ACTION COMICS #3

Review by: TheNextChampion

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Avg Rating: 3.8
 
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Written by GRANT MORRISON
Art by RAGS MORALES, GENE HA and RICK BRYANT
Cover by RAGS MORALES
Variant cover by MIKE CHOI
B&W Variant cover by RAGS MORALES

Size: 0 pages
Price: 3.99

You have Grant Morrison writing a Superman comic. What is not to love about this? Having one of the best writer’s in comics certainly helped this reboot of the character go swimmingly well. He’s got a fresh take on the origin of Superman that is not bogged down by continuity, and heck he’s flexing his own continuity very subtly. But just because you have a brilliant writer on board, doesn’t mean the comic will always be perfect.

The biggest failing in this comic for me is the art. Now before you go postal on me like the people on this cover, let me explain. The opening pages of the end of Krypton were fantastic, there are no other words. Gene Ha’s pencils are so sharp and so crisp, it’s like looking at a High Definition comic. So when you go out of that flashback and into the present day with Rags Morales, there is an obvious downgrade in quality. Morales’s pages aren’t terrible, but I wouldn’t call it great. It wasn’t as obvious like last issue but Morales seems to have a hard time with faces. Look at Clark, Lois, and Olsen in various panels and you can see a glaring inconsistency. It’s one thing to be slow at an ongoing rate, but to be so inconsistent with character models is quite puzzling.

The story is also a bit rushed if I have to be honest. We go from one set piece to the next without much of a transition. One minute were in Kent’s apartment, the next he’s in the park, then suddenly he’s in a cafe, then…well you get the idea. Morrison has always been like this but it doesn’t seem like he should be doing this for a new, ‘friendly’ start for Superman. I’m not saying he shouldn’t experiment or go ‘out there’ like he normally does in his books. But with this hectic pace and somewhat poor storytelling in some cases it might have been easier for Morrison to just tone it down for a little bit.

Even with the problems I had with the Gene Ha-less pages and confusing story paces throughout the book, I still enjoyed the issue. It is quite easy to tell now that Morales might not have been the best choice to do a new, ongoing comic for DC. If his pages are going to look like this and other, better looking, fill in artists continue this trend for the book then it should be a good time to change the creative team a bit here.

Story: 3 - Good
Art: 3 - Good

Comments

  1. Great review. Well-written, as usual.

    I noticed the herky-jerk transitions between scenes in the first issue of this run, and I didn’t like them then. You’re right that Morrison has been doing this for a while, and I agree that they don’t work so great for this story. (In the two “Final Crisis” tie-in issues of “Batman”, I think the “channel-surfing” style worked much better, for example.) I haven’t read the latest issue, but in Action #1 I think the awkward transitions were coupled with a lot of non-sequitur dialogue, which is another recent Morrisonian tic.

    Like you, I don’t actually dislike this Action run: I think it’s “okay” or “kinda good”, but I definitely notice the flaws. I’m glad most other readers seem to be enjoying it more than I am (maybe I’m just extra hard on Morrison because I generally like him so much?), but it befuddles me that so many people would praise the book without even commenting on all the awkward transitions and (sometimes) stilted dialogue. I mean, even if you like those things, shouldn’t you at least comment on them, because they’re quite glaring features of these comics?

    But instead it’s just like “5 Stars! Excellent writing!” Really, guys? When Morrison did a lot of these awkward things in other comics, y’all said you were confused and didn’t like it. And, in my opinion, he’s using those same techniques LESS effectively here. I hate to be a pessimist but sometimes, regarding Morrison comics especially, I wonder if half the readers really even notice the different writing techniques in the first place…

  2. I wanted to nick-pick and find something to make fun of in that review but i couldn’t. Get back to your typical nonsensical reviews, TNC

  3. Good review. If I didn’t read this I was going to write one but you basically summed up how I felt. Morales are is bad…looks rushed, even more so when compared in such high contrast to Ha’s Krypton pages. The story really let me down. It was confusing and didn’t seem to fit together in a cohesive. How will “new” comic readers react to this issue (if there are any)? It was a boring issue. Art 3 (raised from a 1 by Ha), Story a 2 (Morrison can do better).

  4. TNC has a good bead on this issue. Art is rushed and Morales is the weak link in this run. However I would grade the story higher, mainly because it defines the Clark Kent we will be seeing movig forward, not the bumbling reporter playing second fiddle to Lois but a dedicated, sharp investigative reporter. This is clearly a set-up issue and Im excited to see where Morrison takes the series.

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