Review: Superman Blue Vol. 1 trade paperback (DC Comics)

I've often thought of Superman Blue as the beginning of the end.

In their heyday, the "Triangle Titles" Superman team was nigh unstoppable. They're best known for "Death of Superman," but there's a bevy of stories before and after that are just as good. And the way in which the team functioned as a "writer's room" across four Superman titles to provide interconnected, soap opera-style stories has never again been done as well at DC.

But by the time "Superman Blue" came around, the longest-serving member of that team, Dan Jurgens, had written over 60 issues of Superman over at least seven years. The team had seen Superman engaged, killed, resurrected, and married (also amnesic and time-tossed once or twice). Certain events, including a perceived second death of Superman, the "death" of Clark Kent, and the overuse of characters like the Cyborg Superman suggested perhaps the team had told all the stories they had. Jurgens, whose art once anchored the books alongside Jerry Ordway and others, no longer drew; though the books sported some talented artists, the art depicted here is many steps behind its contemporaries, such as Howard Porter's dynamic work on JLA.

The "Superman Blue" plotline stumbled a lot and the stories often focused on secondary characters who seemed more interesting to the creators than to the readers. Parallel to this, the Bat-titles were offering stories like Legacy and No Man's Land, setting the foundation for the modern iteration of Bat-title storytelling, while the Super-titles were struggling to get the audience engaged. When the "Superman Blue" era ended after about 10 months, the Super-titles launched right into their next equally troubled epic, and within a year of that all the titles' creative teams would be replaced. As a loyal and long-time Super-titles reader, I can tell you the end was an unfortunate relief, and the arrival of Jeph Loeb and company a breath of fresh air.

That DC has chosen to collect Superman Blue in four volumes is a wonderful oddity. If anything might spark the casual reader's interest in these stories, it's probably Superman's noted blue costume and/or Grant Morrison's exceptional use of the "electric Superman" in JLA. As indicated, these stories are not great and get sillier as they go, and I am not at all confident in this four-volume series actually ever being all collected -- whether casual reader interest will support this series for four volumes once curiosity gives way to the actual content. But I believe DC's tangible history largely rests in its catalog of collections, and prior to this there was about a 25-issue gap in DC's Superman collections (times four Superman titles!) that, if all of these issues are collected, will be reduced down to about 15 issues (or, an additional year of Super-titles will be collected), and that's a good thing indeed. The beginning of the end deserves its place in history just as much as any other part does.

[Review contains spoilers]

The biggest problem with Superman Blue arrives on its very first page -- Ceritak, the Kandorian alien who would come to be known as "Scorn." In an afterword to this volume (which is a great thing to have, and I hope all four volumes have afterwords), Dan Jurgens talks about how the teams wanted a more fun atmosphere in the books and a "loud, bawdy" character. The Triangle Title Super-teams certainly introduced many compelling original characters to Superman's supporting cast over the years, but the problem is that by the end of this book, there are issues that just feature a Superman A-plot and a Scorn B-plot, and that's it -- the travails of Scorn, instead of Lois, Perry, Lex, or any of the Super-titles' other stalwarts.

Scorn is a hulking, blue behemoth, which makes his storytelling potential both predictable and limited. Ron Troupe, to name another Triangle Titles original, has been at times a Daily Planet reporter, worked some other jobs in Metropolis, was friend to Jimmy Olsen, married Lucy Lane, and so on. Scorn's storylines (so far, at least) play out according to Frankenstein/Beauty and the Beast tropes -- the public mistakes him for a menace and shuns him, a blind girl is the only one who understands him. The girl is the daughter of Dirk Armstrong, the Daily Planet's stereotypical conservative provocateur, another supporting character the book emphasizes -- so there's something of an echo chamber where, if not Superman, the book is wholly focused on some aspect of Dirk or Ashbury Armstrong or Scorn.

It's interesting all these years later to hear Jurgens state reasons for Scorn's inclusion. If a lighter tone was what the team wanted, then perhaps in that vein they succeeded (though shortly after the events of the final Superman Blue book, Scorn would never be heard from again). That Scorn would not, by definition of the character, become a Daily Planet reporter, be active in Metropolis politics, have an opinion about the next mayoral election, ever have any secret identity, and so on, reflects a move by the creative teams away from the gritty realism of early Triangle Title stories (see Dark Knight Over Metropolis or "Going to Blazes") toward a more bombastic Silver Age tone. That's a fine goal; my recollection, however, is that Scorn would continue to crowd Superman out of his own books, and I don't think it's a coincidence that as soon as the next creative team arrived, they dived right back into Metropolis politics with gusto. The creative teams consider Scorn far more interesting than he is, and that works increasingly to the titles' detriment.

All of that said, surprisingly I enjoyed the first volume of Superman Blue more than I expected to. There's no denying this book is tightly plotted -- for books from before the "write for the trade" era that make lots of references to prior events, there's a distinctly graphic novel feel to how this volume starts in Kandor with Scorn and then comes back around to a grand Kandorian adventure finale, or the motif of how Clark Kent's shaving process changes over the course of the book with his new powers. The writers hand off storylines to one another with grace not seen much since and there's always something going on -- how Dirk's appearance in the first issue leads to the two-part Atomic Skull story; how that plants the seeds for some of the Scorn background action in the three-part Metallo story; and then the Kandor four-parter. To that end, I even disliked the Scorn material less than I recalled even if perhaps because I'm gripped watching how the writers weave Scorn through every aspect of this book (for good or ill irrespective).

"Electric blue Superman" is handled well here. It reads desperate -- even Superman wonders aloud how he can possibly do things like shape-change, and ultimately the writers won't explain how Superman got like this nor how he returns to normal, because "why" seems less important than making the change. But a few years from the end of the twentieth century, there's something appropriate about a superhero turning into a bold of lightning and zooming off to face the next threat (if not entirely appropos to Superman). Watching the ultimate superhero have to re-learn how to handle his superpowers is a lot of fun, as is the conceit that when not using his powers, Clark becomes completely human (something we'd see again around Geoff Johns's "solar flare" concept). The "Pulp Heroes" annual, collected here for the first time, uses well the "Clark Kent, mild-mannered hero" concept.

But Superman Blue's other weakness, for me, is the art. From the days when the Triangle Title's artists were almost indistinguishable, here there's stark differences between the works by Ron Frenz, Stuart Immonen, Tom Grummett, Jon Bogdanove, and others (as well as in the depth of color from issue to issue). Joe Rubinstein began inking Dan Jurgens after Brett Breeding departed, and if one compares for instance the Superman #82 of those years to Superman #83, there's a stark difference with how sharp Breeding's inks were versus Rubinstein's, more sketchy and indistinct. Frenz's depictions are at times absurd or overwrought; though Frenz and Rubinstein are both comics legends in their own rights, again their work on the flagship Superman pales in comparison to Howard Porter and John Dell on JLA or Graham Nolan and Scott Hanna on Detective Comics at the time. Though Bogdanove gives this new-era Superman some great Golden Age stylings, at some point in his Man of Steel tenure Bogdanove leaned toward the cartoony, and it's evident here in at times distracting ways.

Support Collected Editions -- Purchase Superman Blue Vol. 1

Wild sci-fi Kandor stories, you might suspect, are not my favorite, but this time I got the homage to "Nightwing and Flamebird" tales of old with Superman and the (Zero Hour de-aged) Atom zapping in for a mission. It's another example of how, with more seasoned eyes, I'm inclined to give Superman Blue Vol. 1 more leeway than I might have previously. There's other Superman stories that I'd like to see collected, but I'm not sorry these stories are being collected, too. Hopefully the other volumes make it so I can see how this turns out, for the second time.

[Includes original covers (lacking variants), Scorn sketch, afterword]

Summary

Reviewer

Collected Editions

Review Date

2018-07-22

Reviewed Item

Superman Blue Vol. 1

Author Rating

3 (scale of 1 to 5)