Action Comics #1069 review

It’s the conclusion of Superman’s intergalactic boxing bout… well, boxing is understating it as punches are thrown, but so is an axe. The point is that the Man of Steel is being forced to fight other extraterrestrials, but ones with a more brutal attitude to puglisim. Luckily he has two official seconds… and an unofficial, unseen third.

Actually, I’m understating again. He has four sanctioned seconds, as the referee, unable to find Superman’s pals Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane on the spacecraft housing the arena above the Earth, asks for two volunteers to support Superman.

And Superman could use someone to mop his brow, given the battering he’s received. A Thanagarian isn’t shy of offering advice.

Look at that eye roll from Superman, ever the gentleman. Can he even be sure the next foe will have the usual humanoid set-up?

As it turns out, he likely would, being a Daxamite, sister race to the Kryptonians and therefore pretty darn super-powered on Earth.

Scary. And Superman isn’t intimidated in the least. Gail Simone’s Superman may be at an earlier stage in his career than the usual presentation, but he knows how to use his power. He also knows that if Lois and Jimmy aren’t around to cheer him on that’s because they’ve sneaked off to find a way to help him.

And so they do, with Lois approaching the problem from one direction, Jimmy from another, and that third second – Lex Luthor, unseen but ready to make his presence known.

Spoiler – Superman wins the competition, along the way gaining a reputation as the most formidable fighter in the galaxy. And that’s not a bad takeaway from what doesn’t need to be anything more than a fun, no-fixed-continuity, three-parter.

One thing I liked was a cameo by Cat Grant.

Cat’s not a hard news reporter, but she’s out there, telling the bad guys where to stick it. Mind, given the vibe of this story is early Seventies, I’d love to have seen Cat’s pre-Crisis model, Lola Barnett (based on US gossip columnist Rona Barrett).

Gail Simone again gives us an unfashionably full-on omniscient narrator, and I like it; it’s novel, and Simone knows how words work well together. I’d love to see a few other writers stretch themselves, give us some commentary on events rather than simply present them as sparsely as possible.

Penciller Eddy Barrows is a veteran and it shows. The storytelling is superb, the panel-to-panel action clear as a bell. And the character work is fabulous, the players as handsome or as horrific as they need to be. Barrows’s Superman is one for the ages, strikingly strong not just in his legendary musculature but in his determined body language.

The only thing I don’t like in the art are some brutal close-ups during the fight, it’s tough to look at them.

Inkers Dani Miki and Jonas Trindade give Barrows’s pencils a lush finish – I imagine the art looks amazing in black and white.

But it’s coloured, and coloured with pizzazz by Rex Lokus, a master of subtle skin tones, while the letters of Dave Sharpe are as excellent as ever.

‘Superman and the Challenge of the Stars’ isn’t what I would have expected from Gail Simone, a writer for whom black humour is usually very much to the fore. It’s a pretty serious affair, but it’s great to see Simone emphasise some of the other tools in her kit. A good-looking adventure with a script to savour, it leaves me wanting more.

The back-up strip, ‘Finale’, wraps up the Lois & Clark: In Love. At work serial, and it’s the perfect complement to the main story, as an intimate character piece set in the current day. And it is lovely.

The tale has seen editor Lois demote Clark from the city beat to small-scale human interest pieces, on the basis that perhaps other reporters without such a close interest should cover the Superman stories. It’s been a cause of tension, unsurprisingly, but here the couple resolve the situations as adults, lovers and friends.

Rowell demonstrates a fine understanding of Lois and Clark, and I’d love to see her have a crack at the wider Daily Planet cast.

Cian Tormey provides some lovely, true facial expressions, enhancing the script. The only thing I’d tweak would be the keylines around the figures, which are at times a little too thick, setting Clark and Lois apart from their environment. And colourist Romulo Fajardo Jr’s highlights make the figures pop even more. Letterer Dave Sharpe, again, likely ‘awwwed’ as he filled in the words.

There are various covers but my digital edition has the standard one and I couldn’t be happier – the image by penciller Eddy Barrows, inker Eber Ferreira and colourist Tomeu Morey is glorious, capturing the Golden Age wonder of Superman in an enchanting way.

The year-long Superman: Superstars experiment of three-parters by top creators ends with this issue, and it’s a great one to go out on.