Drunken Comics Rage

So about a month ago I bought the first of the DC Showcase collections for Superman. A family vacation was drawing nigh and I needed some reading material for the trip. I've always been a little apprehensive about the black and white collections as I'm more easily distracted by pretty colors (oooh look! Shiny!). But as the collection clocked in at a whopping $9.99 for 560 pages of comics, the price point and the opportunity to read some classic Superman tales was enough to make me bite.

Flash forward a month or so and I'm still nursing my way through the thing. Seems like I can only manage to get a couple of stories knocked out in a sitting before something else distracts me (oooh look! Shiny!). I had every intention of posting my thoughts about the collection, but had really wanted to wait until I got it finished. However it (and its stories) have come up often enough in conversations for the last week or two that it probably just needs to be done now.

So my first thought on the collection was, and still is, this.

Say what you will about the drug culture 1960's, but it's pretty clear from this collection that comic writers in the 50's had access to some good shit.

And I mean that in the best possible way.

Let's just do a quick rundown of some of the stories this puppy has to offer shall we?

• Superman uses a giant key to unlock the giant door to his Fort Superman (that we now know as the Fortress of Solitude). But someone has figured out how to get in. Turns out Batman figured out how to get in as a special surprise for Superman.
• Brainiac and his space monkey Koko (yes I said space monkey Koko) plot to steal all the great cities of Earth with their shrink ray so they can take them back to their abandoned planet so he has someone to rule over.
• Superman is tricked by an alien claiming to be a descendant of Circe into drinking a potion that gives him a lion head. He then uses his powers to do help out his fellow lions and such.
• During a mysterious explosion, Superman loses all his powers but gains a new power. His power is the ability create a miniature version of himself with all his normal powers to do the super things he used to be able to do.
• Toto the chimp is shot into space and comes into contact with kryptonite radiation rays that make him grow into TITANO THE SUPER APE! He can also shoot kryptonite rays out of his eyes so Superman can't do shit to him.

Oh I could go on. But you get the idea. All the stories are completely insane and drug induced.

And glorious.

It's far and few between that I giggle so frequently while reading a comic, and I can't remember the last time it happened as often as it has here. For as bizarre as the stories I explained above sound, the resolution for each story is just as cracked out as the premise is. It's like they were aware they came up with something absurd and thought it out to its absurd conclusion.

I'll say it again. It's GLORIOUS.

Oh sure, none of this shit would really play well in our current era of “comics are serious! We are building elaborate tapestries where serious shit occurs!” And truth be told if I were paying $2.99 a pop for each of these stories they might not be as amusing. But there is such a sense of fun and wonder with these books that I don't know that the current era can match.

I think after reading this collection I now “get” All Star Superman. I had been buying and enjoying All Star Superman, but I'm not sure that I was really getting where Grant Morrison was going with that book. I now “get” it. Morrison is totally invoking this era of Superman comics and the fun and endless possibilities that can exist in a world with Superman. We're talking about an era of comics that is responsible for a lot of the Superman mythos as we know it.

Here's a list of some of the “firsts” that occur in this collection:

• First appearance of Brainiac (with Koko of course)
• First appearance of Kandor, the miniaturized city from Krypton
• First appearance of the Fortress of Solitude and it's big ass key that only Superman can lift.
• First appearance of Supergirl
• First appearance of Metallo
• First appearance of TITANO THE SUPER APE!
• First appearance of Bizarro (as created by Lex Luthor)

That's a lot of shit in the stretch of a few years that has endured through something like 50 years of comics. There's a reason they call it the Silver Age of comics folks.

Mind you there is a ton of stuff that hasn't endured, and for good reason. A few highlights:

• You know Lois Lane the independent woman and super reporter? Yeah, not so much back in the day. Lois Lane hasn't been in a single panel where she isn't talking about wanting to be married to Superman. I'm not sure she ever actually got any work done. The only stories she might have written would have titles like “Superman was seen with some bitch instead of me”.
• Kryptonite was in crazy abundance. Like so much so that I would have to estimate Krypton was about as close as our moon when it exploded for Earth to end up with that much Kryptonite.
• Superman spends a lot of time busting mobsters. So much so they must have considered it a reprieve when he moved on to super villains and they only had to deal with Batman.
• In that same vein, it's quite apparent that Superman (and the legal system for that matter) had obviously never heard of entrapment. About every third story where something bad happens to Supes, it turns out to be a ruse he planned with an accomplice to trick the mobsters into trying to commit a crime so he could arrest them. Apparently he concentrated more on the “Justice and the American Way” because “Truth” was certainly lacking.

But even all that just adds to the fun that much more. Because I don't have to wait for some new writer to retcon all the nonsense out. It was already done a long time ago.

Now if we only didn't have to wait 50 years to say the same about Infinite Crisis.

Anyhow, I can't recommend the collection enough. I've gotten my $10 out of it several times over and I've still got 150 pages to go. It quite possibly might drive me to buy the DC Showcase of Green Lantern which comes with the same $10 price tag.

So by all means, anyone who has read this far through my poor rendition of the complete cracked out insanity of the collection, just go out and buy it now. You were gonna piss away $10 somewhere else anyhow. Some of you are likely going to piss that much away on bad DC comics as it is.

At least spend that $10 on legendarily bad DC comics.

Filed under: DC Comics, DVO Reading Rage