Taking Superman for Grant-ed

Without a doubt, All Star Superman is the most remarkable comic that DC has published in at least a decade.

If someone had told me, when DC announced their All Star line, that I would end up loving the Grant Morrison-Frank Quitely Superman title and abhoring the Frank Miller-Jim Lee Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder title, I would have dismissed them as insane.

It turns out that's exactly what's happened, though. Miller totally missed the point of creating an All Star line, while Morrison got it spot on. These books should be quintessential books, incorporating all the elements of these characters that have become part of the popular culture consciousness; this is not a book that should destroy all that has been done before in order to try to imprint an iconoclastic creative vision onto an established character who has become an indelible part of our cultural psyche.

Morrison has captured the vitality and enthusiasm of the Silver Age, the exuberance of an unlimited-budget superhero film, while giving the whole project a contemporary air. And Quitely's art conveys a modern visual sensibility while paying homage to the traditional Superman that has become well known to all. There's nothing here that violates the visual that people have when you say "Superman," but somehow it's even bigger and more energetic when Quitely puts it on paper.

One customer told me, "I rarely buy DCs and I never buy a Superman book, but this cover just makes you want to read the book to see what's going on!" Julius Schwartz, Mort Weisinger, and all those Silver Age editors would be proud...

And Charles called me today to say that it was without a doubt the best Superman book he had read in a long, long time. Charles wasn't just pleased--he was enthusiastically happy about the book. It's the sort of book you want to force into the hands of people who say, "I don't read Superman."

(I hope someone forces Frank Miller and editor Bob Schreck to sit down, read the first three issues of this series over and over for several hours, and then make them figure out what Miller could be doing to capture the same sense of wonder in the pages of All Star Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder. From any other writer, the book would just be bad; from Frank Miller, it's an embarrassment because we all know what he's capable of...)

Bumsteady as She Goes

Seventy-five years... that's a long run for any series in any medium. Chic Young's Blondie turned 75 today (although Chic Young is no longer around to do the honors on the series), and for the past few weeks, comic strip costars galore have guested in the strip, while Blondie cast members have popped up in a few other strips. The build-up was great fun; today's climactic strip was a bit of a letdown, though, since it only offered a guest-star-packed single panel noting the fact that Blondie was now 75 years old.

The lead-in strips were all sorts of fun, although they do bring up some intriguing questions--for example, how can an American suburban family co-exist alongside a Viking and his family? Continuity questions must be answered...