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davidmann95 · 3 years

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Sooo… Superman and the Authority?

magnus-king123 asked: Your thoughts on Superman & the authority Give it to me...lol

Anonymous asked: Seeing Bezos take his little trip into space the same day Morrison puts out a Superman comic that touches on how far we’ve fallen from the days when we dreamed of utopian futures where everyone explored the stars was a big gut punch. Not used to Superman being topical in that way.

Anonymous asked: What'd you think of Superman and the Authority#1?

This is far beyond what I can fit in the normal weekly reviews, so taking this as my notes on the first six pages, with this and this as my major lead-in thoughts:

* Janin's such a perfect fit for Morrison - the scale, the power, the facial expressions selling the character work, the screwing around with the panel formatting as necessary to sell the effect, the numinous sense of things going on larger than you can fully perceive amidst the beauty and chaos. It's a shame he wasn't around 25 years ago to draw JLA, but I'll take him going with Morrison onto other future projects.

* His intro action sequence is such a great demonstration of why Black actually does have something to offer, and also how he's such a dumbass desperately needing Superman to save him from himself.

* While Jordie Bellaire didn't legit go with an entirely monochromatic palate the way early previews suggested, it's still an effect frequently and excellently deployed here. And glad to see Steve Wands carry into this from Blackstars since there's such an obvious carryover from its work with Superman.

* "Gentlemen. Ladies. Others." Great both because of the obvious - hey, Superman's nodding at me! - and because it's a phrasing that reinforces that this take on him (and let's be real Morrison) is old as hell.

* I'm mostly past caring about whether this is an alt-Earth Superman until it becomes indisputable one way or another, this and Action both rule so what does it really matter? But while there are still a couple signs in play suggesting some kind of division (the Action Comics #1036 cover, Midnighter up to time-travel shenanigans) the "lost in time" quote clearly thrown in after the fact to explain how he could have met Kennedy outside of 5G that wouldn't be necessary for an Elseworlds, the assorted gestures towards Superman's current status quo, the Kingdom Come symbol appearing in Action, and that Morrison would have had to completely rewrite the ending if this wasn't supposed to be 'the' version of Clark Kent going forward as was the intent when they first planned it all say to me that no, no fooling around, this is our guy going forward one way or another.

* Janin and Bellaire making the first version of the crystal Fortress ever that actually looks as cool as you want it to.

Anonymous asked: I like that Superman and The Authority is basically the anti-All-Star; instead of the laid back, immortal Superman who is supercharged, we have a stressed, ageing Superman whose tremendous powers are fading. The former will always be there to save us, but the latter is running out of time and needs to pull off a Hail Mary. Also, he mentions in his monologue to Black that he was "lost in time" when he met JFK, so maybe he is the main continuity Clark. Or he's the t-shirt Supes from Sideways.

* You're absolutely right - the power reversal is obvious and the ticking clock in play seemingly isn't for his own survival but everyone around him as he wakes up and realizes all the old icons grew complacent with the gains they'd made and he's not leaving behind the world he meant to. Both, however, are built on the idea of preparing the world to not need them anymore - it'll still have a Superman in his son, but that'll only work because of the others he empowers and inspires. The question is what happens to Clark if he's not going to live in the sun for 83000 years.

* Clark's 'exercise' here does more to sell me on the idea of Old Man Superman as a cool idea than however many decades of Earth 2 stuff.

* Intergang being noted alongside Darkseid and Doomsday speaks to how much Kirby informed Morrison's conception of Superman.

* This isn't exactly the most progressive in its disability politics but at least it makes clear Black's being a piece of shit about it.

* It's startling how much Clark can get away with saying stuff in here you'd never expect to come out of Superman's mouth. "I made an executive decision" "Privacy, really...?" "You have nowhere to go, Black. Nothing to live for." "There are few people in my life who I instinctively and viscerally dislike, and you've always been one of them." It only works because there's zero aggression behind it, he's just past the point of niceties and being totally frank while making clear none of these assessments preclude that he cares and is going to unconditionally do the right thing every time. He is absolutely, per Morrison, humanity's dad picking us up when we're too drunk to drive ourselves home.

* The story doesn't put a big flashing light over it, but it's not even a little bit subtle having the material threat of the issue be a ticking timebomb left by the carelessness and hubris of generations past.

* Manchester keeps trying to poke the bear and prove his hot takes about Superman and it's just not working. The front he put up under Kelley is gone after decades of defeats, and as Morrison understands what actually conceptually works about him as a rival to Superman underneath the aging nerd paranoia he's exposed as what he absolutely would be in 2021: a dude with a horrific terminal case of Twitter brainworms. I was PANICKED when I heard there was an 'offensive term' joke in this, I was braced for Morrison at their well-meaning worst, but it's such a goddamn perfect encapsulation of a very specific breed of Twitter leftist who uses their politics first and foremost as a cudgel and justification to label their abrasive, judgmental shittiness as self-righteousness (plus it's a killer payoff to a joke from way back in his original appearance). Cannot believe they pulled that off when they're so very, very open about basically not knowing how the internet works.

* @charlottefinn: Manchester Black using his telekinetic powers to force someone he hates to fave a problematic tweet so that he can screenshot it and start a dogpile

@intergalactic-zoo: “Once they cancel Bibbo, Superman won’t be *anyone’s* fav’rit anymore!”

* Friend noted this issue had to be fully the conversation because the whole premise stands on the house of cards of these two somehow working together, and with three 'silent' inset panels the creative team pulls off that turning point.

* So much of this feels on the surface like Morrison bringing back the All-Star vibes with Clark, but when he drops a "That's all you got?" in a brawl you realize what's underlining that bluntness and confidence in the face of failure is that deep down this is still the Action guy too. This dude ain't gonna get wrecked in his Fortress while the other guy chuckles about him being A SOFT WEE SCIENTIST'S SON!

* Bringing up Jor-El made me realize that Morrison already spelled out that this is the final threat to Superman, what he faces at the end of the road:

"Now it's your turn, Superman."

* A l'il Superman 2000/All-Star reference with the Phantom Zone map!

* There's so much intertextuality going on here even by Morrison standards - Change or Die with the old hero putting together a team of morally nebulous folks out to 'fix' everything, Flex Mentallo with the muscleman trying to redeem the punk, Doomsday Clock with the fate of the world hinging on whether Superman can get through to a meta stand-in for an idea of 'modern' comics cynicism, DKR and New Frontier and Kingdom Come and Multiversity and Seven Soldiers and What's So Funny and All-Star and Action and the last 5 years of monthly Superman comics and Authority and probably Jupiter's Legacy and Tom Strong - but none of that's needed. You could go in with the baseline pop cultural understanding of the character and not care about any of the inside baseball shit and get that this is a story about a leader of a generation that let down the people they made all their grand promises to as inertia and day-to-day demands and complacency let him be satisfied with the accomplishments they'd made long ago, looking at a new era and seeing the ways its own activists are dropping the ball. The only thing that fundamentally matters in a "you have to accept you're reading a superhero story" sense is that because he's Superman he's willing to own up to it and listen to people who might know better about some things and try to set things right while he and those who'll take his place still have a chance. And yes, the oldster looking back on their legacy with a skeptical eye and hoping for better from the next generation, hoping most of all that their little heir apparent can fulfill the promise inside of him instead of being a provocating little shitkicker, is obviously also autobiographical.

* The overlaying Kennedy reprisal is such a great visual of a sudden intrusive thought.

* The Kryptonite secret is the obvious "This is going to matter!" moment, but "He lied about his son" is a bit that doesn't connect to anything going on right now so maybe that's important here too? More significantly, the Justice League can't actually be the villains here but that Ultra-Humanite's crew are in an Earth-orbiting satellite makes pretty clear what's up.

* I've said before that between Superman, OMAC, and a New Gods-affiliated speedster this was going to use all of Morrison's favorite things. King Arthur playing a role isn't exactly dissuading me.

* Love the idea that all the antiheroes have their own community in the same way as the capes and tights crew. They definitely all privately think the rest are posers though and that they alone are Garth Ennis Punisher in a mob of Garth Ennis Wolverines.

* Manchester's fallen so far he's gone from trying to convince Superman to kill to convince him to dunk on people for their bad takes and Clark just doesn't get it. Official prediction of dialogue for upcoming issues:

"According to these bloody Fortress scans, the only thing that can restore your powers is an unfiltered hit of dopamine. Don't worry, Doctor Black has a few ideas."

"Hmm. Maybe I'll plant a nice tree?"

"...fuck you."

* Ok I already talked about how great the Fortress looks in here but LOVE this library.

* A pair of pages this seems like the right spot to discuss from Black's original appearance that underlines both his and Superman's inadequacies up to this point:

Responding to the problem of "the government and penal system are hopelessly corrupt" neither of them has any actual notion of what to do about it in spite of their respective posturing beyond how to handle individual outside actors - each is in their own way every bit as small-minded and reactionary as the other. Clark's coming around though, and he's holding out hope for the other guy.

* Superman: Have a lovely mineral water :) proper hydration is important :)

Manchester Black: *Is a dude who can get so mad he vomits and passes out. At water.*

* That last page is the one to beat for the year, and does more to put over the idea of this as an Authority book than that Midnighter and Apollo are literally going to show up. It also feels like Morrison tacitly acknowledging all the ways the premise could go or at least be received wrong - from Superman saying 'enough is enough' to who he's bringing into the fold to go about it - in the most beautifully on-the-nose fashion imaginable. Maybe they'll save us all! Or maybe they'll drown us in their vomit.

#Superman and The Authority #Superman #The Authority #Manchester Black #Grant Morrison #Mikel Janin #Jordie Bellaire #Steve Wands #Opinion

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davidmann95 · 7 years

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It seems Tyler Hoechlin is your favorite live-action Superman, but can you rank the actors from worst to best as you see it (of the current actors, I'm not sold on Hoechlin yet, but I think it has more to do with my dislike of his costume—particularly how the cape attaches—that it distracts me from the character, while Cavill seems to physically look perfect for the part and certainly is capable of the acting and charm, but the script he has to work with is lacking)?

Leaving out Kirk Alyn, John Haymes Newton and Gerard Christopher, since I’m not familiar with their performances:

7. Tom Welling

I feel kind of bad about this one. I grew up watching Smallville, y’know? And in terms of sheer man-hours devoted to the role, Welling has more of a claim to being Superman than anyone other than Bud Collyer. But he…wasn’t great, in retrospect. I suspect it was largely a matter of the material he was given; he did well whenever he actually had something to do, whether as dorky reporter Clark Kent intermittently throughout the final season, or various cases of amnesia/mind control/body-swapping/Red Kryptonite exposure. But outside maybe a sweet spot after he’d grown into the role and before he visibly started to get tired of it, and occasionally when getting to spar with (better) actors like Durance, Rosenbaum, and Glover, he had a weird stiffness when playing regular Clark Kent that for the most part didn’t translate into charm once he couldn’t bank on teen awkwardness anymore, and while that frankly made him a pretty honest depiction of the increasingly dicey version of the character he was written as, it didn’t make for a great take on Superman.

6. Henry Cavill

Cavill’s been more let down by the material than anything else - the unfortunate unifying factor of the bottom three here. When the movies let him be great, he really is great, whether promising Martha that he isn’t going anywhere even after learning the truth about Krypton or fighting for the stories he believes in against Perry White. For the most part though he just seems to be called on to look varying degrees of sad and solemn, asked to call on none of the charm he showed in, say, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Granted his Superman has a lot to be down about, but there’s no range on display here; I don’t doubt he’s got a great take on the character in him, but for now it’s being kept under wraps.

5. Brandon Routh

Of all the reasons Superman Returns was such a damn shame, maybe the biggest was that it buried any chance of seeing the performance out of Brandon Routh that he so clearly had to offer. He’s a great dorky Clark, a charming Superman, and when the stars line up just right, he really manages to capture the idea of Superman as a melancholy figure - his take doesn’t just seem to be bearing the weight of the world in the philosophical abstract, but much more palpably feels an entire planet crying out for him, knowing he can never save them all but always trying anyway out of unconditional love, very much in line with Garth Ennis and John McCrea’s take on him in Hitman. Unfortunately all that takes up maybe 10-15 minutes of runtime, spending the rest of the movie stalking his ex with a neutral expression until he gets shived by Kevin Spacey and regurgitates Brando at his secret kid. Superman Returns was weird, ya’ll.

4. Dean Cain

I was honestly surprised with myself when I decided Cain won out as the best of the rest outside the big three - I thought for sure it’d be Routh. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that while Routh’s take is definitely closer to the version of Superman I had in my head, it’s compromised in a way the Superman of Lois & Clark never was: like the take or not, this is a perfect realization of the Superman the creators of the show clearly had in mind. His Clark’s funny, clever, warm, and vulnerable, and while it feels weird for him to be acting that way in the glasses these were the Byrne years, so as an expression of his ‘real’ self it’s pretty on-point. His Superman’s the weaker end, stilted even given it’s supposed to be him putting on a performance in-universe, but there’s such an unironic earnestness there that it typically slid back into charming.

3. George Reeves

I thought for awhile about 2 and 3, ultimately concluding that what was asked of George Reeves was a fair deal simpler. He didn’t much differentiate between Superman and Clark, and his booming radio announcer voice made clear we weren’t supposed to be measuring his performance in terms of whether or not he seemed like a real person. What he was called on to show though, and what he had out the wazoo, was raw charisma. When Jimmy asks him why he burst through a wall rather than using a door and Superman replies with a grin “Well, this seemed a little more spectacular,” you’re 100% willing to buy into that explanation, because yeah, it was spectacular, because Superman’s fantastic. And he could more than hold his own with the best of them when asked to work with more serious material, whether wandering through an amnesic fog in Panic In The Sky with only his instinctive decency to guide him, or here, in the final scene of The Dog Who Knew Superman, where Clark has to deal with a dog not only adoring him, but recognizing him in both identities:

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2. Christopher Reeve

I gave Tom Welling his well-earned due earlier, but if you really want to talk about a guy with a solid claim to being Superman, Christopher Reeve didn’t just embed himself on the psyche of a generation, but is still held up today as the unequivocal standard by which the role is set. In all likelihood he’ll always be ‘the’ Superman, in the same way as Sean Connery will always be James Bond, and Bela Lugosi will always be Dracula. He shone like the sun in the costume, he was believably such a wimpy klutz out of it that no one would guess they were the same even when it was staring them in the face, and if anyone has any lingering suspicions that he just had the easy task of playing two extremely arch roles to the hilt, they might be forgetting this bit:

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Was it perfect? I don’t know about that - if nothing else there were one or two awkward line readings, and the identity division is so sharp that it’s hard to tell when you’re getting a glimpse of the real guy underneath all the identities. But while I definitely question how much of a positive impact on Superman those movies themselves really had in the long run, Reeve’s performance on its own was an undeniable revelation, everything he did reverberating with such a sincere and powerful sense of decency and love for his fellow man that it not only brought Superman to the life, but frankly changed him forever for the better.

1. Tyler Hoechlin

I expected nothing out of this guy. Not that I by any means thought he’d be bad, but when I heard some dude from Teen Wolf was gonna appear on an episode or two of Supergirl, my reaction was about as intense as…well, what you’d expect upon hearing that some dude from Teen Wolf was showing up on Supergirl, even given who he was playing (granted I’ve never seen Teen Wolf and don’t actually especially know what Teen Wolf is, beyond that it’s based on that werewolf-playing-basketball 80s movie written by…wait, Jeph Loeb?!). Looked fine - and it became clear he actually really did look the part once behind-the-scenes pictures started to come out, rather than that godawful original promo picture - and I figured he’d belt out his best Reeve/Animated Series/Cartoon-on-the-side-of-a-cereal-box brand Generic Superman Performance to cheer Kara on before vanishing into the sunset forever outside of the opening credits. I was plenty interested in the potential long-term ramifications of Superman being allowed on TV again in any capacity for the first time since the 90s, given the influence that suggested Geoff Johns had as the new DC President and what that could mean in terms of other characters showing up down the line, but I wasn’t inclined to think of this as anything other than a stepping stone, only notable in its own right because it meant someone would be wearing the s-shield.

Then we actually saw him.

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Where the hell has this guy been all these years? Was he grown in a goddamn laboratory for the part? How did the best Superman ever end up in a minor recurring guest spot on the CW Supergirl show?

It would be so, so easy to leap to the idea that he simply works as a jack-of-all-trades: he’s almost as charming as Reeve, just about as confident as Reeves, nearly as vulnerable as Cain. But that would be selling what he’s doing short - especially given that he probably hasn’t had the opportunity to stretch as far as he could in any of those directions, as his role so far has very much been as Supergirl’s backup dancer. What it comes down to is his general demeanor and how he incorporates those aspects into a whole that feels more fully-realized than any portrayal before him. His Superman and Kent are not only distinctive to the point that within the heightened reality the show occupies you can buy that people think of them as different people, but you can see threads from both of them connecting back to the real Clark you see around Kara. He’s open and warm and authentic in a way none of his predecessors quite were, and he’s able to turn on a dime into steely determination or outright fury while remaining recognizable. He’s above everyone’s heads and vaguely alien at times without ever seeming detached or less than entirely loving of the people around him, able to admit his fears and failings while staying strong and capable of changing for the better, utterly and palpably good without ever sliding into naivete or cartoonishness. In short he has range and nuance, and thanks to that along with the air of laid-back friendliness he brings with him, he more than anyone else to put on the suit feels like a real person. And somehow, that real person feels as much as anyone ever has like Superman. And that’s a hell of an achievement. So someone give him his own goddamn show already.

#Superman #DCTV #DCEU #Smallville #Superman Returns #Tom Welling #Henry Cavill #Brandon Routh #Dean Cain #George Reeves #Christopher Reeve #Tyler Hoechlin #Opinion

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