Superman Goes for a Walk, Chapter 1
You know, it's hard to explain Superman to people who hate Superman. It's easy not to like Superman, because 90% of Superman stories suck. That's not a higher ratio than anybody else, it's just that even terrible Batman stories are exciting. Or have George Clooney in them.
The problem is, much of the time people write Superman as fucking boring. And he shouldn't be.
Now, it can't all be All-Star. (And you shouldn't fucking try. More on that in a bit.) But there are ways to make Superman interesting.
The "Superman walks across America to get in touch with the common man" premise is a perfectly good one. The trouble is that, so far, it's about 80% Boring, Sanctimonious '90's Superman and 20% Crazy Social Justice Vigilante '40's Superman.
I love '40's Superman. He was like if FDR got up out of his chair and PHYSICALLY FORCED motherfuckers to treat the working class right. Run an unsafe mine? Superman's going to trap your ass down there until you promise to impose strict safety guidelines. Is your neighborhood full of run-down, abandoned buildings? Superman will just KNOCK THE FUCKERS DOWN so that HUD will come build new ones.
So when Superman shows up in a neighborhood full of drug labs and burns them all up with his heat vision, and then mocks the dealers? That's EXACTLY the kind of shit Joe and Jerry would have done. THAT is Superman connecting with the common man and solving real-world problems.
Too bad he spends the rest of the issue spouting smug platitudes in a bunch of scenes we've seen before. (Seriously? Talking a girl off a ledge? I don't know which is harder to believe, that JMS hasn't read All-Star or that he has but still decided it would be a good idea to do a shittier version of a scene from it in a book whose target audience is mostly made up of people who read it.)
Point is, I love the original Superman, and for a brief, fun moment, he's in this book, using his might to make life better for people in a seedy neighborhood, while mocking the thugs who have made it so bad. I want more shit like that. I want him to come to Phoenix and stick Joe Arpaio in Tent City.
But of course that's never going to happen, and the best we can hope for is that he takes down a few more conventional comic-book thugs in-between his sanctimonious lectures.
