Lois and Clark #2

Hey Superman? Want some gym advice? Maybe spend a little more time working the arms and a little less time, um, expanding the torso? Is that a thing? Are there supplements to help "expand chest and rib cage width"?

I've come to the conclusion that I must not be a real writer. Writers love to say how much they hate reading things they wrote in the past. But I read stuff I wrote like this from the last Lois and Clark commentary...

Lois has been publishing books under the pseudonym "Agent X". She raises awareness and crap. Her new book is going to let everybody know that Intergang is bad. Whew! I thought Intergang was getting off easy with everybody concentrating their hatred on the Supremacists and Superman. Instead of emailing the file to her publisher, she meets her in a clandestine back alley meeting where they're spied by some eavesdropper with glasses. If it weren't for the glasses, I would probably recognize who it was.

...and I think, "I'm so clever!"

Technically I think, "I was so clever last month! What happened?! Why is my writing so much worse now?!" Shouldn't I be filled with embarrassment and angst that I'll never write anything mature or anything that matters?! Why am I content in making stupid jokes about Superman's Clark Kent disguise?! Why do I always feel stuff I've written in the past is better than stuff I've written now?! That's all backwards! Maybe this feeling of not feeling the same feeling that writers feel is the feeling that writers feel which makes me feel like a real writer feels?!

I actually do know why my writing was better over a month ago than it is now! It's because I had less distractions in the form of mindless entertainment which I wanted to partake in over a month ago. Now the new Call of Duty is more interesting than most of the comic books DC is publishing. Plus I purchased a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons games bundled from GOG.com and I'm replaying one of my old favorites, The Temple of Elemental Evil. And I've found another British "game show" of which I'm obsessively watching every episode via YouTube (Would I Lie To You with David Mitchell and Lee Mack and various guest stars). So it makes sense that I might look at the top of my comic book stack to see Doctor Fate or Doomed or Telos or Lost Army or Earth 2: Society and think, "I wonder if any of my friends are currently playing Call of Duty?"

One other factor that might interfere with how much effort I want to expend doing anything creative: I live in Portland, Oregon, and I work nights. So at this time of the year, depending on when I can get to sleep after working factored by how much I obsessively play Temple of Elemental Evil, I sometimes don't see any sun at all for days on end. That's probably not healthy for some evolutionary reason, right?! Is this how people eventually turn into werewolves? I also haven't shaved in a few months, so I don't know how much of my beard is "regular facial hair growth" and how much is "signs I'm becoming a man-wolf of the the night"!

The first page does not endear me to Lois White. Not because they chose the name "White" and their address is "1938" which really fucking seems like Jurgens is sending some kind of neonazi racist message via this comic book about the two most perfect people (one of them a "Superman") having the perfect son but because Lois Lane is still obsessing over Pulitzers and casually denigrating the jobs usually done by other journalists.

I realize this is the first year they spent on Earth-You, so she's simply adjusting to her new life. As a nobody!

Lois is busy lying to her landlord about why she can't make rent which is fine because he's a creepy motherfucker who will probably wind up to be Superman White's Lex Luthor. Superman is busy stopping earthquakes in Chicago by tunneling around underground, moving huge chunks of earth about, and fusing others with his heat vision. I'm not a geologist but I can't see how Superman is helping and not ensuring Chicago will have many, many future earthquake problems in the near future. But that's the near future! What matters right now is stopping Shockwave from destroying Chicago without Superman actually being seeing stopping him. I suppose he could play the part of Oracle and just send an anonymous text message to Earth-You Superman saying, "Hey, I don't know if you've noticed (or you could not have noticed being that I'm at home baling hay and I totally noticed just with like my super ears and shit) but Chicago is having some problems. Signed, Anonymous Guy With Super Hearing And That's All. Seriously."

Superman stops Shockwave by stripping him naked and leaving him on a roof where he'll totally have to answer to the justice system's rigorous punishments. Or maybe just the angry stare of the building's custodian when he has to unlock the door to the roof to let this guy in his underwear down.

So Lois would choose murder? Good to know.

Superman keeps Shockwave's armor so that it won't ever be used again. At least not until Jon Double-el enters that phase of growing up where kids constantly go through their parents' things when their parents aren't home. I imagine the Whites are going to have some difficult years ahead of them.

I hope DC simply created this comic book to answer all of the continuity problems of The New 52 since it began. Now with Superman White acting in secret and having the powers to do pretty much anything anybody can think to do, DC's only answer to any question on continuity can be, "Oh yeah. Superman White did that at super speed."

Lois, being the Pulitzer prize winning Narrator, continues to harp on how everybody on Earth-You is a mistrustful xenophobic rat bastard. That sounds vaguely familiar. Have I read that somewhere?

Meanwhile back in the present, some guy named Filthy Dick Chambers reacts suspiciously to the Excalibur Jupiter Exploration Spaceship landing rather safely when he expected it to burn up on reentry. Luckily some military satellite snapped a picture of the underside of the ship as it reentered Earth's atmosphere which seems to show the outline of a man amidst the flames. I'm no geologist but that seems to be a mighty low flying satellite.

I think the artist had the right idea because according to this picture, Superman had to be on top of the ship guiding it in so that it wouldn't burn up. Unless I'm expecting the ship to be like a space shuttle. It was just confusing because the army grunt said, "Take a look underneath." But then he's just a dumb grunt and we all know how dumb army grunts are, right?! Well, the crickets seem to agree with me.

At school, Jon Double-el has a run in with his nemesis Roman! But before he can accidentally punch out all of Roman's teeth creating Roman's supervillain origin story and why he chose the name Toothless Threat, his mom comes out of the principal's office where she was apparently telling the principal how to do her job. How sick must teachers and principals be with everybody telling them how to do things? Although isn't that the way with every job? Even as a floor cleaner, I'm constantly told by about 95% of the people I run into who have cleaned floors in their lives (roughly 100% of all people in the world, apparently) how I should be doing things. People's favorite thing to tell me is where to put wet floor signs and it always happens to be exactly where they're currently standing. I guess all of the other floor signs you simply fucking strolled past didn't clue you in to the fact that maybe wet floor signs sometimes alert you to the fact that the entire fucking floor might be wet and not just a small diameter of floor around the floor sign. Another fun thing I get to deal with is when I wax the floor of an open 7-11 and then have to yell at grown adults not to fucking step over or go under the barricades I've made to keep them out of the freshly waxed aisles. I suppose the concept of a "barricade" is foreign to most people. Or maybe they think it only applies to people who don't desperately need a fucking Twix bar.

On their way home, Lois and Jon are driven off the road by some horrible men. You can tell they're horrible because they wear all black, have dark shades, and carry uzis. Another big clue was that they rammed a car with a woman and her child off of the road and down an embankment. This is probably why Lois and Jon are hiding in the woods with a gun and a crowbar on the cover! At first, I just thought they were doing farm chores. It seems reasonable to this kid who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"Door's open. Mighta got out." You think so, Genius of the Century? Are you sure? Did you check the glove box or under the seat?

Turns out they didn't get out. I guess the dark glasses kept them from seeing that they were right there in the front seat ready to kick the other door open and knock the guy with hair out. That's why I don't wear sunglasses unless they're pink and provide me with a nice rosy glow to my surroundings. It's just too easy to be fooled into thinking that nobody is actually around you with dark glasses on. And also maybe these guys are blind?

More men with more weapons arrive on the scene to capture or, more likely judging by their enthusiasm, kill a woman and her son. So they're horrible too although they might actually see Lois since they've left their dark glasses behind. Too bad Superman shows up and murders them all in cold blood. Although maybe he just injures them gravely. He can't be as careful as I think Superman generally should be because he also doesn't want to be seen. So when he smashes the first guy's face into the back of the van at super speed, he probably didn't crush the guy's entire skull at all. And the guy he pulls down into a fist sized hole in the earth? I'm sure the ground here is soft and malleable. Although he is protecting his family and I think there's a saying about mother bears that might come in handy here if only I could remember trite sayings.

Everybody gets home safe and Clark lies to Lois about the men being Intergang and how it's her fault that Jon was put in danger. He also tells her there was no sign of Hank Henshaw in the Excalibur because that's probably part of the lie about the men being Intergang when they're probably government black ops guys who are on to Clark White and his hobby. I suppose Hank Henshaw is in the barn along with all of Superman's other trophies. Jon Double-el may or may not have super hearing and knows all about his family's secret life.

Meanwhile an alien with a nice boob is still looking for the Oblivion Stone and has tracked it down to Superman's solar system! I suppose with any knowledge of the Sol System, they already know where the stupid stone has been taken so why not just say Earth?

Lois and Clark #2 Rating: +1 Ranking. So far this is a Superman book where Superman is acting like Superman. Not because it's technically not a New 52 book like all of the New 52 haters are probably raving about while punching kittens that aren't the kittens they loved when they were younger so fuck those fucking impostor kittens. It's because the entire premise gives Superman a conflict that he can't simply punch away. That's all a Superman story fucking needs and then--guess what?!--you can allow Superman to keep his crazy power levels! Yeah, guys. It's that fucking simple. Here's the basic premise of this story: Superman must keep his family safe while trying to retain not just a secret identity but complete secrecy as to his existence. But he's also Superman so he can't help but risk all of that to keep helping people. The end. That's it! Sure, there are some aspects I don't like but they're more problems with the way DC has "Marvelized" the DC Youniverse. I'll never feel comfortable with a universe where the general populace hates and despises superheroes. But then I don't feel comfortable in my real universe (America, 2015) where large swathes of the population hate other people so much that they constantly vote against their own best interests. I guess they think they're voting for their own best interests which are mostly interests like "I don't want other people doing things I don't approve of and I'll wave my gun around as much as I want as I demand they change their ways" but in reality they're just voting for "congressmen and businessmen with lots and lots of money stuffed down the front of their pants because pockets that big have yet to be invented but just imagine if I invent them and how much money I'll make that I'll get to keep in those pockets which is totally a realistic speculation and not a total fantasy wank-dream at all."