Action Comics #2 and Animal Man #2

Okay, I got two comics read yesterday, but I didn't get a chance to post anything because I was gaming last night.

Action Comics continues to amaze me. Grant Morrison's vision of Superman is what I think it should be. I have mentioned in the past that I don't like Superman, I don't normally like him because he's so powerful and undefeatable for the past era in which I've read comics (80's to now) that DC has literally had to try and force something to be as powerful as him, hence the creation of Doomsday in the 90's as a being even more powerful than Superman, so powerful in fact that he actually supplants Superman as the most powerful thing on Earth other than when Apokolips shows up. Grant Morrison in this beginnins story of the DCnU (it takes place 5 years before the current continuity of the DCnU) has brought Superman back to his roots of the 30's, 40's and 50's though. Superman is not all powerful. He can be hurt; he doesn't just immediatley stand up after being slammed into the wall by a speeding bullet train, and he doesn't immedialy recover from being shocked with 500,000 volts of electricity at 10 amps as in this issue. It takes Superman time to recover now, time to heal, not as long as you or I because he is still Superman, but it does take time. I've always liked Grant Morrison as a writer, and this comic proves why. He has taken a character that I all but hated and made him into a character I love to read about. He has also made the character very human without needing to make him human. In this issue, Superman has been captured by General Sam Lane and is being experimented upon by Lex Luthor. At some point after his capture, his cape (what we all know is his baby blanket from Krypton) was taken from him to see how much damage it could take (it proves to be up to the challenge by the way), and the first thing Superman does when he finally gets free is not make a break for daylight, but demand they return to him what they took from him (his cape). They do not return it of course because they are already in recapture mode, so he searches through the base until he finds his baby blanket and then he escapes after a small detour to find his rocket that the base also has, which he didn't know about. Here there is a brief scene between he and the rocket which appears to have some intelligence before he tells the rocket to look after itself for now and he'll be back for it later. All showing Superman's very human side without overburdening him with the need to fly home to maw and paw Kent to get in touch with his human side (Maw and Paw Kent are actually both dead in this continuity by the way). I have to give kudos to Morrison for creating a character that people can sympathize with again.
Also, that little detail that Grant Morrison wrote in the last issue about the object in the sky that Lex Luthor noticed in the sky; we find out what it is in this issue. I'm pretty sure it's Brainiac, but they haven't shown that part yet.
The pencils by Rags Morales continue to be amazing. Capturing Superman at a younger age without making him seem like a tired teenager. His pencils add as much to capturing the humanity and less powerful Superman as much as Morrison's writing. His images of the battered and tortured Superman in this issue do a wonderful job of showing us that Superman can be hurt even if he does heal up quickly given time. And the motion he attached to Superman when he is loose and, dare I say, revelling in his power are absolutely amazing. You can almost hear the controlled passion and anger in Superman's voice as he demands the soldiers give him his cape back.
Pick up this title and read it if you like Grant Morrison. If you couldn't figure out why you didn't like Superman but always wanted to, pick it up. If you love Superman, pick up this title. Just get out there and read it before you're stuck looking it for it later when no one wants to part with their copies of this comic.

Animal Man continues to amaze me as well. I wasn't even going to buy this title. I picked it up last month because it was selling out quickly, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It shocked me and showed me a Buddy Baker who was not the Animal Man I thought he was, but someone more confident and secure in his powers. And then it began to turn how we thought his powers worked and where we thought they came from on its head to show us that there is even more to Animal Man than we ever thought.
I don't think I had ever previously read any work by Jeff Lemire, but his take on Animal Man in this openinc arc of the series is spectacular. He has connected Buddy to his family again and introduced new elements to Animal Man in a way that I would have never foresaw. The villains he and artist Travel Foreman introduce fully in this issue are amazingly creepy, and if I was still 10 would probably give me nightmares. The variant powers of Buddy's daughter, Maxine, first revealed at the end of issue 1 shows you a taste of what Buddy could be capable of if he fully understood his powers, while Maxine seems even more powerful than Buddy to begin with as she seems more intimately connected to the source of their powers.
If you ever liked Animal Man before, this is definitely a book you want to be reading. If you never gave Animal Man a chance because he seemed like a B rated and uglier Vixen, you should give him a chance with this series. It's obvious that Buddy is capable of so much more than just grabbing the strength, speed, or other characteristics of animals if he fully explores the use of his powers completely. Hopefully, we'll see him doing more of that as this arc and series progresses.

Thanks for reading and have a good day.