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All-Star Superman #10
Posted 04 Apr 2008
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Frank Quitely
Letters: Travis Lanham
Ink: Jamie Grant
Colors: Jamie Grant
Publisher: DC Comics
5.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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“Morrison & Quitely have been rebuilding a
common faith in the mainstream comics medium.”
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As if unleashing a
mighty river, changing a centuries-old course and washing away a
dry and deadened era, Siegel & Shuster’s Superman led the
giddy onrush of American pop culture’s real-life – and
humanity’s imagined – next evolutionary step. These
were characters whose costumes were more colorful than the
Depression and whose physics-defying strength and flight was
intrinsically liberated from the shadow of totalitarianism.
Superman got boring when he came to be synonymous with an
established order that, in too many ways, was no longer new. As
community ties fractured and social safety nets wore out, it was
the solitary outcasts – first the noirish everymen of the
crime and horror comics and the despairing everywomen of the
romance comics, then the freakish antiheroes of the
post-Fantastic Four era – who drew the sympathy.
There’s much I can’t tell you about All-Star
Superman #10 that brings Superman home to the outcasts (on both
sides of the drawing board) he was created to serve. It would give
away too much of the very surprise and reassurance Morrison &
Quitely manage to conjure and reconcile in their story. Suffice it
to say that, in what he thinks may be the waning days of his life
(that’s a cliffhanger everyone who’s even heard of this
comic knows about), Kal-El reaches out, considers possibilities
he’s never thought about, and contemplates his own
unexistence to comfort anxious friends, rescue ancient relatives
and leave a legacy for the world, in a very mature fairytale that
takes us from the Fortress of Solitude to the Bottle City of Kandor
to the Daily Planet offices, the plains of Mars, a microscopic
universe and the lonely ledge of a would-be suicide. This issue is
the essence of how Morrison & Quitely have been rebuilding a
mythic foundation and a common faith in the mainstream comics
medium. The classic Superman became an enforcer of faceless social
norms. This comic’s character is super-humane. And in this
world that’s solitary – and heroic – enough.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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