Action Comics #12

Superman versus The Dirty Spaceman.

Superman begins this issue in a fugue state. He relives leaving the farm and his first exciting days at the Daily Planet when he still believed he had a shot with Lois Lane. The fantasy continues with the beginnings of the Justice League. He compares them to a new Camelot which is just tempting Daemonite fate. And then he experiences the Future Yet To Come where he’s married to Lois Lane. He then turns to the deathly ghost and says, “I can still change it, right?! I can still change it!” But before Superman can run to the window and throw Jimmy Olsen a sack full of coins for the fattest goose in the market, he is inexplicably pulled from his fantasy.

I’m surprised he even feels this.

It turns out the Dirty Spaceman is mind-controlling everybody so that he can kidnap Lois’s niece without any trouble. But just hitting Lois with the truck was enough to distract Superman. He doesn’t even seem to notice the girl being taken by the weird burned face Spaceman. He’s desperate to save Lois’s life.

While Lois being near death has distracted Superman, it’s also caused Lois’s niece to struggle and escape from the Dirty Spaceman. Her mental powers seem to be amplified by close contact to the Dirty Spaceman which enables her to break free and fly herself to Lois and help her with the pain. Annoyed, the Dirty Spaceman uses his mental powers to throw a car at Superman which Superman easily deflects.

Et tu, Superman?

See? Now that’s an appropriate response to the “Is that all you got?” attitude.

Pretty sure this is actually Grant Morrison’s reaction to writers using the “Is that all you got?” cliche.

The Dirty Spaceman’s identity is actually Captain Comet.

Here he is in the early nineties with a cleaner face and his tighty whiteys on the outside of his costume.

The Who’s Who says Captain Comet was born on a farm in Kansas to parents named John and Martha. Wait. What? No wonder Grant Morrison decided to use him as a foil for Superman. Adam Blake (Captain Comet) was created in 1951, well over a decade past Superman’s first appearance. But he’s not an alien so the story wasn’t completely plagiarized. Captain Comet was born as a comet was passing across the sky. In this version of Action Comics though, it looks like it could have been when Superman crashed to Earth. He’s apparently some kind of mutant with the mental and physical powers of a human evolved 100,000 years past the current model. Superman knows more of Adam’s background since he got a glimpse of Comet’s mind when Comet invaded Superman’s mind.

He’s only the first Superman because he was showing off at a much earlier age.

Later, Captain Comet was visited by the Oorts, a race that collect Neo-Sapiens to turn into warriors. They collected him and now they want to collect Suzie, Lois’s niece.

“Adam! Adam! Be thou not afraid! No harm will come unto thee. Your efforts are needed for the survival of all Earthlings. Come, I shall showeth thee….”

Oh! I remember why I know Captain Comet! I have an issue or two of DC Presents with Superman and Captain Comet!

Earlier, Suzie made mention of Captain Comet telling her about “the Cuckoo’s Nest”. This may indicate that the neo-sapien persona replaces the sapien persona that Suzie was meant to have. So it wouldn’t be a mutation at all. It’s actually a Cuckoo, kicking the old personality out of the body, in effect killing it, so that the neo-sapien can live and grow.

Meanwhile, the firefighters are busy clearing the streets when they find one of their fellow fighters dead, disfigured and eaten from the inside by the Metalek creatures. And then they find Johnny Clark’s helmet and assume he’s been vaporized. So there goes another one of Superman’s secret identities!

Superman begins to battle back against Captain Comet. Adam Blake just has too many tricks up his sleeve. He’s about to shoot Supes with a psychic bullet that would make him incapacitated by guilt when Suzie blinds him with her powers. Between the two of them, they force him to transport back to his ship which is 40,000 Astronomical Units away. I think that’s pretty far

The last thing Superman needs to do is save Lois. I mean, the last immediate thing he needs to do. He obviously needs another secret identity! Or his old one if Batman figured out how to fix that. I’m sure he’ll create some ruse that has Clark Kent gaining amnesia from the blast and waking up in some ghetto hospital in Metropolis until he slowly remembers who he was.

Anyway, Lois has about thirty minutes to live but the surgery to save her will take hours. So Superman reads all the medical texts and then goes to work with actual doctors assisting him as he sloppily operates on Lois. It has to be sloppy, right? He’s not going to be an amazing surgeon just because he read a bunch of text books! Maybe he did some practice surgeries in super speed as well. And just how fast can Superman do things? Is he as fast as The Flash?

Of course Superman successfully saves Lois’s life and the doctors all quit their jobs and go home to get drunk and beat their kids.

Later that night…

Does that mean Batman needs a longer Bat-grapple here? Or it could mean he could use a fucking elevator some day.

Batman doesn’t actually do the work for Superman. He just brings a flash drive containing everything Clark Kent did once he came to Metropolis.

I’m not sure how effective that Bat Tracker will be on a suit that dissolves and rebuilds itself with some kind of nano-technology. Unless the underlying structure is that white suit and it just changes the look depending on a Kryptonian’s need for the occasion. To learn more about Superman’s suit (but not much more), read Superman #11!

So Clark Kent returns to his apartment to discover that his landlady is actually from the Fifth Dimension. He learns that she can grant him three wishes and one of those wishes will be to make everyone forget that Clark Kent ever died. I guess that’ll work just as well as my amnesia plan! He also learns a little bit more about her and her nephew and the little man with the mole that I thought was her nephew all this time.

The Little Man must be the Envious One from the Fifth Dimension. So at least I was in the right dimensional ballpark when I guessed Mxyzptlk.

And then The Envious One appears in Suzie’s room to do Jor-el-knows-what!

Action Comics #12 Rating: +1 Ranking. Why can’t the worst of the New 52 read the best of the New 52 and take some pointers. Hey, bad writers! You don’t have to steal anyone’s style! Just look at how they tell a good story, you dumb bastards! See how many Narration Boxes were in this comic book? ZERO. Z-FUCKING-E-FUCKING-R-GODDAMNMOTHERFUCKING-O!

Action Comics #8

Seeing as how Brainiac’s ship was Superman’s original Fortress of Solitude, I’m pretty sure I know who is going to win.

There’s a lot going on at the beginning of this comic. Lex Luthor doesn’t want Superman to save them because he believes the end of the world is now imminent and the only way to survive is to stay preserved in the bottle. The human head of the Brainiac creature is yelling at Lois through the glass to convince her that he is the reason Metropolis is being saved. Superman is just trying to beat the crap out of it. Lois and Jimmy Olsen are taking notes to turn this into a great story. And Glenmorgan is freaking out about the Little Man.

I knew there was something weird about that little man!

Oh! I just realized that the human part of the Collector of Worlds is that guy who loved Lois and wore the experimental Steel armor! The Metal-Zero crap! No wonder he was talking to Lois and trying to get her to believe it was his idea to save Metropolis! So he’s been incorporated into the Brainiac Unit to create the Human Centuarpede look it has! Although now that I’ve figured it out, Superman has ripped the human part out of the rest of it. And the Collector has been infected with EMOTION by the human and the metal-zero! Now Superman can make it cry!

See? Even the Centuar part of the creature knows it’s a Centipede!

Lois Lane’s military ex finally decides he doesn’t want to be Brainiac’s puppet so he begins to fight it alongside Superman. After tackling it, he tells Superman to save them if he can! Perhaps being pulled off of the Centuarpede caused him to get a piece of his mind back.

Superman finally threatens to destroy Brainiac’s collection and it stops Brainiac short since he’s spent millennia saving these bits of destroyed worlds. Brainiac doesn’t understand why Superman doesn’t want salvation. It looks like Brainiac knows the Terminauts are coming because they have a Master List of 333 worlds to be destroyed. And Earth is next on the list. So it looks like Brainiac and the Terminauts are definitely separate entities.

Brainiac doesn’t believe Superman will harm it and Superman probably won’t. But he flicks his tiny baby rocket at Brainiac like it’s a bullet so that it can interface with Brainiac and Superman can take control. Superman collapses after this but crawls into a patch of sunlight shining through the window of the Brainiac Satellite and begins to recuperate. And once his Baby Rocket interfaces with the Collector, Superman gives it a voice command to reinstate and magnify Metropolis. It is put back on Earth.

Once everything in Metropolis calms down a bit and people begin to forget (or at least go on pretending nothing cosmically catastrophic just happened to them. You know, the way we all do every single day but only certain people labeled schizophrenic seem to remember clearly), Clark Kent ends up talking with his boss at the Daily Star. He’s proud of Clark for bringing Glenmorgan down although Kent is sorry that Glenmorgan lost his mind while in the bottle. Of course, Clark doesn’t know anything about the Little Man that was the cause of it all! But Kent’s boss decides Clark has bigger things in store for him than being a reporter on a tiny paper like the Daily Star.

Isn’t a Star bigger than a Planet?! Let me check the internet. Hum de dum. It is!

Clark Kent has also been getting huge leads via a mystery man named “Icarus”. Kent asks him if he’s Superman, to which the other person says, “Superman? Just call me Icarus.” It is, of course, Lex Luthor. I’m sure he was glad to help put Glenmorgan down so he could come up and fill the vacuum. I like that Clark asks his lead if he’s Superman. Nice obfuscation, Kent!

John Corben (that’s the name of the guy that was part of the Human Centuarpede and is Lois Lane’s ex) is being held in sedation by the military. The Metal-Zero armor has fused to his central nervous system. He’s alive but nobody knows how. Lane’s father wants to make sure he gets nothing but the best of care. Who knows what horrible villain he’ll come back as! Probably the next iteration of Brainiac.

Finally, Clark’s landlady has a talk with Clark about his secret identity as Superman. She found his costume when the police were searching his place for Glenmorgan and she kept it safe so they wouldn’t find it. Of course Clark wants to make sure his secret is safe with her.

This is just a good all around page.

Superman receives a Giant Key to Metropolis and tells the reporters a little bit about himself. It’s actually stuff even he has just learned. He’s from Krypton. He actually looks like a human. The t-shirt and jeans look is over now that he’s recovered this formal and indestructible suit that’s also from Krypton. And he explains that he’s there to stand up for people that can’t stand up for themselves. He’s there to stay.

After that, he flies off to the Smallville Cemetery to speak with his parents. At first I thought they fixed the spelling of Cemetery over the entrance gate:

See? Fixed!

But then:

What?! I guess it must be a separate entrance! Or seperete? Zing!

And the story finishes up with Superman back on Brainiac’s satellite and speaking with it in Kryptonese. So I guess Superman is taking care of all the little worlds now. And they’ll all be transferred to his Fortress of Solitude in time.

The issue finishes up with a two page prologue. Pshaw! Stupid Grant Morrison! You can’t finish with a prologue! You’re such a stupid head! I mean, sure it’s a prologue to a future storyline! Or maybe it’s the prologue at the end of the book for the story that appeared in issues #5 and #6! Now that’s a mind fuck!

Oh man! I forgot that I was going to explain the Nimrod the Hunter thing in Issue #6 when one of the Legionnaires mentioned that Nimrod the Hunter shot the Tesseract into Superman’s brain! But now I don’t have to because Morrison did it for me. Although I still haven’t explained how Bugs Bunny turned the term ‘Nimrod’ into an insult! Because he was just using ‘Nimrod’ sarcastically when he was calling Elmer Fudd a Nimrod since Nimrod was supposedly a great hunter, Biblically speaking. As this Nimrod points out. And Fudd sucked so Bugs used it mockingly. But people just picked up on the idea that it was an insult. “What’s up, Nimod?”

Man, that was a long caption! The Little Man is apparently hiring this hunter, Nimrod, to shoot that tesseract into Superman’s head! So this prologue is for a story that’s already happened. Nice. Although it’s probably a prologue for more story than just the tesseract. That Little Man is just completely up to no good!

Action Comics #8 Rating: No change. This comic is just fantastic. But I’m not going to put it up over Batman as the #1 comic. Not on its own, anyway! This story arc is good enough to put Action Comics at the #1 spot. But only if Batman’s story arc declines in quality! So it’s up to Scott Snyder and Batman to put forth the effort to maintain the #1 spot. And who knows? Maybe Wonder Woman or Aquaman will sneak up on them both! Although I don’t have any great hopes for DC Presents: Challengers of the Unknown!