Frezno's Comics Challenge: The Straight Story Six Part 2 (My Adventures With Superman: Jon Kent)

Oh good Christ. I suppose I had to confront this madness sometime during all of this. After 3/4ths of a year broadening my horizons, covering corporate magical girl wars, space capitalism, the unflattening of perspective and consciousness, road trips through the dark heart of America, and the pitfalls and perils of wishing... I have arrived to face down the monolith that is Mainstream Superhero Comics. And it's the Mainstream Superhero to boot. Well, a version of him, anyway. The contrast and shock is palpable. It's as if, after a night of classy dining at a new restaurant and tasting hereto unknown dishes with their own flavor palates and unique buildups which set your taste buds alight with fresh boldness... your dessert is a pack of Oreos. There's nothing wrong with Oreos, per se. Sometimes you're just in the mood for something trashy that's not good for you, because of the sweetness. It's junk, but a little junk can be fine. Sometimes. After a night of fine dining, though? Not so much.

2023's The Adventures Of Superman: Jon Kent is not a comic I liked. The crushing return to the madhouse that is superhero continuity was jarring after all the self-contained things I have experienced on this journey. To use the metaphor again, it is as if the great unflattening which opens up untold avenues of seeing stories and the world has been steamrolled into a cartoon cutout, flattened back into its limited scope. The art itself is... fine? I do try my very best to take my own perspective and try to broaden it here, by talking about colors and what that means or the way a book will use unique paneling or word balloons to express something using the visual medium of comic books. I mean... there's some nice use of color in the opening when Jon Kent is stopping satellites from falling onto Earth? Several panels of close-ups and whatnot just sort of have no background, taking place in this blank featureless void. (Or that really weird panel where Harley Quinn is doing what I think is the fucking Pogchamp face.) I don't remember if the comics I've read previous have done this, thus making the following critique unfair or anything, but there's just something so stark and utilitarian about it. It's not trying to elevate the art form or push the boundaries of words paired with a collage of images. It's just a comic book. It's just flattened. As workmanlike and standard as its cinematic blockbuster brethren. 

The narrative is much the same, and hoo boy. It's a superhero comic book, so of course it is dealing with nebulous continuity that I am supposed to know a lot of and not be going in blind like, I dunno, someone who just wanted to read a good book about a Superman. On more than one occasion it will shrug its hands and have an asterisk next to something someone references with a goddamn footnote saying "SEE ISSUE 12 OF THIS OTHER COMIC BOOK FOR THE CONTEXT!". To say nothing of the main universe the majority of the book takes place in. Before we get to that, though... Jon Kent. He's the son of Superman and Lois Lane, and I don't think this is happening in the main DC universe, whatever that is. He's also gay and gets to kiss his boyfriend Jay Nakamura in the book. Albeit in one of those featureless white void panels, but fine. That's good. It's also a little nice that he seeks out the other universe's Jay in issue 4 just to have someone familiar-ish to talk to about things and to get his head straight. I am afraid I have to talk about the conceit of this book now. It starts off with one premise and swerves right into another. The first is that there's a bad Superman called Ultraman who is flying into various DC universes to kill each of their Supermans, and he also kept Jon Kent trapped on a volcano planet for his childhood to torture him. The reasons for these things are never explained in this book, and I do not know them. 

What seems like a DC multiverse book about other Supermans and stopping the evil Ultraman takes a complete swerve, however. After a fight between Jon and Ultraman in which there's all this cliche shit about how Jon has to be willing to kill in order to beat Ultraman, Ultraman then immediately has his neck snapped by another fucking Superman. Zack Snyder when did you get here? (This is not the only allusion to Superman on film, as Jon will later do the "care to step outside?" line from Superman 2. I groaned.) The rest of the book takes place in this Superman's universe, and oh sweet Lord. So it's actually a totalitarian dystopia in which Superman has gone bad and a bunch of other superheroes rule with an iron fist, while Batman has a motley alliance of rebels plotting his downfall. Standard, but what takes the cake for me is the subtitle of the book: Road To Injustice. The backstory of why this Superman went bad is known to me. It's tied into Injustice: Gods Among Us, a goddamn DC fighting game from the Xbox 360/PS3 generation of consoles. I reel at this. What are we doing here? Why are we here? Why, in the year 2023, are we making Superman's son engage with the lore of a decade-old fighting game? The level of pedantic continuity staggers me, and I lived through the Chibnall era.

That's as good a comparison as any to talk about the ending, in which Jon Kent finally confronts the evil tyrant Superman and... hugs him instead of fighting. He gets to give this big inspiring speech about how Superman isn't bad, Superman doesn't rule with an iron first, he isn't cruel or vengeful... Superman always helps. A nice sentiment, right? Except this is an evil fascist Superman. I understand the thought, I really do. From 2019 to 2020 I marinated in a series with the ultimate message that empathy and understanding were preferable to grim practicality and living with hate in your heart. Do you know what the sunny optimist of that series did to its season 4 antagonist, an out and out fascist automaton from the dawn of time looking to unite the world under his banner, by his rules and ideology? She punched the everloving fuck out of him and blew a hole through his torso. Because sometimes, when confronted with pure evil, you just have to do that. Sometimes the system is the problem, and you can't just hug it out. Sometimes you have to just bash the fucking fash. It is not something to take delight in, to gleefully rejoice in as you finally get a free pass to be the monster and the bully you have always wanted to be. It is something you have to do, lest your inaction lead to corrupted centrist monstrosity.

What does this book want to be? What is the role of a superhuman in modern society? I would say, like that show I just mentioned, it's to know when to use empathy and when to use violence. When to extend your hand, and when to clench it into a fist. If you believe superhero comics and movies, however, it's to maintain the status quo. To keep things just as they are, to not rock the boat, to not change the world. Like how the Injustice Superman changed the world, and he did it badly. Or all those revolutionary leftists in the MCU who cartoonishly cross the line and thus earn a beatdown by the state-sanctioned Good Superheroes. The final panels of this book are Jon Kent returning to his world, and finding it loud and chaotic compared to the ordered (and hushed and fearful) calm of the Injustice world. Better this than change. Better The Way Things Are* (*see Issue 13 of Ultraman for more). Better flattened than unflattened. 

Fuck that. Gimme a good book next, please.