Sore Tooth: Superman #0 Review
You ever had a low-grade toothache? You know, the kind where you feel a little zip when you suck cold air past it? The kind of thing where you find yourself constantly inhaling sharply, trying to see if maybe its gone away, or if maybe it’s getting worse? And you find yourself worrying that maybe it actually is getting worse, and you just wish the damn thing would go away so you could concentrate on something else?
Over the course of the past year, Scott Lobdell has become my toothache.
Superman #0 is a pretty bad comic book. It wallows in exposition, alien cliches, and stilted dialogue. It tries to turn Superman’s parents into some kind of asskicking science heroes for some reason, and it implies that Oracle is now some kind of all-knowing, all-seeing space jerk, which should win back all the female readers Lobdell lost with Red Hood and The Outlaws. And it does all this with art that, while pretty enough in a stylized way, serves in places as examples of some of the worst visual storytelling that I have seen in a comic book in 36 years.
Superman #0 made my hangover worse this morning. After reading it I needed to watch my Blu-Ray of The Avengers again too recover any hope for the superhero genre. It made my stool loose and burny. If it had come out two and a half months ago, it would have caused riots in downtown San Diego.
It’s really not very good, you guys.
Being a Zero Issue, Superman #0 endeavors to tell an origin story about its title character, and Lobdell chooses to do that by ignoring Superman completely and focusing on his parents, Jor-El and Lara. Jor-El is the planetary science hero, having discovered the Phantom Zone one evening (apparently Jor-El uses the same drugs that I do) and who now is exploring Krypton’s core in a pressure suit of his own design. So Joe-El is basically Krypton’s James Cameron, only Jor-El’s hot ass-kicking wife didn’t walk out on him in disgust in 1999. Anyway, Jor-El simultaneously discovers that Krypton is on its way to blowing up and a new form of previously unknown indigenous life living beneath the surface, meaning in one day he made career-making breakthroughs in engineering, geology and biology, meaning that somewhere Stephen Hawking is using his voice box to approximate the sound of jealous weeping. So yeah, it turns out that there are elements in Krypton who don’t want the rank and file to know that their planet is doomed, so they stage an attack on Lara an Jor-El to silence them, because apparently it’s just too complicated to go on TV and call them dirty liberals. Then, because the Zero Issues are meant to be self-contained one-and-dones, Lobdell ends the issue with not one, but two cliffhangers.
Okay: so where to begin… let’s start how the issue started: with the exposition. Of which there is a lot. Lobdell makes the choice to open the story with Jor-El, alone, beneath the surface of Krypton. Which is fine, I guess, except that since the New 52 reboot, all we really know about Jor-El is that Superman shot out of the end of his dick somewhere along the line. So Lobdell has, for all intents and purposes, decided to introduce this character by devoting almost a third of the issue to caption boxes and having a character mutter to himself like some kind of a brain-damaged spastic with a taste for overblown monologue (“What started out as mild scientific curiosity — has become a matter of life or death!” Really, Jor-El? What do you shout out while you’re jerking off? “What started out as mild boredom has become a ruined sock”?). It gets the required story points across, but as a storytelling technique, it is fucking boring. It is the antithesis of “show, don’t tell,”
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