Ensign Wesley Crusher Blues: Action Comics #14 Review

Editor’s Note: Well, I certainly hope this little incident hasn’t put you off spoilers, miss. Statistically speaking, of course, it’s still the safest way to review.

Before I forget: there’s one astronaut in Action Comics #14 who is the primary candidate to be that astronaut who’s pulled over by the state police with a bottle of pharmaceutical amphetamines, a box of Depends, a roll of duct tape and a switchblade. See if you can guess which one! But that’s not important right now.

Action Comics #14 is going to work for you, or not work, depending on how you feel about Silver Age Superman stories, because this is one. From unlikely astronauts on a truly improbable mission that has never been mentioned before (and probably never will be again) to unlikely pseudoscience that can only be accomplished because Superman’s there to accomplish it, to a familiar yet faintly ridiculous antagonist, to a Fifth-Dimensional Imp, the only difference between this and any Superman comic book from, say, 1965 is the actual danger the astronauts are put in an the big, goofy Curt Swan Superman smile… which artist Rags Morales actually apes in one panel.

So this is a tough issue to be objective about because it is ridiculous… but it is kinda supposed to be ridiculous. It features people in distress who can only be saved by Superman – including a kid who clearly idolizes Superman – even though it requires you to believe that these pussies (and children!) are the hardy sort who would be the first to terraform another planet. It needs you to be okay with the idea that ten thousand Christian angels would have a hard-on to tear Mars a new asshole, and that a human distress call from the surface of Mars would attract less attention from the citizens of Earth than the landing of a remote controlled Tonka truck that made this dude the jack fantasy for every female XKCD reader in the English speaking world.

So this story has some logical issue, but the logical issues seem to be there on purpose. So the overriding question is: does it work?

The story opens with the original colonists of Mars under attack by the Metaleks we saw in earlier issues of Action Comics. The multinational crew, including an Asian dude, and African-American woman, an Englishwoman, and a twelve-year-old boy, call frantically for help and – waitaminute, a fucking twelve-year-old!? Okay: the journey to Mars, when it is eventually undertaken, will take eight months. Let’s be seriously Goddamned optimistic and say that it would take six months to build the habitation domes that we see on the surface of Mars. That means that the Mars mission lifted off from Earth with a Goddamned ten-year-old kid on board. I can’t spend half an hour on a city bus with a ten-year-old without wanting to choke him the fuck out. Eight months of “Are we there yet? I’m bored!” and every space geek on Earth would be wearing a black armband for little Noah, who died tragically in an unexplained airlock accident.” After somehow getting two black eyes falling down the stairs – quite a trick in zero gravity, if you get my drift.

Anyway, the mission’s distress calls go unheard on Earth, except by Superman, who arrives to beat back the attack, only to discover a secondary attack on the way, from the dreaded existential threat known only as… a fuckton of angels. You know, wings, swords, cherubim, seraphim… they have flaming swords, and zombie mouths and a appetite for raw metal for some reason. Superman then rewrites the laws of quantum physics (as he does) to defeat the threats, only to find a greater threat behind the angels and Metaleks…

Okay, let’s be realistic: this story is ridiculous. A Mars colonization mission that no one has ever heard of or mentioned in the DC Universe that includes a child,for Christ’s sake, is just dumb on its face. Having the prima facia enemy be a pile of angels is pretty stupid, and having a Fifth Dimensional imp, like Mr. Mxyzpltk, be the real Big Bad make this story, at face value, kinda stupid. However, what’s important to remember is that, up until probably the early 1970s, this is just how Superman stories were. If I had a nickel for every Superman comic I read as a kid where Superman woke up and found, I don’t know, that Jimmy Olsen was turned into a donkey or some Goddamned thing, forcing Superman to chase down mole people or something, make a giant needle and thread out of a radio antenna and guardrail cable and sew up the rift in the Earth from whence they came, I’d have enough money to buy one of those back issues.

And those old issues always seemed to have some kid to call for Superman, idolize him and give Supes the inspiration to get the job done. So having Noah there to moon over Superman fits with the Silver Age formula writer Grant Morrison is clearly going for. The problem is that this isn’t 1965, when that kid kept showing up to act as a surrogate for the almost always juvenile reader. However, it’s 2012, and as a barely-above median comic reading age 41-year-old, having a kid on a space mission just doesn’t pass the sniff test. I’m too old to believe that NASA or anyone else would subject a growing 10-year-old to the calcium loss of an eight-months space flight. And even if I did, I refuse to believe that any government-run space agency would subject themselves to the engineering headache, not to mention the expense, of figuring out the spacesuit situation for an “astronaut” who’ll grow about an inch every few months. Throw on top of it that when the kid hits 13, he’s gonna be sticking his dick in every container of Tang-flavored space Jell-O he can find, and I just can’t get behind Noah’s inclusion here. Making an adolescent male an astronaut never ends well. Ask Wil Wheaton.

The art by Rags Morales is much as it always: his figures are realistic, with extremely expressive faces. He delivers some damn exciting action in this issue, particularly when Superman takes on the angels, with multiple attackers and heat vision in full effect. He also hits, as previously stated, one damn fine panel nodding to the old knowing Superman smile in the Curt Swan issues, where Supes casually checks out his nails just before pounding one of the Metaleks into scrap. It’s pretty art, but one thing I found it lacking, particularly considering this is a Silver Age pastiche, was big, ridiculous machines for Superman to beat on. The Metaleks just look like standard construction equipment, and I wanted some big sci-fi machines with some Kirby Krackle; it would have helped sell the 60s feel a little better for me. However, this is good-looking modern Superman art.

This story is, frankly, problematic. Morrison is writing a paean to Silver Age Superman stories, which never really had to make a lot of sense. And I get that… but to read those stories outside of their original context, particularly a new one, with more modern trappings, requires a mighty heft to suspend disbelief that I just couldn’t manage. Part of that is that I just don’t have a lot of nostalgia for those old Superman stories – I was more of a Batman and Spider-Man kid when those stories were still somewhat the norm – but the other part is that this kind of story just doesn’t fit with what else is happening in the DC Universe in 2012. As pure homage, it works – all the elements of Silver Age Superman are there, and I appreciate how Morrison managed to fit them into a modern comic book – but as a story, it’s just not firing for me.