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Superman (2025)

Superman is a good film, I think. I enjoyed it. I had fun watching it. I will almost certainly watch it again. There are, however, 2 or 3 specific moments which I think really fuck up the characterization of Clark/Superman and make weaker so many possible thematic angles the character can take. We'll get into that, but first the good stuff (also spoilers if it wasn't clear):

The Good Stuff

Nicholas Hoult's Luthor is absolutely brilliant. Vain, petty and envious, yet self aware of those traits. While a reasonable person would see them as a flaw, Lex revels in it. The script gives him plenty to work with, too. This film's Luthor is more evil and eminently hateable than any in a live action adaptation of the character.

Rachel Brosnahan has the potential to own the role of Lois Lane as much as any performer has owned the role of any comic book character (with the potential exception of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine). She is clever, witty and sees all the angles three steps ahead. Like any good Lois, she figures everything out before everyone else. Also like any good Lois, she is not a yes-woman to Superman. They're on the same side, and they care for each other, but she's more than willing to question Clark's decisions.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention David Corenswet's performance as Superman. It was perfectly good, but I don't think it was as exceptional as the other two.

The Daily Planet crew get plenty of love. I especially liked Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo), who was funny and intrepid and not just played for laughs. Jimmy Olsen the character is on a hot-streak with this and My Adventures with Superman. I wish the rest of the planet gang got more screen time, because I think they all turned in solid performances, this will be a recurring theme.

The Justice Gang were wonderful (JLI fans dancing in the streets). Of particular note were Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific and Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner. Both characters were played perfectly and Terrific stood out with a bunch of really good stuff.

The bad stuff

Who thought it was a good idea to make the Kryptonians space nazis? It fucks up everything. Why is this bad? Well what does the death of Krypton tell us about our own society? It can be climate change, it can be nationalism, it can be a warning about institutional collapse or class struggle (it was three of those four things in literally just Absolute Superman). Instead we get a boring and trite bit about why colonialism is bad. It's fucking lame.

If that were the only problem this caused that would be one thing, but the knock-on effects are almost just as bad. At the end of the movie Clark tells Luthor that his humanity is his greatest strength (and that Luthor's failure to acknowledge that is why he lost). This is fine, I guess. But that in combination with the next scene (replacing a recording of Jor-El and Lara with Ma and Pa) shows that Clark has fully rejected his Kryptonian heritage. Reasonable given the circumstances, but my god it fucks up Superman as a character. Superman is, and has always been a man of two worlds. His humanity and his alien identity give him conflict, and stakes, and all sorts of stuff. Imagine Warworld if Clark didn't care that he was rescuing Kryptonians. Or Phantoms (which sucks, but bear with me) where Superman doesn't care that he's banished from the Bottled City of Kandor. Or Superman Smashes the Klan where we lose the entire parallel between Clark and Roberta's identities as immigrants (hey, remember when James Goon called this an immigrant story? KINDA FUCKING WEIRD).

It may be the case (please please please please) that the whole transmission was fabricated or mistranslated. But there is no indication to that effect in the film. It's like Gunn read Birthright but stopped as soon as that was revealed and didn't finish the fucking book.

There's one other moment, when Clark knowingly throws Ultraman into a black hole. The story didn't dwell on this, Ultraman is certainly not dead. However, it's not clear that Clark doesn't know this. This is somehow worse than Man of Steel because Clark doesn't even show remorse like he did with Zod.

Anyway, the movie was good, just two things that annoy the shit out of me as a giga-dork.

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Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor

Words by Mark Waid

Pencils by Byran Hitch

Inks by Kevin Nowlan

Colors by David Baron:

Almost two entire years passed between Last Days number one and the second and third installments. I was fortunate enough to have not been aware of this series until a few months before the second came out. This book is clearly trying to position itself alongside All-Star Superman, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, and to a lesser extent Waid's own Kingdom Come as an epilogue to Superman's story. Those are all some of the finest stories ever told, supehero or not. Let's get into it:

UNTAGGED SPOILERS FOLLOW THIS HEADER

The central conflict of the story is a classic one: Clark is put in a position to question his desire to preserve life. He's put in a position where it would be not just convenient, not just popular, but easy to trade lives. Just let Lex die off from whatever ailment he has and be done with it. Everyone wants him to do it, and it takes no effort. Superman, of course, doesn't want to do this, he wouldn't be Superman otherwise. This is also where the first of my few criticisms of this book come in - I think Waid doesn't handle Lois very well.

There are, by my count, two pages in the entire series where Lois gets to say anything, and no lines are exchanged between Lois and Clark at all. This is entirely indefensible. Granted, Clark is listening in, and Lois probably knows he's listening in, but it still just feels wrong. There's space in this book for such an interaction, and I think it would probably serve the narrative better than the diversion in Themiscyra. Lois is the touchpoint between Clark and Humanity, between his ideals and the hard, practical decisions he has to make. Even if Lois can't make him question his "vow" (as he puts it), I think it's important that he has this discussion with her. This is essentially the same talk Clark and Diana have when they visit Themiscyra, so it doesn't even mess with the pacing that much. It's just a more efficient use of characters in my opinion.

The Braniac stuff in the third issue is fine, I guess. Not exceptional, but not terribly problematic. I will admit I particularly liked the idea that Branica gave Luthor this disease so Superman would spend time by him and thus have his powers drained. Braniac justifying it as a "professional courtesy" to let Luthor be the one to destroy Superman in a roundabout way was just a very good line I think.

Additionally, I think the third issue really ties together a lot of characterization of Clark and Lex. I think this is most clearly shown by having Clark reverse Luthor's transference device, giving up his own powers to not only save Lex, but give Luthor his Kryptonian powers to defeat Braniac. It shows not only Clark's humility, but also his undying optimism that people can be better. That just leaves the question of why Lex sacrificed himself to save Superman. I'm gonna be honest: I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps the line "It's not enough to force me to watch people to worship you? Now you made me into you?" is revelatory, but I can't make any confident statement about it.

Bryan Hitch's lines are gorgeous, it's an iconic Superman look, but one that is distinctly deified, especially in the first issue. We can see Lex withering and dying as time passes, we can see the pain and regret on his face. The color choices by David Baron are also really interesting, the sickly green of Lex's lab in issue 3 really sticks out to me. Everything is tinted to evoke illness and wrongness. Except Superman, who remains in his iconic blues and reds save a small tint of the light creeping in from the edge. Perhaps this is unintentional, but that green light ceases to color the Man of Tomorrow when he finally decides to give up his powers, though the audience (and Lex) aren't privy to that yet.

Good story, all told. Beautifully drawn at that. I compared it to various, now iconic, endings to Superman earlier, I don't think it quite lives up to any of them, but that's not a failing, it's just a really hard thing to do. I'm glad this book got finished, now here's to hoping Mark Waid keeps up this momentum as he starts writing Superman consistently in Action Comics!

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Save me yaoi Jesus save me

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Thoughts about the Reckoning of Roku but I'm only halfway through.

Very Unpolished. Also spoilers, I guess.

The Reckoning of Roku by Randy Ribay is the fifth novel in The Chronicles of the Avatar, a series of young adult novels set in the universe of Avatar the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. The novels follow various past Avatars and tell relatively contained stories, while expanding the world. So far, each Avatar gets 2 books to tell their story, Avatars Kyoshi and Yangchen both have had complete duologies written by F.C. Yee. Both of those douologies were, in my opinion, very good. As I write this I'm halfway through The Reckoning of Roku, and there are some worries I have about the direction in which the story is headed that I don't know how I would write around absent changing the fundamental premise of the story. Namely, this is the first time that already established narrative has loomed quite so large over the story being told, and I worry that continuity will require an unsatisfying ending to the novel and possible the entire duology.

The Reckoning of Roku follows a young Avatar Roku, about 3 months after he was announced within the Fire Nation as the Avatar. Naturally, Roku had to leave the Fire Nation for the Southern Air Temple, to begin his airbending training. Ribay takes great pains to characterize the young Avatar as nervous, humble and often enough homesick. Roku clearly misses his friends from home, most of all Prince Sozin. I think this is a nice premise, it sets up nicely the core internal conflict that is at the core of Roku as a character: the rift between Roku the Avatar and Roku the Fire National. This divide is made even clearer with another past Avatar introduced by the novels, Szeto (the fire Avatar before Roku) who clearly fell on the latter half of that dichotomy, serving as Grand Advisor to the Fire Lord. There's also a nice little bit of fictional historiography about Szeto, Fire National historians exalting him and other historians painting him as irresponsible.

The novel also follows Prince Sozin, who is shown to genuinely care for Roku. Sozin also continues the tradition of the Fire Nation's royal family being completely awful. Sozin has some seriously unreasonable expectations set for him by his father, to the extent that his father asks him to exploit his friendship with the Young Avatar to benefit the Fire Nation politically. This culminates in (major plot spoiler) Sozin staging a failed assassination of Roku under the flag of the Earth Kingdom to convince Roku to intercede on behalf of the Fire Nation in some small matter he initially refused to interfere with.

The plot is simple, to the point and thematically appropriate for the characters in play. What's the problem then? Look no further than season three, episode six of Avatar the Last Airbender: The Avatar and the Fire Lord. The episode follows much the same premise as the novel: a young Roku is revealed to be the Avatar, must leave his home and best friend Sozin, Sozin later takes actions that tear Roku between his allegiance to Fire Nation and his duty as the Avatar. So what's different, and why does it matter? The biggest difference is timeline: Roku's training in the cartoon is mostly glossed over, we see Roku train, but we don't see any of his specific exploits. We also don't see friction between the Avatar and the (now Firelord) Sozin until after Roku had mastered the elements. Moreover, the relationship between the two previous best friends didn't truly fall apart until Sozin invaded Earth Kingdom territory. This makes Sozin's scheming feel rushed and unreasonable to a reader familiar with the timeline presenting in the cartoon. Either Roku doesn't realize Sozin is playing him, even though that exact idea was pointed out to him by a young Monk Gyatso, or Roku forgives Sozin's heinous actions when they are ultimately revealed, to the point of making Sozin his best man. Both feel wrong to me, like they aren't the natural conclusion to the story being told, and I don't know what other more satisfying conclusion to the first half of this story is.

This is the first time the cartoon has caused such a problem for the Chronicles of the Avatar novels. The Kyoshi books are set in young adulthood, over a hundred years before any of the actions we see her take in the show. The story is thus unburdened from having to worry about events that happen later, and spend time building Kyoshi into the character she would become. The Yangchen books had a similarly easy time, Yangchen had very little about her established before the books came out.

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reblog to give the pervious person a nice rock