New 52
Week of 9/28/11
Superman
We begin with corporate drama as the Daily Planet has merged with its multi-media competitor Galaxy Broadcast System and everyone's smug, preachy, and afraid that the newspaper will lose its integrity. Lois and Clark have a fight about the decline of print media in which Clark looks like an idiot. Lois has been promoted in the merger and is now in charge of the TV news.
On an alien planet, an alien blows a horn. The narration box tells me to learn more about him in Stormwatch #1. I tell the narration box to go stuff itself.
A security guard in some building somewhere goes to check out a mysterious fire that keeps appearing on the security cameras but not generating heat. Elsewhere, terrorists hijack an oil tanker in the mistaken belief that Superman is out of town and are dumb enough to fight him when he shows up. Superman picks up the tanker, intending to hurl it into space before it blows up in the shoot-out between cops and crooks. Lois leaves the party celebrating the merger to help with the live coverage of the story.
The tanker suddenly blows up and the idiot news anchor says it looks like Superman did it (cause that's so much more likely than that it was the terrorists), and Lois orders the news copter to get closer to get better footage. We see a confused Superman hit by a fireball coming from a building that seems to be consumed by living flames. As Superman battles the "living fire" thing, Lois angers her boss by ordering her news crews to leave the area and get out of danger. But she then orders Jimmy Olsen to illegally hack into surrounding security cameras and get footage that way. This is one of the few parts of the issue that's well done, as it shows that Lois is both an efficient professional unafraid to give orders and a compassionate heroine unwilling to sacrifice lives for the story.
The battle goes on way too long, the fire-thing shouts in a strange language but Superman picks up the word "Krypton." He throws the planet from the old Daily Planet at it and takes it into space where it disintegrates due to lack of oxygen. There's some dumb phlebotinum about how the stuff the fire creature touched was not set on fire but transformed into fire and thus harmlessly changed back when it left. Clark receives praise for the article he's written describing the battle after a fortuitous interview with Superman, but we have been reading the article in narration boxes during the battle and it was terrible. As an objective account of the battle, it failed because he kept delving into melodrama and describing Superman's emotions at the time which he presumably learned from the interview; as an interview about the event it failed because he never once quoted Superman. And knowing that Clark Kent is Superman makes the whole thing seem disgustingly self-indugent. In fact, it reads like a Superman diary entry mysteriously written in the third person.
Clark goes to Lois's apartment to apologize for their earlier argument and finds her in bed with some guy. With his super-hearing, he hears them discussing him as he leaves and she interestingly says that she and Clark never got together because he never really lets anyone get close.
Thoughts:
It was pretty bad. This issue epitomizes for me what's wrong with the New 52: there's a lot of changes to enrage and confuse old readers, but the resulting issues are not any less confusing for new readers! Lois and Clark no longer being married doesn't make the fight scene we just saw any less frustrating and confused, and the new villain is not rendered any more accessible by the merger of the Daily Planet and some other company. Too much time was spent on stupid office politics and I have a sneaking suspicion that we're going back to the pre-Crisis interpretation of Superman where Superman was Kal-el's real identity and Clark Kent just a disguise he occasionally puts on, while I'm partial to the interpretation wherein Clark Kent, decent farm-boy and noble reporter, is the real person and Superman a disguise he puts on when he wants to save lives. Anyway, though whole thing was pretty dumb and I won't be buying any more. If DC wants to make Superman more "relatable" they should forget about making him younger and start telling better stories with him.
Aquaman
I refuse to recap this issue as almost the entire thing was a series of stupid jokes about Aquaman's internet-reputation as world's lamest superhero, which is apparently widespread in-universe. The jokes are about how Aquaman's reputation is completely undeserved, which, no shit: he's a superstrong king of a superstrong race who can not only command an army of Atlanteans any time he wants to but can use anything living in the substance that covers 70% of our fucking planet as his own personal army/network of spies. It makes no sense that the people who've seen him fight with the Justice League would actually ask him how it feels to be a living joke. Here is what you need to know about this issue: 1) Aquaman has gotten back together with Mera (apparently marriages are allowed in the DCnU as long as they were not previously stable ones), 2) he's decided to return to his roots, abandoning Atlantis and living on land (which will in no way result in a coup in Atlantis that causes the Atlanteans to try to invade the surface world yet again, I'm sure) and 3) he doesn't talk to fish. He talks to the higher ocean mammals like whales and dolphins, because only their brains are capable of conversation. Fish, he simply mind-controls. ("God, what a lame hero, his only power other than superstrength is mind-controlling sharks!") Hopefully, now that they've gotten this people-are-shocked-when-Aquaman-orders-fish-at-a-restaurant dumbassery out of their systems we will get a real issue next month.
The Flash will get his own post later as he's one of my favorite characters and I want to discuss the changes there in-depth. Hopefully I will get both that and Action Comics #2 done before Wednesday.
Superman
We begin with corporate drama as the Daily Planet has merged with its multi-media competitor Galaxy Broadcast System and everyone's smug, preachy, and afraid that the newspaper will lose its integrity. Lois and Clark have a fight about the decline of print media in which Clark looks like an idiot. Lois has been promoted in the merger and is now in charge of the TV news.
On an alien planet, an alien blows a horn. The narration box tells me to learn more about him in Stormwatch #1. I tell the narration box to go stuff itself.
A security guard in some building somewhere goes to check out a mysterious fire that keeps appearing on the security cameras but not generating heat. Elsewhere, terrorists hijack an oil tanker in the mistaken belief that Superman is out of town and are dumb enough to fight him when he shows up. Superman picks up the tanker, intending to hurl it into space before it blows up in the shoot-out between cops and crooks. Lois leaves the party celebrating the merger to help with the live coverage of the story.
The tanker suddenly blows up and the idiot news anchor says it looks like Superman did it (cause that's so much more likely than that it was the terrorists), and Lois orders the news copter to get closer to get better footage. We see a confused Superman hit by a fireball coming from a building that seems to be consumed by living flames. As Superman battles the "living fire" thing, Lois angers her boss by ordering her news crews to leave the area and get out of danger. But she then orders Jimmy Olsen to illegally hack into surrounding security cameras and get footage that way. This is one of the few parts of the issue that's well done, as it shows that Lois is both an efficient professional unafraid to give orders and a compassionate heroine unwilling to sacrifice lives for the story.
The battle goes on way too long, the fire-thing shouts in a strange language but Superman picks up the word "Krypton." He throws the planet from the old Daily Planet at it and takes it into space where it disintegrates due to lack of oxygen. There's some dumb phlebotinum about how the stuff the fire creature touched was not set on fire but transformed into fire and thus harmlessly changed back when it left. Clark receives praise for the article he's written describing the battle after a fortuitous interview with Superman, but we have been reading the article in narration boxes during the battle and it was terrible. As an objective account of the battle, it failed because he kept delving into melodrama and describing Superman's emotions at the time which he presumably learned from the interview; as an interview about the event it failed because he never once quoted Superman. And knowing that Clark Kent is Superman makes the whole thing seem disgustingly self-indugent. In fact, it reads like a Superman diary entry mysteriously written in the third person.
Clark goes to Lois's apartment to apologize for their earlier argument and finds her in bed with some guy. With his super-hearing, he hears them discussing him as he leaves and she interestingly says that she and Clark never got together because he never really lets anyone get close.
Thoughts:
It was pretty bad. This issue epitomizes for me what's wrong with the New 52: there's a lot of changes to enrage and confuse old readers, but the resulting issues are not any less confusing for new readers! Lois and Clark no longer being married doesn't make the fight scene we just saw any less frustrating and confused, and the new villain is not rendered any more accessible by the merger of the Daily Planet and some other company. Too much time was spent on stupid office politics and I have a sneaking suspicion that we're going back to the pre-Crisis interpretation of Superman where Superman was Kal-el's real identity and Clark Kent just a disguise he occasionally puts on, while I'm partial to the interpretation wherein Clark Kent, decent farm-boy and noble reporter, is the real person and Superman a disguise he puts on when he wants to save lives. Anyway, though whole thing was pretty dumb and I won't be buying any more. If DC wants to make Superman more "relatable" they should forget about making him younger and start telling better stories with him.
Aquaman
I refuse to recap this issue as almost the entire thing was a series of stupid jokes about Aquaman's internet-reputation as world's lamest superhero, which is apparently widespread in-universe. The jokes are about how Aquaman's reputation is completely undeserved, which, no shit: he's a superstrong king of a superstrong race who can not only command an army of Atlanteans any time he wants to but can use anything living in the substance that covers 70% of our fucking planet as his own personal army/network of spies. It makes no sense that the people who've seen him fight with the Justice League would actually ask him how it feels to be a living joke. Here is what you need to know about this issue: 1) Aquaman has gotten back together with Mera (apparently marriages are allowed in the DCnU as long as they were not previously stable ones), 2) he's decided to return to his roots, abandoning Atlantis and living on land (which will in no way result in a coup in Atlantis that causes the Atlanteans to try to invade the surface world yet again, I'm sure) and 3) he doesn't talk to fish. He talks to the higher ocean mammals like whales and dolphins, because only their brains are capable of conversation. Fish, he simply mind-controls. ("God, what a lame hero, his only power other than superstrength is mind-controlling sharks!") Hopefully, now that they've gotten this people-are-shocked-when-Aquaman-orders-fish-at-a-restaurant dumbassery out of their systems we will get a real issue next month.
The Flash will get his own post later as he's one of my favorite characters and I want to discuss the changes there in-depth. Hopefully I will get both that and Action Comics #2 done before Wednesday.