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.

Batman Loves Superman #7

Is this comic book ever going to right itself? Did Brett Booth take a blow to the head recently? Does he not remember the proper orientation of comic books?

I have a nagging feeling that I'm going to get chastised for suggesting that a comic book has a "proper orientation!" How dare I suggest that the traditional and most oft-used orientation of comic books be the "proper" one! Well, I'll tell you why I can say that! Because the orientation the creative team is using in Batman/Superman #7 makes it a calendar!

This issue begins with a woman delivering mail. It really draws the reader in quickly as the reader wonders, "Will she be able to mail her package on time? Or will her life be forever ruined because the line moves too slowly and she can't get her loan application postmarked by 5:00!?" I suppose that might draw the reader in if the reader wasn't like me and didn't immediately start berating the woman for waiting until the last minute to get her loan application in the mail. She can't blame the people in line in front of her simply because they were better prepared and arrived at a decent time to get their errands done. She can't blame the postal employees even if they drag their feet with each customer because it's her own fault for waiting so long. I suppose if I were kind, I could imagine that she's done everything just as promptly as possible and has still arrived at this moment in time where she must now rely on the speed with which other people live their lives. But I'm not kind at all. I'm a jerk. I'm a huge asshole. Which is why I also can't bring myself to blame Batman and Superman for her failure when they bust every window in the post office while fighting each other, causing the postal employees to flee for their lives as the clock ticks over to 5 PM and the woman misses her deadline.

I won't blame them. But it looks like she will.

This moment is as ridiculous as those situations that used to arise in the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercials where somebody walking along with a jar of peanut butter would wind up nearly killing somebody holding a chocolate bar and they would discover the joy of peanut butter on chocolate. Who walks around eating peanut butter out of a jar in public? And if that person exists and another person happens to accidentally get their chocolate bar into the peanut butter jar, what kind of peanut butter jar carrying asshole suddenly decides that half of that chocolate bar is now his? The only person that should discover the delicious taste of peanut butter and chocolate is the grungy person that doesn't mind fishing her chocolate out of a stranger's peanut butter jar with her filthy hands and trusting that the peanut butter now on the end of that chocolate bar is not covered in hepatitis or syphilis (that's how those diseases are transmitted, right? From double dipped peanut butter?). And then after taking a bite, that person could then choose to share her discovery with the asshole that nearly broke her neck while roller blading down the street fingering a jar of peanut butter.

Anyway, this situation is just as ridiculous as the one I just proposed because who falls to the ground, angry and defeated about life, stoned on Mongul's Space Fury Pollen, just wanting to kill somebody and thinks, "Oh look. Google Glasses screaming 'Die die die' and 'Kill kill kill' at me. Might as well put them on and see what this is about!" Luckily for her, the glasses allow her to take her rage out on Superman as she now gets to control Nano-Enhanced Robot Batman.

But this woman is not the real villain. No, she is just a minor player in an epic struggle between mankind and the alien hordes that are dying to use mankind's rage to enslave the universe! That plan totally makes a lot of sense. And by "a lot of," I mean none at all. So I probably should have just said "none at all" instead of doing that cliche thing where I change the meaning of the phrase I just uttered just to underline my sarcasm. Now I just feel like a dirty, filthy internet blogger.

These are the butts of the real antagonists.

Toymaster Gameshop CTO, Whatsherfuckingname Crystalbones, has programmed a brilliant game that utilizes one million humans who believe they're controlling Batman and decide on the move they want to use against Superman. The game system picks the move most likely to get past Superman's defenses and chooses it. Whatsherfuckingname Crystalbones declares that each player has a million moves at their disposal and in a feat of amazingly accurate math, declares that each of Batman's punches is "literally one-in-a-trillion." And by "amazingly accurate," I mean "I'm fairly certain she fucking failed statistics so how did she program such an amazing game?" First off, each of the million players do not have one million different attacks at their disposal. I'll grant her that her amazing controller she invented allows for one million attacks. But then each punch is simply "one-in-a-million." I suppose if you want to mention 1 million twice and then pretend that you can multiply them together, you can carelessly declare that the trillion you've just come up with fits into her stupid word problem some how.

Although she does declare that the million users all have "millions of unique moves." But I don't know how long-lived Whatsherfuckingname Crystalbones is or how many alien programmers she employs, so I suppose it's possible that she somehow had enough time and manpower to think up one trillion different attacks. I have to admit she's probably a lot smarter than me because I can only come up with Round Kick, Jump Right, Low Punch, Jump Left, Back Kick, Back Round Kick, Jumping Back Kick, Foot Sweep Left, Front Kick, Lunge Punch, Jumping Kick, Low Kick, Foot Sweep Right, Jump, Block, Squat, and Move Forward. And of those, I'd simply continually attempt the "Lunge Punch" or the "Jumping Back Kick." Those always worked well!

Mongul wonders why the humans would continue to try to defeat Superman even as they all begin to realize it's not a game but reality. And Whatsherfuckingname Crystalbones begins blathering all that anti-Superman bullshit that I can't get behind because it paints humanity as a bunch of whining assholes that are more concerned with what others have than what's good in their own lives. I can't get behind humanity being like that. But I might be able to make an exception for Americans.

This is how I walk around Portland. I imagine people screaming at me, "You are not rich! You don't have a fancy handlebar mustache! You are not a DJ! You can't afford retro chic clothing that makes you look poor! You aren't nostalgic enough for last week!" Fuckers.

Mongul swells with pride as his scheme allows for the little people to enjoy their power. But mostly he's just engorged because he's going to kill everyone on Earth as he saps their hatred and anger to fuel his new Warworld. And the only person on Earth that can now stop his plan is The Toymaker! He kicks over the Alien Gaming Console in an effort to kill the program and save the world!

But stupid Superman saves the console from smashing into the ground because it might just be the only thing keeping Batman alive. Hey, look Superman. Batman's already dead and it's kind of your fault for ignoring Mongul's arrival in Gotham City. I say ignore because there is no way in hell you didn't hear all that space shit go down with your super hearing that you're always bragging about. You're always going on and on about hearing humanity's collective heartbeat speed up or how you can hear Lana Lang on the other side of the world flipping the fuck out. But when Batman needs help? "Oh, sorry! I must have spaced out for a second while you were getting a hole blown in your chest!" Now, I'm not laying all of the blame on you, Clark. Bruce is just as responsible for constantly insisting he doesn't need your help and that he is, in fact, better than you at everything. So now look where all your stupid game playing has gotten you guys? Fighting to the death playing a stupid game! Way to go, assholes.

This comic book should just be titled "Asshole/Big Dick." Maybe it couldn't be named that because that title was already taken by a gay porno mag.

Oh? Now it's 90 million? So I guess it was "literally" one-in-ninety-trillion. Unless the math is different!

Batman begins repeating my commentary when he tells Superman that the game has already killed him so Superman should just go ahead and destroy the console already. Looking back, I see I only got through half of that statement about Batman already being dead and that he wouldn't want to risk everybody's lives by remaining a Nano-Enhanced Robot version of himself because I was distracted by pointing out how Superman is a huge dick. But Batman gets it! Save the world, Superman! Batman has given his consent!

Superman decides instead of saving the world at Batman's expense, a better plan is to get killed by Batman so that he can become Nano-Enhanced Robot Superman. Good plan! I can't see anything going wrong with this one! I mean, the only downside to Batman being a Nano-Enhanced Super Robot was that he had no free will and was being controlled by 90 million raging gamerholics!

Oh! That must be Superman's plan! He'll now be controlled by 45 million or more of those gamerholics which will allow Batman to break free of their control and figure out how to save the day because Batman is much better at solving problems that need more than punching to solve them.

Crickets.

Batman learns a lesson in stupid comic book tropes by learning that after the heroes fight, they team up to beat the bad guy. Somebody says, "It's a trope 'cause it works." Oh, bullshit! It's a trope because most comic book writers are lazy bastards! It's easier to script "Enter Batman. Superman punches Batman. Batman punches Superman" than to script "Someone appears at the door and knocks. Superman: 'Who is it?' Voice from off-panel: 'It's Batman!' Superman opens the door and hugs Batman. Superman: 'Hi Batman! Glad to see you! I'm glad you didn't surprise me or I might have bopped you one on accident!' Batman: 'Oho! That would have been a bad mix-up that would have wasted much of our time discussing the real problem at hand!'"

Okay, maybe the punching is more exciting.

The trope works and all the raging gamers in the world actually decide to team up and defeat Mongul. I know this ending is bullshit because I play Halo and Call of Duty. In Halo, there's always plenty of people willing to drive their teammates off of a cliff in the Warthog. And in Call of Duty during Hardcore Ricochet where if you kill a teammate with one of your weapons, you die, there will always be at least one asshole going around blowing up his teammate's explosives so that it hurts them and kills the teammate that planted it. Fucking griefers.

Anyway, Mongul is defeated and tossed in the Phantom Zone and everything returns to normal! Hooray! And somehow Batman isn't dead! Yay! I guess the Nano-bots just rebuilt all of his organs so he's not a Nano-Enhanced Super Robot anymore; he's just normal Bruce Wayne, human. I guess. Whatever.

Nice job on consistency, Greg Pak! Fucking up your own themes from the first story arc where Batman trusts the boy to take care of his own problems and Superman doesn't so he interferes with the kid's life and saves him. Basically this is the opposite of that. Now Batman doesn't trust people to save themselves and Superman does. Oh yeah, by "nice job on consistency" I meant the exact opposite!

Batman Loves Superman #7 Rating: -3 Ranking. I have to give this comic book a negative ranking because it just sort of hand-waves away killing Batman and bringing him back to life so that he's completely normal again. And I suppose Superman was killed as well by a single punch of Nano-Enhanced Super Robot Batman which really fucking doesn't make any sense also. I'm also not a fan of Batman telling Superman people are afraid of him because he trusts them too much. That's just stupid! I'm always afraid of the people that trust me too much. More to the point, I resent them because they trust me to live my own life instead of doing everything for me! Assholes.

Batman Loves Superman #6

Mongul's biceps are bigger than his waist. And his head is smaller than his cock.

Last issue, Mongul decided to surprise everybody on Earth with a free video game system that tests their skills so that he can build an army out of video game geeks. His plan might work as long as he is able to keep all of his soldiers anonymous or else they'll lose their self-confidence and their balls of steel. "Balls of steel" is a genderless descriptor of the false bravado of members of the online community. I don't think the "balls" refers to testicles but to burning balls of rage that make up their entire being. I remember playing Halo years ago when it wasn't as easy to mute everybody and we just sort of took it for granted that we had to hear the other team. But you can only hear people screaming "faggot" and "nigger" so many times before you're looking for the button that tells you the phone number of your opponent's mom so you can tell her what kind of a shitbag her progeny has turned out to be. My friends and I used to speak in high pitched voices and treat everybody really super friendly while playing Halo. I don't think Mongul would have chosen us for his army.

Anyway, Batman tried to ruin Mongul's plan and wound up getting shot in the chest with a plasma rifle. Superman, who can hear everything in the world, did not rush to save him. And, I think, that's where this issue begins!

Oh God I hope it's not sideways this month.

Oh fuck me. Well, this will be the only time I leave the pictures sideways. Apparently I understand better than DC when a gimmick has run its fucking course.

Batman currently has a huge, gaping hole in his chest, so he's dead. Or, here's another theory, it's not Batman! I bet when Hiro gave Batman the cheat code to defeat Nightwing, he also managed to log him out of the game somehow, replacing himself with a virtual pre-programmed Batman. But since the game plays over reality, I don't know how Batman could have logged out. Maybe he just pulled that trick where Commissioner Gordon turns around and Batman goes home.

Superman arrives and notices the CTO's skeleton is made out of crystal. He notices Hiro trying not to die. And he sees Batman, calling him "a fool beyond saving." Well, that's not the kind of thing Superman would normally say if one of his buddies died! So he must realize it's just a simulation. Or, like I said last commentary, Superman is a giant dickhole.

Oh Superman. You saw the female's crystal skeleton. Why couldn't you have seen that dead Batman was a fake?

But apparently Batman isn't a fake because a cloud of nano-particles reform his body and bring him back to life so that he can Narration Box again and speak to Superman in a mechanical voice. But he doesn't have lungs or a heartbeat so, you know, that kind of sucks. Batman is also somewhat under the control of Jimmy Olsen and the other Beta Testers. They're still too stupid and filled with Asteroid Bloodrage to listen to Toymaker about how this isn't part of the game. They just keep playing and figure the next level should be Batman Versus Superman.

Except the fight doesn't last very long when Batman realizes Jimmy Olsen is trying to control him and Superman begins chastising Jimmy.

I liked this story last issue when I thought it was going to be a silly little light-hearted romp. But now Batman has died and one of the most powerful aliens in the universe is fucking with Earth. When it becomes serious like this, the stupid stuff I was looking past before now stands out in stark contrast to the heavy tone and makes me hate this story. Batman is dead? He really died here? And now he's Robot Batman linked to a video game console and controlled by Jimmy Olsen? Bah. Fuck that bullshit. You can't fucking kill Batman even if it's just a short lived death! Greg Pak is breaking DC's biggest rule! Batman doesn't die! And he was dead for a bit until the nano-particles brought him back. I suppose the main rule at DC is "Batman doesn't lose." I guess, technically, you can kill him all you want as long as he still fights through it and overcomes. Perhaps sideways comic books take place on a different Earth!

Also, you can apparently turn him into a laser eyed robot.

Agnes launches the Alpha of the Toymaker's MMO and all the raging gamers log on to try their hand at controlling Batman. But they're only super violent because of the Golden Fury Spores that Mongul dropped all over Earth. So this isn't a commentary on video games making people violent. It's a commentary on drug use!

I guess Toymaker sponsored this gaming system via Kickstarter which is why so many thousands of people have the gear necessary to play the game. All the backers probably got free Virtual Reality Kits months ago. And now they're all being asked to kill Superman because of all those stupid reasons that Lobdell has been trying to use to make Superman look bad in the eyes of humanity. He's so strong that he's dangerous. He's not actually helping; he's just a lure for trouble and violence. He's going to sleep with all of our human women. You know. The usual arguments!

So Batman begins pummeling Superman and he likes it. And I'm sure it's not just the Golden Fury Spores causing his violent glee. It's just that, you see, Batman is also a gigantic dickhole.

The issue ends with Batman and Superman fighting and Mongul looking on proudly, just waiting for the proper moment to enslave the human race.

Batman Loves Superman #6 Rating: -4 Ranking. Mongul's entire plan is to harness the violence inherent in humans. Why is he wasting his time? There are so many more species in the universe that are probably more bad-ass fighters than humans with their tissue paper thin skin and their penchant for bleeding out and losing consciousness in just a few minutes. And what about our empathy? Fuck, hasn't Mongul been listening to the Green Lanterns that he's always fighting? Earthlings are special creatures with a capacity for love and hope and kindness like no other creatures in the Omniverse! So why try to increase their minimal amounts of violent behavior for his own uses? Mongul is an idiot. Go enslave Jruk the New Green Lantern Recruit's homeworld! Now those guys are major bloodthirsty madmen!