Review: Action Comics #1000

The good:

The standout in this anniversary issue is "The Car," a story idea so simple it's amazing no one has thought about it before. We've seen hundreds of retcons, and reboots of the Superman mythology over the past 80 years, but this is the first story to ask, what exactly happened to that car Superman smashed on the cover of Action Comics #1?

Genius!

It could have been titled, "Action Comics #1: The Next Day." We find out what happened to the car, and by extension, what happened to the owner of the car who, as you remember, was kidnapping Lois Lane at the time he met up with Superman. The clever story is by Geoff Johns and Richard Donner, with exceptional art by Olivier Coipel.

The whole book is an homage to Superman, but only "The Car" is an homage to Action Comics.

They brought some creative icons back and they're always welcome: Neal Adams! Jim Steranko! Jose Garcia Lopez! Jerry Ordway! Marv Wolfman! Paul Levitz! Any comic book with only one of these creators is worth picking up ... and studying.

There's an amazing greatest hits package by Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason who give us a quick 80-year history through a series of full page recreations. Beautiful.

It ends with a Brian Michael Bendis, Jim Lee cliffhanger which introduces a whole new villain and storyline to be carried out in the future. It's intriguing for now, let's see where it goes.

The head scratchers:


There are two stories where Superman and Lex Luthor stand around and chat. Really, two? Lex Luthor bores me for the same reason the Joker does. He is the default villain. Make a Superman movie, use Luthor as the villain. Make another Superman movie, use Luthor as the villain, make another Superman movie, Luthor. Reboot the franchise: Use Luthor, reboot the franchise again? Luthor, yet again.


And he's not that good a villain.

The other disappointment was the Curt Swan chapter. Yeah, I get it, he was the Superman artist for 20 years, but the unpublished art they use doesn't even have Superman (just his narration, what a cheat!), and secondly, they must have been working with some really rough pencils because after it was digitized and colorized and photoshopped, very little of it looks like Curt Swan's work, same for the full page of Superman by Swan and inked by Kurt Shaffenberger, these two had extremely distinctive styles, all washed out by the time Photoshop got finished with them. I would have been happy with a single page of Superman flying from Swan and Murphy Anderson.

Do they drag out the Superman Day celebration (where something evil is afoot) every anniversary issue. It just seemed very familiar.

Though it's Action Comics' landmark issue, it's all about Superman. Where are the homages to the heroes of its back-up features.  We have two cameos of the Justice League en masse, but no Zatara? Where's the Human Target, Tex Thompson, The Vigilante, the Atom, Green Arrow? When comics had substantial page counts, Superman didn't carry Action alone. I loved those backup features. If I wanted to read just all Superman  stories, I'd get Superman, if I wanted some variety, I'd get Action.