Luthor, You Supercilious Bastard

All-Star Superman #5, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

Quitely really should get top billing this time around:  he simply outdoes himself.  Given an issue that's mostly set in Stryker's Island, Metropolis's prison for super-criminals, he turns the prison's stark utilitarianism into part of his layouts.  He stages the initial prison scenes in a three-tiered, six-panel grid that reflects the monotony and confinement of prison routine. In one beautiful two-page spread the prison design literally becomes the page design, and throughout the sequence panel gutters bleed into prison walls and vice versa.

But when the Parasite triggers a riot the pages open up into four-tiered widescreen layouts, the better to capture the action.  When Clark ends the Parasite's rampage with a timely earthquake, the gutters themselves bend and buckle, doubling as ceiling and floor.  And when the issue ends on a note of uncertainty Quitely gives us a splash page, leaving us no clear visual cues on where to go next.  It's a wonderfully self-assured artist who can turn such a conventional scenario into a breezy lesson on page design--and do it without smacking of effort or pretense.

It doesn't hurt that Morrison is firing on all cylinders, too.  This issue returns to three of the key elements that made All-Star Superman #1 so entertaining, none of them much in evidence since then:  Luthor, Superman's impending death, and Clark Kent.  All three lend Morrison's Superman a vulnerable, human side that's been noticeably obscured in the last couple installments--although Lex intends just the opposite.  He's granted a death row interview to Clark Kent (presumably an old Smallville chum, given Lex's shout-out to Mrs. K) so he can vent about the oppressive perfection of the strange visitor from another planet.  As Jog says, it's basically the Jules Feiffer/Kill Bill interpretation of Superman, but Morrison keeps undercutting Luthor's spiel with little reminders of how much he's missing.

"I've always liked you, Kent," he says.  "You're a humble, modest, uncoordinated human.  You're everything he's not."  And because any five-year-old can appreciate that irony, Morrison and Quitely don't stop there:  they hammer us over the head with it, playing Luthor's hoary interpretation for comedy and countering it with a decent, humane, fundamentally nice Superman at every glance.  Lex spends the entire issue failing to notice the many times Clark saves his life without breaking cover (the best gag from #1 recycled many times over); he can even stare an angry, de-spectacled Clark right in the eye and still not recognize the Superman simmering to the surface.  Nor does he see that the "smug self-regard" he so despises in his foe is just a projection of his own overweening ego.  (In this respect he's a bit like Morrison's treatment of Darkseid in "Rock of Ages":  two iconic super-villains who can't see anything but themselves, monomaniacally projecting their own worst traits onto the world around them.)  Any intimations of Superman's arrogance or condescension are rightly placed back on the shoulders of his antagonist, where they belong.

The comic's finest moment is a visual joke so good I'm not even sure I should spoil it.  (But I will, so look out.)  The beautiful part is not Morrison and Quitely hiding the set-up in plain sight for several pages until they're ready to roll out the punchline.  It's not seeing Lex Luthor redrawing his eyebrow with a pencil.  (First I wondered if the missing eyebrow signified some dastardly escape plan, then I considered the possibility that Lex had subconsciously trimmed it into the "Superman Swoosh" and shaved the whole thing off in a fit of pique.  I was lost until no less a luminary than Cameron Stewart over at Barbelith suggested Morrison was simply extending Luthor's baldness--and this is clearly the classic Luthor, presumably with the classic explanation for his baldness--to his entire head.)  No, the beautiful touch is that when Luthor redraws his eyebrow, he redraws it in character so he can deliver a menacing supervillain rant with that much more flair.  That's dedication to the part!

And then, at his most ludicrous, Lex reminds Clark that he's killed him.  It's a gut-punch ending, reminding us that we have to take Luthor seriously in spite of his arrogance and blindness--or because of them, because they've led him to condemn the kindest man in the world.  Clark doesn't seem to know where he's going next and neither do we, but I'm sure eager to follow him there.

This was easily the best issue of All-Star Superman yet.  Then again, I thought that last issue and I could probably say it of all of them except the third one--this comic just keeps getting better.  Morrison has taken what could be a dreary and repetitive story structure, the grand tour of all Superman's friends and foes, and transformed it into a thoughtful reflection on what makes these characters tick.  It's a Superman story bible that retains the energy of a proper story, filtered through Quitely's expert storytelling.  Again, he's the one to beat in this issue; as well as Morrison writes Clark Kent, Quitely sells us on a Clark so self-effacing that in some panels he actually appears to have a paunch and a double chin.  You can honestly believe he doesn't need the glasses to hide his alter ego (which makes Luthor's ignorance a little more understandable, I suppose).  Morrison's script is note-perfect, but it's Quitely who never lets us overlook the man in the Superman.

If he'd just show Clark pulling the covert-powers-stumblebum routine to make a prank backfire on Steve Lombard!  Come on, guys, will this be the money shot of your twelve-issue megaplot?  What are you waiting for?

Comments

[Steven]

C'mon, you know the money shot is going to be the wink.

[kan]

No clue what your new email is, but: Dinner, september 7th, my dad's house.

[Marc]

I hope we continue to use the blog to pass along dinner invitations from your parents. It already accounts for a surprising amount of my traffic...

Steven: he's already done the wink. I want stumblebum!

[CharlesWHatfield]

Spot-on, Marc. A terrific issue from Morrison and Quitely: ingenious, funny, oh-so-subtle in some places and so arch in others. With smart, smart design work, layered, revealing dialogue, and plenty of surprises.

I really don't have any idea of what's coming next, which is the best compliment I can give for a series like this.

I enjoyed it more than expected, and by #5 I was actually expecting quite a bit. May Morrison continue be our anti-Miller for a good while, at least a few more months, please.

[Scott Faulkner]

One late-to-the-party comment: The two page spread you describe tripped me up at first because there wasn't a strong signal to my eye to continue reading the top panel tier, rather than reading each page separately. I took me a few panels of seemingly non-sequitur dialog before I figured out what Quitely wanted me to do. Maybe it's just me but I think a lot of contemporary comics bungle it when they suddenly switch from a single-page layout to a dual spread.

[Matty]

No, c'mon man! Making a petty bashed-nerd revenge as a cumshot would be killing the entire comic book. This entire trip is exactly about the opposite of that. The killing of the Peter Parkerization of Clark Kent (the alienated-alienating loner sour-faced "idiots! If they only knew...").

PS: where's the wink? I want a wink or a Reeve's smile as a cumshot. Or the full blown voudoun xxx cumshot to end all climaxes, even better than Flex Mentallo's. I'll be waiting for my SHA_AN and superheroes poppin' up all over the place and pickin' up that key from #2 (AKA: A.S.S.).

[Marc]

I don't know, Clark/Superman sounded pretty alienated back in #2 (though not of the Peter Parker variety). The return of Nerd Clark--and the conceit that it allows Superman to do more good without breaking character--has been one of the highlights of this series.

Morrison did the wink at the end of DC One Million: a lovely moment, but he's been there before. Reeve's smile would be great, and certainly well within Quitely's range.

PS to the world: Kan Mattoo is a LIAR.

[Matty]

What I meant is, while Clark IS nerd, I'm feeling Morrison doing it more to that conscious front (while helping people without ever breaking his residual image), but without all the things that usually come together with the secret identity. It's not so much the Peter Parker way to go "this is not the real me, if they only knew. Idiots. Sheep! YadaYada!" and all these sort of anti-social things that's pure grim gritty that Morrison's washing away or is playing on already washed grounds (while on Batman, he's doing the wash big time it seems. Or I hope that's what he's aiming for).

If there's any trace of that still, I think it's being washed away by having it's anti-social debts being paid (for instance, Lois' response, like the "that creepy weirdo could never be Superman", while a geek reader somewhere is going "Ouch, bitch! That hurts!" and locks himself alone in his Fortress of Solitude and "playing pranks on Lois" (keeping his distance))