotionally stable enough to read a Superman story about him returning home to find his parents waiting for him. They're going to be so sweet and nice and perfect and, even though they'll be soul sucking alien monsters, I'm still going to be envious of Clark!

This issue is called "Home is Where the Hell Is" because right?

The story begins with a flashback of eight year old Clark meeting He Who Walks Behind The Rows. Unless it's a dream. Or a hallucination. Clark can't think this is a real memory. No adult would be naive enough to believe in a god-monster that lives out in the corn fields commanding children to kill their parents. That's as silly as an immortal clown that needs a huge sacrifice every thirty years to sustain it. Or a jealous car with a will of its own! Or people calling a deadly flu Captain Trips! What a bunch of silly nonsense.

Now what is Clark up against? Some kind of "fire starter"?

Lana disappears down the end of the hallway which grows and grows and grows and now probably takes about five and a half minutes to walk down. And that's when it happens. That's when he hears his parents call out to him from the next room. Shit. I guess Smallville was established on an old Micmac burial ground.

Sometimes dead is better. Ayuh!

Clark's parents are really just the Smallville monster having a laugh at Clark's expense. But the monster is pretty good at his mimicry which causes Superman to feel a bit guilty when he thinks about how he's going to have to beat the crap out of his parents' corpses.

Untrue, Martha! The angriest person is probably the most intelligent person who is completely and utterly frustrated with having to deal with fucking stupid morons on a constant fucking basis.

Platitudes are right, Martha. Don't let anybody ever convince you that your demeanor in an argument or a debate somehow indicates how right or wrong or innocent or guilty you are. Every time I see one of those fucking true crime dramas narrated by that self-righteous lich Keith Morrison where he interviews people whose sole reason for believing somebody's guilt is due to the way the person didn't react the way they expected them to react, I realize that if I were ever to be a suspect in a murder investigation, I wouldn't stand a chance. Police guts and prosecutor intuition would deem me guilty as soon as they met me.

Clark finds out that Lana has been taken by one of the monsters and is thoroughly enjoying her memory of all the horror movies she saw as a kid. And then Clark is left alone to rebury the corpses of his parents. How is Clark going to figure out the mystery of Horrorville without Batman's help.,Or at the very least, a strong understanding of the culture of American horror stories.

Speaking of horror movies, I'm currently about an hour into Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives! It's not quite as bad as Part V but only barely. They spend even more time with overly goofy characters because the awful trend in horror in the eighties was to mix in as much comedy as gore. But the gore can't even compare to the first four movies. Just like Part V, they rely on lots of reaction shots of the person about to die then quick cuts to the weapon being thrust or swung or stabbed and then a cut back to the person dead with the weapon already in their head or stomach or whatever. At least they had the decency to basically ignore Part V. Jason Voorhees wasn't cremated like was mentioned in Part V and Tommy is played by another actor which helps me rationalize that Part V was just one of Tommy's psychotic hallucinations while in the mental hospital. One interesting aspect of this one that I'd forgotten is that it actually takes place at a summer camp full of children. The only problem is you know none of the kids are going to be killed. Although if this had been filmed in the 70s, those cabins full of kids would wind up being a bloodbath!

Once again, the movie was full of one-dimensional stereotypes. I guess that's not too different from any of the movies that never really tried too hard to flesh out the characters. They're mostly just fodder for Jason's (or his mom's) killing spree. But it's not really until Part V that they start making the characters over the top exaggerations of single character traits played simply for laughs.

The self-referential metatextual dialogue just seems amateurish and hackneyed. Apparently this movie gets credit for being some kind of Scream precursor but that's like trying to compare Spice World to the The Muppet Movie. They may be similar in execution but one is a work of art and the other is a poorly written movie that couldn't be bothered to think of a plot so they made the plot of the movie making a movie. The latter is Spice World! I said it was poorly written! And yes, I've seen Spice World (in the theater when it was released!) and reviewed it!

The best part of Part VI so far is the soundtrack since there have been three Alice Cooper songs so far. They're from Constrictor which isn't a great album but it's still Cooper! No wait. Two are from Constrictor: Teenage Frankenstein and He's Back. Hard Rock Summer is from I don't fucking know where. Maybe just the soundtrack? I only know it from the Alice Cooper Box Set, The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper.

Anyway, back on the Kent family farm, the only people in Smallville still not turned into Tommyknockers discuss what to do next. The first thing they need to do is remove the parasites clinging to their backs. But when that proves too difficult, Superman and Steel decide to finally listen to the people of Smallville who are now all psychic superheroes. Yeah, that makes sense. Why the fuck not? All that Lois Lane with psychic powers has apparently crushed my spirit. I'll accept anything now.

The psychic Smallvillians tell Superman he needs to kill all of the monsters. But they're attached to children and it isn't the 1970s, so he's going to have to put on his post-millennial kid gloves to deal with them. Maybe put a helmet on them and tell them that anything is possible and give them all trophies?

Bah, just burn the whole fucking place to the ground.

All of these monsters have come out of the Phantom Zone and Superman needs to put them back and fix the Phantom Zone leak. Are all these creatures native to The Phantom Zone? If that's true, then Jor-el was a fucking dick sending Kryptonian supervillains into a space already inhabited by sentient beings. Or did Jor-el just stick whatever the fuck he didn't like or understand in the Phantom Zone? Maybe Clark put these creatures in the Phantom Zone? Whenever a creature in his menagerie became too hard to take care of, he'd just flush it down the Phantom Zone? Anyway, the people of Smallville were using their powers to keep the leak sealed. But then Superman confused them and now Smallville is full of monsters from Stephen King's The Mist.

Action Comics #38 Rating: No change. I guess Clark can say fucking goodbye to his secret identity. He's been dealing with one psychic person after another and eventually one of them will decide not to keep his secret for him. He's lucky Lois forgot because she'll put anything in print just to get some praise.