I got the special Ruin the Original Cover With Adverts Variant!
Action Comics #50 Rating: No change.
Twitter would be better if it didn't allow people to comment on other people's tweets. Fully 95% of people should just stop having opinions because their opinions are boring, uninteresting, and poorly thought out. Most Reply Jokes on Twitter are just people restating the original joke in an unsubtle way and thinking that they're fucking hilarious. But I guess replying to people is the entire point of Twitter anyway. Nobody really fucking cares what anybody else has to say anyway. They just want a forum to spew their narcissistic thoughts to the other narcissists who aren't listening anyway. We know this is true because anybody who follows more than around fifty people can't be paying any attention to what the people they're following are tweeting. People who follow hundreds or thousands of other people on Twitter may as well be following nobody because their Twitter feed is now just white noise from the thousands of posts scrolling through their feed every minute.
Tumblr would be better if most of the people using Tumblr didn't exist. Fully 95% of the people on Tumblr are cats willingly walking into a room full of people in rocking chairs trying to get their tails under one of the rails so they can scream and hiss at the person having a lovely day rocking. They're people desperate to have a condition in the DSM to use as armor against any kind of criticism while at the same time moaning about how the DSM has now labeled their cognitive state as a disorder. They're kids rushing toward androgyny so that they can spit in the face of anybody who honestly misgenders them with no malice intended. They're a generation who seem to believe the greatest power they can wield is crushing free speech by ridiculing those who actually understand why it's important. You guys, they literally believe the word literally makes everything literally more literal.
Facebook would be better if it just didn't exist. Do I really need to know how many of my relatives are mean-spirited racist assholes or easily hurt downers with a mental state more fragile than their collection of crystal unicorns? How many hours of inner contemplation and self-betterment are lost to shitty games with Saga or Ville in the title? A little piece of my metaphorical soul dies every time I see any "news" story on the Trending Sidebar. And what is Facebook really used for anyway? It's pretty much just Birth Announcements and Pet Obituaries.
Blogs would be better if the people running the blogs stopped writing them as if they're speaking to an audience. Because--let's face the horribly unjust facts of my life--nobody is reading anything on the internet unless it's so they can reply with their own opinions on the topic of the blog. Nobody is entertained by other people's thoughts anymore. They just want a forum to spew forth their unwanted and probably unwashed opinions. Which is why I'm going to stop offering any and all opinions on everything. Because nobody fucking gives a shit. They just look at the title of the post and scroll down to the Comments section where they can tell me what they thought of the comic in the title. One of first people who began commenting on my blog eventually became somebody that I was glad to see commenting and with whom I eventually enjoyed interacting. But when he first began commenting? I was fucking annoyed with him! He began by simply posting his own reviews of the comic books in the comments section! I'd rather have people swinging by calling me "Lead Twat" and then getting super pissed off at me for "personal attacks" when I shot back at them and called them a dum-dum! But that's part of the problem as well! People who do actually react to my "reviews" might take them personally and then personally attack me in the comments because they feel justified. So they tend to think I fired the first shot when I can hardly even remember what stupid shit I typed the day after I typed it!
None of this has anything to do with Action Comics. But then, most of what I've written in my "comic book reviews" has very little to do with the actual comic! If you want a real review, there are plenty of shit people writing dishonest reviews because they're so afraid of pissing off any of the creators they may have once met at a con and now think of as a personal friend. Here's a quote from the Weird Science blog's Telos #6 Review to show I did the least amount of research as possible to back up my point: "I hate saying all of this because Jeff King could possibly be the nicest dude in the world and if not the nicest, he's definitely in the running......... I just don't like this series." Why does that guy use so many periods? Doesn't he know there are kids in Africa who can't end their sentences without sounding too excited or unsure because of his waste?
Regarding that last paragraph, I suppose that wasn't a dishonest review. But you can see the writer's trepidation in voicing an honest opinion because he didn't want to hurt Jeff King's feelings. Look, Eric (I think that was his name)! Don't worry about hurting a creator's feelings! They received a nice paycheck to compensate them for the amount of internet shit they're going to get over every single stupid thing they write. You know why I don't mind calling Scott Lobdell the poster child for the dangers of unsafe sex? Because he's fucking swimming in X-men cash! He doesn't give a shit what I have to say because he's got the greatest shield in the world: scads and scads of money! If he really cared about criticism, he'd stop writing garbage, right?! The only writing he really fucking seems to care about is when he's endorsing his checks at the bank. And even then, I bet his signature is mostly a line. Wait! I can actually verify that! Let me see. Where is the Big Book of First Issues he unwittingly signed for me as I stood there thinking, "You write shit, mate." Oh! Here it is beside me. Let me have a look . . . yep. Mostly a line. He can't even be bothered with his own name!
All of this is to say nothing because here I am writing a blog on the internet, posting on Tumblr, linking it to Twitter, and, occasionally, sending it over to Facebook so my friends and family can think, "What the fuck is this asshole doing with his life?" Here are my shit opinions on what is primarily shit pop culture, internet! Suck it!
A lot of the worst New 52/DC You material has just been ideas cobbled from Young Justice episodes but done much worse.
It's not that
Young Justice didn't take ideas from pre-existing DC Comic book stories as well. It's just that they incorporated previous DC History into a show that took the DC Universe in its own direction (you know, an interesting one). So they took the Glorious Godfrey idea of turning the masses against the heroes and they took the whole metagene Bloodlines thing and they threw them in the
Young Justice slow cooker as part of the big story. But I can't help feeling that this whole House of Dawn thing is a bit too reminiscent of
Young Justice: Invasion where Vandal Savage and a host of other baddies created a secret society to turn a bunch of humans into superbeings whom they could control in an effort to take over the world. The bad guys even have a similar name for the group since in the cartoon it's The Light and here it's Dawn Command. Or Savage Dawn. Or Dawn of the Dum-Dums.
Luckily for those people who haven't been writing a blog about comic books to help them remember everything that has been going on in every monthly title DC puts out, Vandal Savage recounts the events of the Superman titles across the last year. He doesn't tie them together as neatly as he should because they don't really tie together that neatly. When all the events are mentioned quickly in the space of a couple of pages though, it sounds sort of like he had a plan that made sense. The gist of it is that Superman lost his powers and Vandal Savage drained them. With the power he stole from Superman that he could have just taken directly from the sun and in bigger quantities although that story would have been boring shit, Vandal has merged the JLA Watchtower with the Fortress of Solitude with The Eye of the Storm to create a comet magnet. Now he's going to capture the comet that gave him his powers so that he can have more power than even the power he stole from Superman or could have taken directly from the sun. And he's captured the entire Justice League so nobody can stop him now!
I mean, Superman will probably stop him. But probably not in this issue. That will probably happen in Superman #50.
Just fucking use solar power already! Stop bothering with the negligible amount of energy in Lex Luthor's fat cells. He got all of that energy from the sun to begin with!
I've never understood power as the motivation for being an evil villain. Why would anybody want to bother? Vandal Savage is immortal and has the resources to live any kind of unfettered life he'd like to live. But he'd rather spend his time causing all of this drama? I guess the power of the comet is like super-heroin.
Meanwhile, Superman is now powered by Kryptonite. It's a comic book so it doesn't have to make sense. All a comic book has to do is present an idea while raising its eyebrows and going, "Hunh? Hunh? Never thought of that before, did you?!" The idea this time is "What if Superman used Kryptonite as chemotherapy?!?!?!?!?!" I had to add all of the extra punctuation because that's how I imagine the idea was presented at the yearly "What the fuck kind of stupid ass stories are we going to put Superman in this year?" corporate board meeting.
Vandal Savage shoots Superman out of the sky while Kal is using his new Kryptonite Flight Power which works differently than his Yellow Sun Flight Power.
Batman finishes the "more importantly" statement with "he always has friends" and I sprain my wrist doing a jerking off motion.
So basically Superman's plan is to have friends. Is that really a solid plan? I currently have a friend on Facebook asking her friends for help moving and apparently nobody is responding because she sent out the second message after the plea for help which is always the "shame on you all for not helping me" message. I bet that really got everybody running to the door to help out! I suppose I could have volunteered to help but my plan is not to have friends. My plan is to do everything myself and only interact with other people when I absolutely have to.
Yeah because that would have been a dick thing to say! "Hey, friends! You're my back-up plan! But know this: there's no chance you're going to be able to do anything if me and the Justice League couldn't! Pathetic B-List losers!"
Superman's plan to have friends means he has to save his friends. So that might be a bit of a flaw in his plan. It's why he had a secret identity! So his friends don't get in the way of his plans! But now Vandal Savage has to punch Superman a whole bunch of times because Vandal's plan is to distract Superman with punches until the next part of the plan takes place. The next part is when the comet is close enough to Earth to turn all of Savage's offspring into super assholes.
All of Superman's friends ask themselves, "What would Superman do?" And the answer to that is "throw his life away by relying on friends instead of making plans." So they all stick around Metropolis as the Eye of the Storm begins crashing into it. If I were one of Superman's friends, I'd ask myself, "Which one of us can stop that fucking comet since that's Vandal's main plan? Shouldn't Green Lantern be stopping it or something instead of just battling Vandal on his ship? I mean, if you stop the comet, you stop his plans. So, um, you know. Someone? Zatanna maybe? She can say "Comet be gone!" backwards, right?"
Vandal begins to show compassion for his children this issue because it mirrors Superman's feelings for his friends. But Vandal is just using them for his own ends while Superman . . . well, Superman is technically using his friends for his own ends too. Except his ends aren't selfish so it's okay to manipulate people towards his goals. I mean, not that he's manipulating them! He's, um, inspiring them! Inspiring them to be great enough to throw their lives away! If I were Jimmy Olsen, I would be inspired to call Green Lantern to stop that comet.
Vandal sends his children on a shuttle towards the comet to see if he'll survive close proximity to it. He and Superman are also on the shuttle. I mean, they're literally on the shuttle and not in it like the passengers are. Vandal shoots Superman and kills him while Vandal hops off the shuttle to land on the ground in a broken, immortal heap. I'm sure he'll be fine by Superman #50. Superman, meanwhile, falls into the Fortress of Solitude which finally recognizes him and restores him to greatness. So that's all he needed to get his powers back? Find somebody who could lift that stupid oversized key to unlock the Fortress and let him in?
Now that Superman has his powers back, he doesn't need his friends because he can just punch his way through all of his problems. And now that Vandal's children have become super children thanks to the comet, their plan is to punch their way through the problem (which is Superman). So even with all the talk of needing plans to win, it's all going to come down to a slugfest anyway. Oh comic books. Don't ever change. And by that I mean change. Fucking just change already. I'm tired of your shit.
