All Star Superman

How do you make Superman relevant today?

The character is over sixty years old, wears his underwear on the outside even now, and has a history littered with absurd anachronisms. Like Mickey Mouse, Superman is often more recognised as a corporate logo rather than as character around whom compelling stories can be told.

DC attempted to revitalise Superman back in the mid-eighties using a story called Crisis on Infinite Earths to wipe out the history of the DC Universe and start everything from scratch. Some characters received greater attention than others. Whilst Batman came through largely unscathed, Superman's history was completely rewritten.

The familiar parts of his backstory remained in place: Last survivor of the doomed planet Krypton, rocketed to earth to be raised by a pair of kindly farmers. But the devil as always is in the details. Much of the detritus accumulated by the character were pared away. His history as Superboy was deleted, and once more he became the last survivor of Krypton. Supergirl was gone (along with Krypto the Superdog, Streaky the Supercat and the rest of the Legion of Superpets), as was the bottle city of Kandor. Lex Luthor was reinvented - from criminal mastermind to ruthless businessman.

Even Clark Kent underwent a radical change. Instead of being little more than a clumsy front for Superman, Clark became a real person at last. A Pulitzer prize winning journalist trying to use his abilities to make the world a better place.

The upshot was that many of the more fantastic elements of the character were stripped away, somewhat unceremoniously in many cases. There was plenty of lunacy left, but on a milder and slightly more realistic scale compared to what went before. This was not a Superman you'd find using his cape to tow a dwarf star, for example.

And it worked well enough. For a time.

Grounding the character is all very well, but it can be taken too far. Bryan Singer's Superman Returns for example. Bringing Batman into the real world, as Christopher Nolan arguably managed with this summer's The Dark Knight, is a natural fit. Superman is not. Superman is defined by the fantastic, and it's to the characters detriment to strip that away so completely as Singer did.

Which brings us to All Star Superman, this week finishing a 12 issue run after some 3 years. DC's All Star range is an attempt to use it's most famous characters to tell classic stories, unencumbered by any continuity concerns. Writer Grant Morrison, and artist Frank Quitely, far from ignoring Superman's long and colorful history, positively revelled in it. And the result is possibly the finest Superman story ever told.

It's a wonderful series. 12 issues over 3 years is glacial pace, and most creative teams producing books on such a schedule are usually, and rightly, excoriated. But Morrison and Quitely were given a lot of leeway, such was the quality of their work.

How do you make Superman relevant today? You don't. You simply tell good stories. If modern times have seen Superman's history pared to bare minimum, Morrison and Quitely restored it to it's full glory and beyond. The book is rife with detail and references to old forgotten continuity. The key to the Fortress of Solitude, once a vast monolith placed in plain sight because only Superman was strong enough to lift it, returns as a small key made of a superdense material that still only Superman is strong enough to lift, but this time place under a doormat enscribed "Welcome". Hundreds of other details reference the past, albeit with a postmodern edge. Every toy in the toybox is restored and on display.

The 12 issues form a single book telling one coherent story, the tale Superman's 12 great labours. Without giving too much away, it's truly mythic story and all the better for taking place outside of normal continuity. Ongoing series', such as Superman, are troublesome in many ways. How can Superman's story have a beginning, a middle and an end, when the character cannot? I doubt it's a coincidence that the greatest Superman stories, notably Alan Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow deal with Superman's (possibly) last days. Morrison and Quitely, virtuoso storytellers both, craft a tale brimming with colour and emotion. It's not story of Superman as a man, but Superman as a god, as made evident in issue #10 as Superman completes a labour in way that sent a shiver down my spine.

If you've read a Superman comic and enjoyed it, if you've ever read a Superman comic and felt dissatisfied with the character, if you've ever been curious about the appeal of the character to begin with, this is the book for you.

PS. All Star Batman is as bad as All Star Superman is good. Don't let the fact that it's written by Frank Miller convince you that it might in anyway be decent. It's not. All you need to know about it can be summed up by one line of dialog from the series as Batman introduces himself to Dick Grayson, the soon to be Robin, for the first time: "What are you, dense? Are you retarded or something? I'm the Goddamn BATMAN!"

'Nuff said.