Action Comics #991

This week's issue of Action Comics has a truly shitty cover. (I shall not torture you by reproducing it here--not even in a Deep Arted version.) It seems to be a riff on the Neal Adams Breaking the Krptonite Chains cover from January of 1971 (Superman #233)     . . . but artist Nicholas Bradshaw (with a little blame for Brad Anderson, who inked) seems to have gone out of his way to make Superman look like he was struggling mightily with kryptonite-induced constipation this time around. It's. Just. Awful.

And to make matters worse, DC offered a lenticular version of The Same Artwork. Sheesh. If I saw this comic book on the stands cold, I wouldn't even pick it up much less give it a glance.

And that would be a damned shame, because this was a really good issue. NOT for the art. The interior art--by Dan Jurgens and Viktor Bogdanovic--is almost as bad as the cover art. But the Dan Jurgens story . . . . Well. It moves from pretty good (with the Is It Jor-El Or Are We Just Fucking With You Again The Way We Did Six Issues Ago With "Clark Kent"?) to Really Good with this page:

(Which, by the way, I've de-colored and blurred so as to preserve the sanctity of the story.) All those word balloons are snippets of messages . . . from the news, etc. . . . about the terrible things going on all over the world. And it is one of the most effective pages I've seen in comic books in a long time. For one thing, the way the balloons pile up on each other makes you feel overwhelmed as you read them. You aren't quite sure where to go, and you end up reading some balloons several times as your eye searches for a way to keep track of everything. It's pretty fuckin' brilliant. I don't know who gets the kudos for designing this page . . . my guess would be writer and breakdown artist and all around brilliant guy Dan Jurgens, but it could be the other artist, Viktor Bogdanovic, I suppose . . . or maybe the letterer, Rob Leigh. But whoever it was, it really, really works. It pushes the whole Superman story into that other realm . . . a realm it is rarely capable of inhabiting . . . wherein you see and feel that Superman can't solve every problem, wherein you can see how overwhelming his life actually is, wherein you actually wonder what he is going to do, how he is going to handle all of the shit that's hitting the fan in his immediate environs. Yep. For that moment, Superman became relevant.

So high hopes. We'll see what happens from here.

As I've said before, I'd be buying this book through issue #1000 no matter what happened. But this is the first time in awhile that I've actually been looking forward to the next issue.

Which is two weeks away. 

Seems like a long time at the moment. 

An-ti-ci-pay-ay-tion.

I love that feeling.