Not So Marvelous

I've been enjoying Marvel's new Captain Marvel series, but for the book's run so far, my enjoyment has been largely in spite of the art. Dexter Soy has never seemed like a very good fit for the book's tone, and it was sometimes hard to follow the action, but I was getting used to it by the end there. I just read Captain Marvel #9 though, and I kind of wish Soy was back.

There's a definite stylization to Filipe Andrade's art, which could make the book more expressive and dynamic, and that's almost certainly what they're going for. It'd work, too, if it weren't quite so inconsistent. The character work is really ugly, with characters eyes sliding around their faces and whatnot. Most of the close-up shots are actually quite good, so I don't know if he was just rushed or what, but some panels make Carol look like a flounder or Sloth.

Andrade's art, at its best, reminds me of Humberto Ramos, and at worst, like the late Carlos Meglia, whose work on Superman in the early 2000s was some of the worst professional comics pencilling I can remember seeing. It had the same problems as Andrade's: inconsistent, deformed characters, unclear perspective (there's a panel in this Captain Marvel issue where Spider-Woman looks like she's been shrunk because there are no indicators that Capt. Marvel is meant to be closer to the reader), and visual continuity errors (besides the dramatically shifting size of Carol's tablet/phone in the early pages, there's the issue that since the redesign, Carol has had notably and intentionally short, and not flowing butt-length, hair).

To add insult to injury, on the last page Carol is told she has some kind of lesion on her brain, a ticking time bomb. And, well...

Look, it's a minor thing, but there's a writer, a letterer, and two editors working on this book. Somewhere along the line, someone should have noticed that a bomb is defused, not diffused. The goal with a bomb is to remove its fuse (literally or figuratively) so it won't blow up, to de-fuse it. The last thing you want is for it to be spread evenly throughout the area; in fact, diffusion of the bomb is what you're trying to prevent.

Altogether, the sloppy art and editing error make this book look rushed, which isn't totally surprising given Marvel's wacky scheduling antics. I can't speak for everyone, but I'd certainly be more happy with one polished issue a month than two or three that were rushed to meet an unreasonable deadline. Especially when they end up with the same cover price.

What's the Flashpoint?

I know that's not an original title, but it's a fitting one. After a GenCon-caused delay, I made it to the comic shop this week and bought most of two weeks' worth of comics. Naturally, though I'm not entirely sure why at this point, that included "Flashpoint" #4. Reading through it, and through some Flashpoint tie-ins of varying quality, really solidified some of the series' problems in my mind.

First, and most trivially, there's the usual-by-this-point problem of editing.

I'm sure the New 52 has everyone working overtime to make things run smoothly, but when you have a panel where a whole bunch of difficult-to-distinguish characters are talking, it might be a good idea to make sure the word bubbles are pointing at the right people. Especially when those word bubbles are being used for relatively important (to the issue) characterization. And especially in the tentpole frigging crossover title you're using to launch your whole new initiative. This is the most high-profile book I've seen this kind of editing error on (unless you count "Superman: Earth One"), but it seems like every week, I pull out a new DC comic with some kind of crazy mistake. The last one I remember was, as I recall, one of the Kid Flash tie-ins, where the art credits were printed twice, on the same page, but in one case clearly accidentally over the art. It's becoming a trend.

That being said, this issue suffers from more of the same kind of thing that Chris Sims rightly noted in the last three: namely, that there doesn't seem to be anything even approaching a plan. Issue #1: Barry tries to cope with new world, regain his powers, recruit Batman to set things right. Issue #2: Barry tries to convince Batman to help him regain his powers so he can set things right. Issue #3: Barry regains his powers and tries to recruit Superman, who will help set things right. Issue #4: Superman runs away, Barry decides that setting things right is too hard and instead wants to help people.

Seriously.

I just don't know where to begin. Issue 3 turned out to be utterly unnecessary; the only worthwhile thing it seems to have done was bring Cyborg into the superheroes-changing-the-world fold, but that could easily have been accomplished in issue #1 or 2 as well. The first section of #3 was dedicated to doing what they'd already done in #2, and the Superman plot ended with things in exactly the same position they'd been before. Now, a sizable part of this issue was spent complaining that the heroes didn't get together when they got together in issue #1, and subsequently getting those heroes--or at least some of them--together. I appreciated the moments of characterization for the Shazam Squad, but there's not enough space for them to have any more depth than they did back in #1, and dedicating that space to "war affects people and is bad" seems like a waste.

But hey, we got a full-page splash introducing Element Woman! I guess Geoff Johns slept through the day in creative writing when they explained what a cheat and a bad idea it is to introduce key characters in the fourth act.

But there's the bigger problem of Barry Allen, who wants to set things right, who has Batman on his side because he wants to set things right, who gets the Captain Thunder Kids Club on his side because he wants to set things right, and who has a ticking clock in his head that, if he doesn't beat it, will prevent him from setting things right. And he decides that it would be too hard to set things right, so instead they should go stop the war that wouldn't be happening if they set things right.

"Boy, the Emperor sure is intimidating. You know what? I think I'll go back to Toshi Station after all."

"Gee, I never expected Mount Doom to be so awfully hot, and this ring's not so bad. Come on, Sam, let's head back to the Shire."

"Holy Hannah, it sure is hard to destroy these horcruxes. That's what, like, four of them? Screw this, I'm going back to my cupboard."

Barry Allen, the Fastest Man Alive, has spent the last three issues spinning his wheels, and decides in this one to just head off in a completely different, irrelevant, unnecessary direction. This is the hero who inspired a legacy? This is the steadfast beacon of hope who outshone even the Man of Steel? This is a man who raced back from death itself to save the world that he sacrificed his life to save once before?

The worst part is his rationalization: "Trying to figure out what events he altered will be like trying to find the right grain of sand in the ocean." Well, sure, I guess, except that if you go back in time to stop him, you should actually see him altering those events. You know, catch him in the act. Altering them. And I suppose it would be hard to find the right grain of sand in the ocean. If only you had the ability to travel through time, thus allowing for a near-infinite amount of it, and some kind of super-speed ability that would make examining a large number of things possible in a short amount of time. Of course, it would help if the person with those abilities also had expertise in a branch of science that went to places and pieced together what had occurred after the fact, some kind of forensic science. But where on Earth would we find a character with super-speed, time-travel abilities, and forensic science expertise?

Look, if the point of the whole series up 'til now is Barry learning that, in this new world, he can't just do things the way he used to do them--round up the heroes, get to work, etc.--then it's been awfully obtuse. Especially since "rounding up the heroes and getting to work" has worked about 50% of the time. But honestly, I can't see another point. Meanwhile, I keep feeling like we're missing out on a much more interesting story, replaced with these repeats and retreads of what we've already seen, and plot elements that either go or come out of nowhere.

So I suspect that August 31st will give us Barry and Zoom's inevitable confrontation, the return of Superman, and Barry finally setting things right...but not quite everything and not quite right, because of his swiss-cheesed memory. And then it'll all be even mooter than it is right now, because we'll have the New 52 to contend with.

But if "Flashpoint" is meant to be our gateway into the New 52, then it seems like we've got a lot of repetition, disjointed storytelling, bad editing, and repetition to look forward to.

An Editorial Mistake I Can Forgive

I've been catching up on "Booster Gold" for the last couple of days, it being one of several comic series that I buy but haven't actually read in months, and along the way I came across an interesting editorial error to add to the list. No, it wasn't how Booster cryptically referred to the Perforated Man as "PF" in one word bubble, suggesting an abbreviation in the script that should have been changed for the finished page (or a typo, though when he later calls the guy "P.M.," it seems like it would have been a hell of a typo), it was this bit of signage:

From the context and the following panels, it's clear that this is meant to be the 30th Century version of Sundollar, DC's clever ersatz Starbucks. But if you're the sort of sad, strange person who can kind of, sort of read Interlac (like me), you might notice something strange about this sign. You might have the sneaking suspicion that "sundollar" would be rendered thusly:

Assuming, of course, that we ignore the differences between capital and lowercase letters. Either way, if the bottom image correctly renders "sundollar," then what does the top image say?

"Sunflower." Which means, I suspect, that letterer John J. Hill could have the nerdiest entry to Damn You, Auto Correct ever.

On one hand, this is forgivable. It's a small error in a made-up foreign language with almost no bearing on the plot or issue. On the other hand, I would hope that the foreign language bits are the places where editors are keeping the closest watch, since they would make it easy for all manner of errors, slurs, and blue placeholder text, to slip through.

The backwards cover preview on the letters page--which would be totally unnoticable if not for the moderately recognizable S-shield on the left--is less forgivable.

What are DC's editors doing?

The snarky answer is "writing Flashpoint tie-ins." But seriously, DC, you're paying an awful lot of editors, and I'm seeing more sloppy, basic errors slipping through than ever before.

I suppose I started noticing it when Perry White didn't know what 'passive language' meant and Lois Lane redrew state borders, but just in the most recent books I've read, there have been a slew of sloppy errors and sloppy writing in general. And it's the kind of thing that's up to editors, not writers or letterers necessarily, to correct.

So, three examples, all books I've read in the last two days. First, "Outsiders" #37, a book written by former editor Dan Didio, edited by Harvey Richards. I can forgive the comma splice in the first caption on the first page; it's page four--a full-page splash--that I'm concerned with. I'll chalk the sentence fragment in that first caption up to artistic license--totally acceptable--but it describes Doomsday as "The monster who murdered the greatest heroknown to man" (emphasis mine). Okay, a dropped space, not a big deal, right? But it looks sloppy and unprofessional; it would have come up in even a basic spellcheck search, and I have to imagine that the page gets looked over by at least one person after it's lettered. Isn't it the job of a decent editor to check the copy?

As I continued in reading "Reign of Doomsday," I came to James Robinson's "Justice League of America" #55. No spelling errors that I caught here, but there was a serious stylistic problem. The first page has fifteen 'bubbles' counting every caption and dialogue bubble. Within those fifteen bubbles, there are eleven ellipses. Robinson seems to be a really big fan of the separator characters, your ellipses and double-dashes, and I say that as someone who greatly overuses double-dashes. And perhaps it's my familiarity with those double-dashes that made them stand out so much for me this issue, because they are everywhere. They're overshadowed by ellipses on that first page, but even on that first page, a page where exactly two people have speaking parts, there are two people who end a sentence with a double-dash, interrupted by something else. Alan Scott, who is inexplicably Professor X, interrupts Jade, then interrupts himself, and sets the tone for "Justice League of America," the rudest comic ever.

Page two features Eclipso, who uses five ellipses in the span of three connected speech bubbles, then four more between four captions. The elliptical menace perforates Dick Grayson's narration on page three and even Alpha Lantern Boodikka's speech on the following pages. And then Supergirl ends a sentence with a double-dash, and it sets the ball rolling again.

Dick Grayson (Narrative Caption): Lucky. Just plain lucky. All the weapons on this craft...to fight Kryptonians...I can use them to fight--

Supergirl (Dialogue): Grayson!

Dick (Dialogue): I'm fine. Space-suit--just deal with--

Supergirl (Narrative): Sure. He's here for me anyway. I'm going to--

Supergirl (Narrative): Wait. No...

Supergirl (Narrative): ...it's not me he wants at all.

Boodikka (Dialogue): Ring? Why can't I--

That's two pages. Two pages where one character's dialogue is interrupted by a narrative caption, and that same character interrupts her own narrative caption with another narrative caption! The next page features this interestingly unnecessary bit of punctuation:

Jade (Dialogue): Go, Jesse!...

Jade (Dialogue): ...Take my father away from this. Now. Please. Now.

I understand using an ellipsis to link separated balloons or boxes; they demonstrate that a thought hasn't been finished, what in actual dialogue would be a hanging or pregnant pause. Such a pause is hard to accomplish directly after an exclaimed order.

The rest of the book features a "bubble ending in a double-dash, indicating sudden stopping or interruption" fifteen times in the remaining eleven story pages. This includes such interesting instances as Supergirl thinking "He'll kill Grayson, I w--," with no apparent reason to stop thinking, then saying "Me! Hit m--," somehow being interrupted in the middle of a single-syllable word. That particular disease hits Batman's next speech bubble, "That was too close f--."

Look, it's nitpicky, I know. But it's also a ridiculous excess of punctuation, and generally for no good reason. This is the kind of nitpicking that editors are paid to pick up on as being clunky and unnatural, and then fix it. 90% of the ellipses and double-dashes in this book could be replaced with commas, taken out entirely, or (heaven forbid) replaced with words, without losing an iota of the sense of urgency from the dialogue and narration of a book centered around fight scenes. It would have the added advantage of allowing us to see what Supergirl "w--," and not forcing us to believe that someone could be interrupted in the middle of a two-letter word¹

But I might not have posted about it if not for Detective Comics #876, and this:

Batman is one of the smartest men alive. He designed these computers to be bleeding-edge, beyond-state-of-the-art, with his genius intellect and limitless funds.

And they can't spell acquired.

Seriously, I would think that the blaring red screen in the middle of the page might stand out to one of the three editors on this book. Apparently this either slipped past everyone who saw the lettered art, or letterer Sal Cipriano and editors Katie Kubert, Janelle Asselin, and Mike Marts are all unfamiliar with the concept of spellcheck.

Look, I don't want to be the nitpicky fanboy. I'm not trying to point out little continuity flubs; I'm not even criticizing fictional science content. I'm saying that these errors in basic English are sloppy and make DC Comics look terribly unprofessional. These comics pass through many eyes, and in some cases, many editors before I stand in line to pay my $2.99 for them, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect those editors to edit.

---

1. Yes, she was interrupted by a teleportation, presumably instantaneous. In which case, Robinson should have followed through on the trope (and the Star Trek VI reference) by having her say "--E!" on the other end. This suggests that she actually stopped speaking in the middle of the word "me."

Off to a bad start

So, I'm reading "Superman" #707, the first issue scripted by Chris Roberson, and I have all these tentatively hopeful expectations for a better experience than the previous few installments of "Grounded." Then, I get to this panel:

Now, I understand that it's difficult to pin down fictional comic book locations. I've had a devil of a time with it myself, and I'm quite glad that the Atlas of the DC Universe has taken up the difficult task of citing semi-canonical locales for our superheroes' homes. It's not perfect, as I've discovered, mainly because writers and editors don't seem concerned with giving these cities stable locations--or even stable states. While Metropolis is listed in Delaware by the Atlas--which, frankly, makes the most sense to me, given various details about Metropolis's geography and placement relative to Gotham and Washington, DC--"Countdown to Infinite Crisis" set it in New York (which is absurd). The Atlas places Smallville just south of Wichita, very close to the southern border of Kansas, but the "JLA: Our Worlds At War" special implies that Smallville is within 150 km (about 93 miles) of Topeka.

In neither case, however, is Smallville "just across the state line" from Des Moines, IA. There are two reasons for this:

1. Des Moines, IA, is just south of the center of the state of Iowa.
   
2. The state of Iowa does not share a border with Kansas.

It was almost forgivable that J. Michael Straczynski didn't do the research to figure out what side of Philadelphia he was setting the story in the first issue, or that he didn't realize that ordering a "Philadelphia Cheese Steak Sandwich" in Philly is like going to a hot dog vendor on Michigan Ave. and asking for a "bread-wrapped frankfurter sausage, adorned in the custom of Chicago, Illinois." But holy Hell, has the man never seen a map of the United States? With two writers, an associate editor, and the Superman titles' editor working on this story where Superman is visiting real places in the real United States, you'd think someone would have the sense to open a goddamn map. It's not like they're hard to find. Perhaps someone could send DC Comics a gas store roadside atlas. Or at least one of those handy U.S. placemats.

On the other hand, I'm glad to see someone finally calling Superman out on his incredibly out-of-character behavior of late. And while I may be the only person in the audience for this, I did like that the main plot/action was lifted directly from a scene in "Superman III."

Some initial thoughts on Superman: Earth One

I just finished reading "Superman: Earth One" (okay, except the article at the end), and I figured I should get some initial impressions down before they're all gone. Spoilers ahead.

• First, this is basically "Marvel Comics Presents Superman." It's Superman's origin by way of "Smallville" and "Spider-Man," and while that's certainly not a terrible thing, it's also the latest in a long line of fairly pessimistic, dull-toned Superman stories. And more and more, I'm tired of reading those stories.
  
• That being said, this certainly isn't as bad as "Grounded," which was a pleasant surprise. I'd still rather have someone other than Straczynski writing this book. Or another book being written, honestly. "Birthright," which did is still in print, did many of the same things and had the same general tone, while also being a much better introduction to the Superman mythos than this was. Meanwhile, "Superman: Secret Origin" is due out in collected form any day now, and it tells yet another version of this story. If I were working in DC's marketing dept., I'd frankly be a little worried-slash-upset that we were diluting the market like this. Seriously, take a look at the Superman graphic novels that are both accessible and acclaimed, and you'll find that a fairly sizable portion of them ("Birthright," "For All Seasons," etc.) are about his origin story. A story that has been a basic part of the cultural background noise since the '40s. I think DC would be better off focusing on telling accessible new stories about the Man of Steel than treading the most well-worn ground in comic book history one more time.
  
• In that same vein, the new villain is simultaneously a good idea--introducing new ideas, freshening up that well-worn ground--and a bad one. This is one of the problems I had with "Birthright" as well, but Superman shouldn't be the kind of person who needs to be motivated by some sense of revenge or responsibility. Despite the fact that he lost his planet, Superman doesn't need, and generally hasn't really had, a defining tragedy to spur on his superhero career like Batman or Spider-Man. His driving force is and should be that it's the right thing to do. I don't understand why that's a tough concept for people to grasp, or why writers feel like they need to gild it with sci-fi tropes like "I hate seeing people's souls disappear" or "I must avenge my homeworld, and it's my fault that these aliens attacked Earth." Other superheroes take up the tights out of responsibility and vengeance. Superman takes them up because of his strong moral upbringing.
  
• Moreover, the main villain, Tyrell (wow, that's the best alien name you could come up with? I know people named Tyrell), looks a little like "what if the Crow were a Final Fantasy villain." Alternately, "what if the Silver Banshee was a dude from the future." Not the most striking design, though I like the contrast between Clark's colorful outfit and his stark black-and-white.
  
• Speaking of Clark's colorful outfit, it's gotten some minor tweaks. There's some piping on the main suit and around the S-shield, the shield on the cape is now yellow-on-red, and the boots are a different shape. Fairly minor changes, and yet it seems like they didn't quite think it through. There are scenes where we can see Superman's armpit, and yet, we can't see the seam between the two colors that should exist there. The way the piping and the two-tone colors work, there should be a place where the colors separate. This seam could be in three positions: over the arm, possibly along the deltoid, so that most of Superman's sleeves are the darker color that predominates on his sides (both of Superboy's pre-t-shirt costumes do something like this); along the armpit, so that Superman's sleeves are the lighter blue of his torso (like that Cosmic Boy costume, but with fabric instead of naked Braalian); or along the arm, so that the sleeves are also two-toned (like Spider-Man. Do I need to provide an image?). Instead, we get no seam, no indication that any part of the sleeve is a different color than the rest of the middle/upper torso, and a question as to why, if you're going to design a new costume, you wouldn't consider that kind of detail.
  
• Also, the shading on the top is reversed from the shading on the legs, which is a little weird, but I can imagine ways for it to work. It's the briefs breaking things up that makes it look weird; the eye expects the piping to be continuous, so the color swap looks weird.
  
• I suppose I needn't mention my feelings about the nigh-indestructible costume. The same goes for the nigh-indestructible metals--Clark's indestructibility comes from his cells' absorption of yellow sunlight. Where does it come from in acellular metal?
  
• I'm also not thrilled with the way that comics keep pushing the age of Clark's onset-of-powers. Writers, please, people have been realizing (all too occasionally) since the very beginning that a baby with full-on superpowers is not a good idea. Let's stop the creeping development before it gets that far again, thanks.
  
• Not only does Clark need to learn how to use proper SI units (kilograms, Clark, not grams), but his "equation" is, not surprisingly, almost total gibberish. If you carry out the equation as written, going by the order of operations, then the term "1 mol H₂O₂" disappears, which means it's completely unnecessary. That is, of course, assuming it's "H₂O₂," because it's written without subscripts (and strangely, the computers used by the researchers use the same font that Clark writes in). The "ΔH" suggests that Clark's equation is describing a change in enthalpy, the total energy of a system, and that might be useful for researchers trying to get energy out of the system. Unfortunately, the likeliest way to get energy directly out of salt water is going to be to break the atomic bonds (breaking the ionic bonds in salt is already done once it's in the water; breaking the hydrogen bonds holding the water molecules together or breaking the molecular bonds holding the hydrogen to the oxygen both require an input of energy greater than the output), and the equations for that are different.
  
  But it's clear from the fact that 1.00 mol H₂O₂ is about 34.0 g H₂O₂ that Clark just left out some important parentheses. Inserting them where they ought to be in this equation gives us the meaning of what Clark is actually doing: first, converting grams to moles (34.0 g/mol is the conversion factor for hydrogen peroxide) then multiplying by the enthalpy of reaction of the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide (-98.2 kJ/mol), the reaction that spontaneously occurs when hydrogen peroxide is exposed to...well, most things, really. If you've ever used peroxide for anything, you're familiar with the way it bubbles and fizzes; this is because it is unstable and decomposes into water and oxygen quite readily, releasing a small amount of heat in the process (as Clark's equation notes, about -2.89 kJ for every gram of H₂O₂, or about .69 Calories).
  
  What's not clear is why any of that is significant. The amount of energy is miniscule, the equation is pedestrian, and none of it has anything to do with salt water, which is what the researchers were supposedly working on. "Give this man a job, he just told us that hydrogen peroxide fizzes!" This is one place where the writer, artist, letterer, whoever's to blame should have gone with a less-is-more strategy. Don't show us the revolutionary equation, because then you have to come up with a revolutionary equation.
  
• I'll leave aside the idea that an electron microscope can image normal atoms, that such an image would show atoms as spheres connected to each other by rods, and that you could write on electrons. It's comic book science, I know, and it'd be almost clever if it weren't so not-even-wrong.
  
• Similarly, when reading Perry's speech to Lois, my first thought was "hey, Perry actually sounds like an editor here." My second thought was, "actually, he sounds like someone read about editing somewhere." Much like the science thing, what's meant to sound kind of profound and insightful is really kind of bog-standard. "Use active language" is the kind of thing that every editor already knows; it's the kind of thing that any reporter should already know. And so the speeches Perry makes in his first scene read not so much like the words of a seasoned editor, but the words of someone who's just started out editing and has learned all these things in school, and is meeting his team for the first time. These are the conversations that I had with my writers when I edited my college newspaper; these are not the kind of conversations I would expect an experienced editor to have with professional reporters. "So you don't think a reporter should give her opinion of the story she's covering?" Really, Lois? Is this your first day in the News section too?
  
• The dialogue in general is kind of problematic, really. The characters all kind of sound the same, making the same kinds of quotes and references, and that's to be expected to some degree in any work by a single writer. But these are characters who all have fairly well-established voices, and I didn't really feel like we got much of that at all.
  
• Moreover, and this is a problem carrying over from "Grounded," too many characters seem to exist primarily so other characters can bounce speeches off of them. In that first scene with Perry, that's the only purpose served by Lois. In the two later scenes with the scientist, he's only there so that Clark can smugly moralize at him. Too much of the story is geared toward setting up particular speeches, and that's kind of a serious problem. It shows that Straczynski wasn't following the advice he had Perry give to Lois: "You fell in love with the words and put yourself too far into the story. Write about what you're writing about, not about you writing about what you're writing about."
  
• Speaking of writing advice:
  how exactly do you bury the lede in the headline? Way to fall asleep on the job, Perry. In fact, now that I'm looking at the interview, the paper looks a bit amateurish. Fix the justification, guys. There's also way, way too much of Clark in that article. It all seems a bit...self-indulgent. Superman should never seem self-indulgent.
  
• I actually like the idea of Clark trying out using his powers for personal/familial gain. I would have been more happy to see some more moral development here--a note about fairness, at least with respect to football--but I think it was generally a fairly reasonable and well-played set of scenes--the terrible science aside. That being said, though it touches on the issue, it really doesn't answer the question Straczynski posed at the beginning of "Grounded"--if Superman has the power to do things like, say, tell scientists what everyone already knows about peroxide how to get energy from salt water, then why doesn't he put his powers toward ending hunger or the energy crisis or cancer or whatever? The answer here seems to be "he doesn't really want to, and his mom said that he doesn't have to," which I suspect would be small comfort for that lady in the "Grounded" prologue.
  
• Jimmy Olsen was pretty awesome in this, I have to admit.
  
• Um, yeah, so...Superman sure killed a lot of aliens in this.

And aside from that last point, I don't think "Earth One" is terrible. It's not the kind of Superman origin I like seeing, but I guess for anyone who's coming to the character through, say, "Smallville," it fits that tone and style fairly well. Clark even looks like Tom Welling at a lot of points, and I don't think that's an accident. There are some barely-patched-over holes (the justification for the S-shield is particularly weak) in the story, and I think I've done a pretty thorough picking of certain frustrating nits, but it's not as awful as I expected it to be based on "Grounded."

That being said, I'm glad I didn't pay $20 for it. It actually makes me want to revisit "Birthright," which boggles my mind a bit. It also makes me wish that someone, anyone, would take a page from the John Byrne book and write a Superman origin that was upbeat. I guess "Secret Origin" has a lot of smiling in it, but it's still not as brightly-colored and brightly-toned as "Man of Steel" all those years ago.