Action Comics #5 Annotations
ACTION COMICS #5
Rocket Song
DC Comics, Date, Color, 40pgs, $3.99
Written by GRANT MORRISON, SHOLLY FISCH ; Art by ANDY KUBER & JESSE DELPERDANG, CHRISCROSS; Cover by ANDY KUBERT; Variant Cover by RAGS MORALES
As the assault from an alien threat takes a turn for the worse for Metropolis, keys facts about Superman's past are brought to light for the first time! And how can certain elements from The Man of Steel's future help to prevent the theft of the millennium? Don't miss this awesome issue from series writer Grant Morrison and the guest art team of Andy Kubert and Jesse Delperdang!
Commentary
An interlude to the ongoing Brainiac story told in spectacular style by Morrison and former Batman collaborator Andy Kubert. Ostensibly a chance for Morales to catch up for the last two parts of the Collector of Worlds arc (returning to Action in issues seven and eight), this two parter features a guest turn by the Legion of Super Heroes and a New 52 make over for the Superman Revenge Squad.
Leading directly on from Gene Ha's 'dream of Krypton' sequence in issue three, it *kind of* organically fits into the ongoing story, as a sort of reversal of Morrison's 'Missing Chapter of R.I.P.' two-parter in Batman #701 and 702. Whereas there Morrison used the 'Missing Chapter' to flesh out and explain various plot points from earlier in the run and lead up to the conclusion of The Return of Bruce Wayne, here in Action we get lots of mystery built up in this issue and plenty of unexplained 'spoilers' in part two. One of the (many, many) reasons for the lateness of the annotations was that I thought Morrison might offer up a bit more explanation in issue six. He didn't though, and fair play to him. So, let's get our guesing hats on eh?
From this issue onward Action Comics is also offered as a 'Combo Pack', polybagged with a digital download code and a slightly recoloured cover. I am 100% convinced DC have only introduced this so I have to buy yet another copy of a comic I already buy two copies of every month. Yes, that's right, I said "have to". And "two copies". Go ahead and judge. Glass houses, stones, crosses to bear. You know the drill...
Annotations
Cover -Both covers showcase the new Supermobile-style redesign of the rocket that brought Superman to Earth. Kubert's is typically dynamic, if a little brash. Morales' 'Boy and his Dog' cover also (hopefully) teases an eventual return for Krypto, though more of that below...
Page 1 -The Super baby blanket that will eventually become Superman's cape. We've already seen in issue two that it's for all intents and purposes indestructable.
Jor-El's father, the original owner of the cape, was Jor -El I (or at least he was pre-reboot), who, amongst many other amazing scientific achievements, managed to journey to Earth in 1956's Superman #103, "The Superman of Yesterday" with art by Wayne Boring. As well as the polymath Jor-El (II presumably), his other offspring include Nim-El, Jor-El's identical twin brother and a distinguished weapons scientist (hmmm...), and Zor-El, father of Supergirl, who may or may not have been responsible for Argo City surviving Krypton's destruction. Anyone care to share how this relates (or not) to what's been happening in the new Supergirl book?
The Escape Ark prototype is, of course, Superman's rocket.
Gene Ha's Krypto redesign, like a cross between a wolf and a lion, makes a welcome reappearance.
The Phantom Zone, one of Jor-El's most notable if less noble discoveries, is a intangible, inescapable prison where the prisoners, never eating, sleeping or able to interact with the world around them, exist as bodiless wraiths. It was created by Robert Bernstein and George Papp and first appeared, along with some of its more notable residents (more on them later) in 1961's Adventure Comics #283. It's one of the elements of the Super-mythos familiar to many folks who don't read comics (seriously, what is wrong with you?) via the Superman movies and, to a lesser extent I'm sure, the massive role it plays in the Helen Slater Supergirl film. Though it inexplicably fell out of favour after Crisis on Infinite Earths rebooted the DC Universe the first time around, Morrison, amongst others, has made use of it when he's been allowed to, most notably during his JLA run, where both the White Martians and Prometheus use the Zone as a hide-out. Geoff Johns, Richard Donner and Adam Kubert brought the Zone back with a vengeance in 2006's Last Son arc, elements of which also appear here.
Page 2 -"That horrible sound. The cold, the smell..." Framing the Phantom Zone as a bleak and genuinely horrible place rather than another generic adventure backdrop is a baton Morrison picks up from Steve Gerber, whose 1982 Phantom Zone miniseries, with incredible Gene Colan art, mentally scarred me as a child. Even more bleak and disturbing is Gerber's follow up with Rick Vietch from the final issue of DC Comics Presents, 1985's issue #97. That DC hasn't ever collected these stories in either their own book, or even in the Tales of the Phantom Zone trade they put out a couple of years ago, is a crime for which they should be made to face some kind of international trubunal. If you haven't ever read them you should get on over to ebay now and pick them up cheap. Its okay, we'll wait until you get back...
The telebands, headbands that give the wearer the gift of telepathy, featured in the Krypton sequence in issue three, and give some function to the ornamental headpieces that Kryptonians were depicted with back in the Golden and Silver Ages.
The Phantom Zone line-up draws from both the classic and modern versions of the Zone villains and, perhaps surprisingly given his role as the major villain of Zack Snyder's upcoming Man of Steel movie, seems to sideline General Zod in favour of another, as yet unknown villain.
As we don't really see anything else of the Zone after this sequence, let's try and have a guess as to who's who shall we?
I think Kru-El is a fairly decent candidate for the big bad in the centre of the group, with the David Niven moustache and the black sun on his chest. Kru-El, Jor-El's wayward cousin, was sentenced to the zone for testing ancient and forbidden weapons, a capital crime on pacifist Krypton. He first appeared in one of the earliest Phantom Zone stories, 1963's Action Comics #298 by Leo Dorfman and Jim Mooney, in a story entitled 'The Super Powers of Lex Luthor!', a Silver Age precursor to the conclusion of Morrison's own All-Star Superman. It was recently reprinted in the second Showcase Presents: Supergirl volume. I'm basing my guess on a combination of the vague resemblance to the pre-Crisis Kru-El; the El family connection; his chest emblem, which closely resembles Jor-El's Silver Age costume; and the robot-hand-forbidden-technology angle. Finally, he's clearly not General Zod, who usually acts as the figurehead for villanous plots that emanate from the Zone.
Off of Kru-El's right shoulder, the guy at the back fourth from the left with the Bono shades and a goatee beard, is General Zod, as redesigned by Adam Kubert in the afformentioned 'Last Son' arc. Zod first appeared alongside the Zone itself in Adventure Comics #283 and was also created by Bernstein and Papp. Zod, one of Krypton's most effective and revered military leaders, was confined to the Zone after leading a military coup against the government, in some accounts by using an army of imperfect synthetic clones (i.e. Bizarros). He was famously portrayed by Terence Stamp in Richard Lester's (or Richard Donner's, but that's a whole other can of worms) Superman II (right). His post-Crisis continuity has been... complicated, with a Pocket Universe version, a non-Kryptonian armoured Soviet dictator, and at least a couple or three fake Zods to boot, though Morrison here seems to be broadly sticking with Johns and Kubert's take.The big guy next to Zod in the back row is Non, a mindless brute. Non also appeared in the Superman II movie alongside Ursa, who we'll get to in a minute, but wasn't based on a specific character from the comic books. Non was co-opted into the DC Universe when Geoff Johns and Richard Donner rejigged the Phantom Zone in 'Last Son' and given an origin in 2006's Action Comics Annual #10. The lady to his right is probably the afformentioned Ursa, who, while not exactly the same character, was probably heavily based on Faora Hu-Ul, a female Kryptonian serial killer who uses her isolated farm as a concentration camp and slaughterhouse for wayward men. Faora first appeared in 1977's Action Comics #471 and has since become a staple of Phantom Zone villainy, partly due to Ursa's familiarity through her movie appearance and partly due to the fact that she seems to be the ony woman in the Zone. Whether this is Ursa, Faora or Zaora (a post-Crisis 'variant'), is a fairly moot point as all are basically the same character.The rest of the Zone's residents we see here are harder to pin down, given that they all look quite generic, but we'll give it a go... On the far right is probably Jax-Ur, who's always been bald but used be a bit fatter and have a pencil moustache also. He was a rocket scientist who accidentaly destroyed one of Krypton's (inhabited) moon's while illicitly testing a new missile. He was the first criminal consigned to the Zone, since as a consequence of his actions the Kryptonian space programme was permanently grounded (pre-Phantom Zone capital punishment consisted of rocketing the criminal into space for a pre-determined period). He recently appeared in the Smallville TV series, or his spirit possessing somebody did, or something like that. Alongside Zod and Ursa/Faora, Jax-Ur is probably the most prominent Phantom Zone villain.
Moving back across to the far left the first guy is super-generic and, really, could be anybody. I'm hoping he's Gra-Mo from Superboy #104. As well as having an awesome name, he also has a back story that reads like some sort of demented fever dream. This bit from Supermanica is so good I feel like I have to quote it in full -
"A few days later, Gra-Mo, disguised as a European gentleman known only as "Pater" arrives in Smallville with a boy named Reginald, who he states is his son. Reginald is actually a sophisticated lifelike android created by Gra-Mo and his henchmen who possesses immense superhuman strength, on par with that of Superboy. The "boy", after committing several acts of vandalism, fights Superboy, proving to the hero that he is just as strong as a Kryptonian, and, just after handing his glasses over to Johnathan Kent for safe keeping, goads the Boy of Steel into hitting him as hard as he can. Superboy complies with the request, and knocks the "boy" into the sky with one punch. The force of the punch disintegrates "Reggie", causing Superboy to believe he has taken the life of another being. After the "death" of "Reggie", Superboy vows to end his career as a hero, which plays right into Gra-Mo's hands."
Next to him is (probably) Professor Vakox, who first appeared in Action Comics #284, also by Robert Bernstein but with Curt Swan on art duties this time around. Vakox was condemned to the Zone after contaminating the Great Krypton Lake, resulting in the creation of a giant mutant lizard. Gra-Mo, Vakox (or Va-Kox) and Jax-Ur also teamed up in 1970's Superboy #162, giving me hope that the guy on the far left really is Gra-Mo...
The final Phantom Zone felon is, like pseudo-Gra-Mo, fairly generic and his identity is, by necessity, a total guess. I'm going for Quex-Ul, an innocent man sentenced to the Phantom Zone for a crime he didn't commit, who first appeared in Superman #157 by Edmond Hamilton and Curt Swan. He has, on more than one occassion, been the deciding factor in Superman's struggles with the Zone's devilish denizens, often with power-sapping Gold Kryptonite playing a part. He also plays a key role in those Steve Gerber Phantom Zone comics you just bought off of eBay...
Page 3 -Harking back to issue three - "There's a ghost watching over you. There's a white dog". Krypto is trapped in the Zone as the portal shatters. The spirits spiralling away as the mirror cracks recall the 'past versions of yourself spiralling back through time'-imagery that plays such a crucial role at the end of The Invisibles.
Page 4 -'Superluminal' means faster than light. The onboard 'Brainiac A.I.' is explained (eventually) in issue seven.
"My place is at your side Jor-El. Until the end of the world." (choke)
"Younger, fiercer suns..." Krypton's red sun is in the latter stages of it's stellar evolution and as such it's cooler but many magnitudes bigger, and hence burns brighter, than a younger 'yellow' sun, as ours is. Solar energy has been the accepted source of Superman's super abilities since probably well before the Silver Age. However, it wasn't always the only - or even the first - pseudo-science explanation for Superman. Seigel and Shuster had it as the weaker gravity of our world in comparison to Superman's (then unnamed) homeworld in their earliest Action Comics stories, something Morrison also pays lip-service to here.
The captions, heavy in the myth-making symbology of Jor-El and Lara's plight, come from the rocket itself, something we saw it do in its native Kryptonian tongue in issue two and will revisit later this issue. 'Mothermatician' is a chaos magic-style deliberate mis-spelling of 'mathmatician', heavy in symbolism and double meanings.
Page 5 - The absolute destruction of Krypton. Kal-El's Fall from Paradise.
Page 6-7 -Kubert gives us an unusually featureless representation of Krypton, especially given what we've seen at ground-level. No oceans? Cities?
In what amounts to the most nerdish thing I have ever knowingly commited to print in my life, I would like to point out that, pre-reboot, Krypton only had two moons remaining of its original four when it was destroyed, with one having spun off into space in the distant past, and one having been destroyed by Jax Ur.
Page 8 -Kryptoniain crystal grows from the ship to protect it, as it did back in issue two. Morrison gives us the command line poetry of a Super-computer experiencing the death of a world.
Page 9 -The 'G' in G-Class is from the standard stellar classification, 'O, B, A, F, G, K and M'. Krypton's red giant would be an M-Class star. Our Sun is a G.
Page 10 - The second stage of the Superman ur-myth begins, as the Kents, broken down on a lonely highway in their battered farm truck, see a blazing Earth-bound object in the sky.
Jonathan and Martha Kent, Superman's adopted Earth parents, are portrayed a lot younger here than in more traditional takes on Superman's origin, possibly inspired by Mark Waid's similar approach in Superman: Birthright. Though everyone's gotten used to them being Jonathan and Martha, they only got those names in the early fifties. Previously they'd been both John and Mary Kent (in the comics) and Sarah and Eben Kent (in both a 1942 Superman novel and the Adventures of Superman TV show). In fact, they weren't a very well defined feature of Superman's origin at all until nearly ten years after his debut in Action Comics #1.
The "poor deformed calf" we last saw in decidedly different surroundings in issue two. Sholly Fisch's back-up tale gives it a bit more context.
Page 11 -Notice the helicopters in the bottom panel. In a very post X-Files addition to the Superman mythos, Luthor and the army head straight to the wreckage site to recover what they can.
Page 12 -The rocket is using an equivalent to the Kardashev scale for measuring a society's advancement on a technological level, probably inspired by the early Brainiac stories where he and his compatriots on the planet Colu are described as Level 10 intelligences. The military going to any lengths to recover crashed UFO's is a classic sci-fi trope going back, via Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to the original reports of the Roswell UFO crash back in the 1940's
Page 14 - As seen in issue two, twenty odd years later the military will give the cape a similar battering to what the rocket gets in the last panel. All in the name of scientific advancement, ...
Page 15 -...To which we return now, though this time we're hearing the rocket speak the same way Kal-El hears it.
Page 16 -As befitting Superman's status as the New 52 DC Universe's first super-hero, his arrival, and that of the Collector of Worlds, heralds the advancement of the human race from Level 3 to Level 4.
Have to say, the rocket's crystalline armoured shell looks pretty sinister.
Page 17 - And as we make the transition from summarising the opening issues and heralding the birth of the superhuman, time and space warp, and 'new and unimaginable evil' arrives in what we'll soon see is the Fortress of Solitude.
Given that they spend most of this issue in shadow, the coloured speech bubbles are a handy ready reckoner as to who's who over the next few pages
"Kryptonian sunstone". From the Jewel Mountains perhaps?The foregrounding of the robot hand seems to confirm that this mysterious, bandage-wrapped foe is the same one who confronted Jor-El at the Phantom Zone projector earlier this issue.
Page 18 -The Kryptonite Man, a thoroughly second-string foe despite his uniquely-Superman-themed gimmick, first appeared (after a few unrelated one-shot predecessors) in 1984's Superman #397, written by Paul Kupperberg with art by Eduardo Barretto. He was also one of the villains pitched for a revamp in Morrison, Millar, Waid and Peyer's Superman 2000 proposal. He seems to have been replaced in the New 52 DC Universe by three Kryptonite Men (though one of them looks to be a Kryptonite Lady), one of whom we're introduced to here as K-Man Green. His name also has echoes of the Gilbert and George-inspired Man Green/Man Yellow from Morrison's The Filth.
Tesseracts played a big part in the future of Morrison's DC One Million. They're shapes or spaces that can be folded to microscopic size and concealed within other shapes or spaces that are much smaller than they are, TARDIS style.
'Drekken', who sounds like an eighties hair metal band, seems to be new. More on him next issue...
The Kryptonite Men seem to be implying that, unlike in the previous continuity where the substance of the planet Krypton itself became irradiated Kryptonite after its destruction, here all Kryptonite stems from the power source of the rocket - begging the question, where did Jor-El get it from?
Synthi-K sounds like a jazzed up version of Synthetic Kryptonite. Kryptonium, surprisingly, doesn't seem to be a reference to an obscure old Superman story or piece of pre-Crisis Kryptonian marginalia. The strongest metal on Krypton was the similarly-named Kryptium, and the most valuable Boradium.
Page 19 -"We're up against something that can erect impregnable shields around events. That's beyond even the Time Trapper." The equivalance of events with physical 'things' recalls Morrison's rejected Hypercrisis pitch, where the heroes, led by Superman of course, build a bridge of events in order to stop a Chronovore who's literally devouring the continuity of the DC Universe. The Time Trapper is a longtime foe of this issue's special guest stars. A heavyweight threat with mastery over time, he was first menioned in 1964's Adventure Comics #317, and was created by Edmond Hamilton and John Forte. And those special guest stars?
Page 20 -The Legion of Super-Heroes! And not just any common or garden Legion either; an adult Legion from the future, alongside an adult Superman from the present, come back to the past to stop an insidious plot by a group of villains from who knows where...
More of these time travelling shenanigans next time. Come back soon!