Bottled (City) Frustrations
Dec. 27th, 2008 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
subplotkudzuI'm going to have to call my local comic shop to stop my Superman pulls. I've been reading trhe various Superman titles because Busiak was part of the creative team, but it looks like he's gone and the new team is, well, less innovative. Here's a quick comparison between the best in the business and those that are flashes in the pan:
<spoilers Ahead>
In _All Star Superman_ Morrison has a plot thread with the bottled city of Kandor. For those not in the know, this is the Kryptonian city taken and miniturized by Brainiac before the planet exploded - it is the last real piece of Kryptonian civilization, but Superman has been unable to reverse the miniaturization. So he's been keeping the icty in his Fortress, sometimes shirking himself so that he can travel amongst them. In All Star Superman, Supes impending death means that he has to find some way to change the status quo, and after recruiting the microscopic super-powered Kryptonian doctors to both a) keep him at fighting strength for his last days and b) sending them into the wards of Metropoliz hospital where they might heal the sick from the inside with their super-powers and high tech knowledge, the bottle city is settled on Mars where the Kandorians might expand beyond the boundaries of their city in relative isolation without totally disrupting life on Earth. It's clever and logical and out of the box thinking from Morrison on how to resolve the plotline.
In the regular _Superman_ books, helmed by Geoff Jones, who has yet to find a plot he couldn't make boringly apocalyptic, the bottled city has just been rescued from Brainiac's ship (the real Brianiac, apparently, with all previous ones being probes and clones and what not of this one because that is somehow more realistic...). The city is immediately expanded to full size and dropped in Antarctica, where their presence immediately starts disrupting human society (and the US Army unveils it's top secret magic and Kryptonite wielding, Lex Luthor using Anti-Superman brigade - differeny from Division K or the other 'let's keep an eye on this powerful alien' because this one is run by Lois Lane's father with the goal of preventing a Superman takover). The Kryptonians are, naturally, completely split between the military types (who want to free General Zod from the Phantom Zone) and the scientist types, most of whom just want to take over Earth and mold it into a proper Kryptonian society. A small handful are wondering if this is the best plan.
My problem with this isn't just that it's a sad, pathetic rehash of stories that I've seen done over and over in elsewords and other places (Morrison even did a one-issue version of this in _All Star Superman_, with some empathy and humor that clearly surpasses ). It's that the internal politics are so damn cliched. Oh look, the army is being set up as the villain. And there are evil military types in the Kryptonians too! And the Kryptonians immediately start trying to take over - exactly what I'd do when I just became guest on a planet after spending decades in a bottle. No need to listen to the native interlocutor. No chance of becoming heroes ourselves. No poosibility of settling into our on nation. Whammo, let's start the conquest!
Bored. Bored bored bored. In a universe of possibility, why would we want to leave out standard Cold War story tropes about the bloodless technocrats and the evil military? I hope my games never get this dull.
<spoilers Ahead>
In _All Star Superman_ Morrison has a plot thread with the bottled city of Kandor. For those not in the know, this is the Kryptonian city taken and miniturized by Brainiac before the planet exploded - it is the last real piece of Kryptonian civilization, but Superman has been unable to reverse the miniaturization. So he's been keeping the icty in his Fortress, sometimes shirking himself so that he can travel amongst them. In All Star Superman, Supes impending death means that he has to find some way to change the status quo, and after recruiting the microscopic super-powered Kryptonian doctors to both a) keep him at fighting strength for his last days and b) sending them into the wards of Metropoliz hospital where they might heal the sick from the inside with their super-powers and high tech knowledge, the bottle city is settled on Mars where the Kandorians might expand beyond the boundaries of their city in relative isolation without totally disrupting life on Earth. It's clever and logical and out of the box thinking from Morrison on how to resolve the plotline.
In the regular _Superman_ books, helmed by Geoff Jones, who has yet to find a plot he couldn't make boringly apocalyptic, the bottled city has just been rescued from Brainiac's ship (the real Brianiac, apparently, with all previous ones being probes and clones and what not of this one because that is somehow more realistic...). The city is immediately expanded to full size and dropped in Antarctica, where their presence immediately starts disrupting human society (and the US Army unveils it's top secret magic and Kryptonite wielding, Lex Luthor using Anti-Superman brigade - differeny from Division K or the other 'let's keep an eye on this powerful alien' because this one is run by Lois Lane's father with the goal of preventing a Superman takover). The Kryptonians are, naturally, completely split between the military types (who want to free General Zod from the Phantom Zone) and the scientist types, most of whom just want to take over Earth and mold it into a proper Kryptonian society. A small handful are wondering if this is the best plan.
My problem with this isn't just that it's a sad, pathetic rehash of stories that I've seen done over and over in elsewords and other places (Morrison even did a one-issue version of this in _All Star Superman_, with some empathy and humor that clearly surpasses ). It's that the internal politics are so damn cliched. Oh look, the army is being set up as the villain. And there are evil military types in the Kryptonians too! And the Kryptonians immediately start trying to take over - exactly what I'd do when I just became guest on a planet after spending decades in a bottle. No need to listen to the native interlocutor. No chance of becoming heroes ourselves. No poosibility of settling into our on nation. Whammo, let's start the conquest!
Bored. Bored bored bored. In a universe of possibility, why would we want to leave out standard Cold War story tropes about the bloodless technocrats and the evil military? I hope my games never get this dull.
