This was okay, but it was pretty shallow. For an extra-sized $3.99 comic, I didn’t really feel like there was much substance here. A couple cool plot-points. An interlude or two. An action sequence that was neat but kinda ate up more pages than it was worth. And…that’s it. Issue ended. It wasn’t bad, but I can’t really praise it that much. And I’m generally a big Morrison fan.

A lot of the dialogue seemed very “non sequitur”. I’m not sure what magick rituals Morrison’s been using to come up with his dialogue for the last few years, but every now and then in his recent comics there seems to be quite a few word balloons that make me think things along the lines of: “…That’s a weird thing for that character to say. That’s a weird way to phrase that sentence. It doesn’t really fit in very well with the context of the situation. Awkward.”

The art was fine and dynamic enough. Rags is a good artist. His linework was solid. It brought excitement to the story while also seeming kind of “old-timey”, which fit the mood Morrison’s script seemed to be playing upon.

That said, while this retro vibe fits the issue in and of itself, I don’t think it’s tailored very well to DC’s overall strategy here. I’ve heard several people on several websites say that they think THIS is the issue that should have led off DC’s new initiative. Really? I do think this was a slightly better comic than Justice League #1, but…I’m sorry…anyone who thinks the vibe of Action Comics #1 would be more conducive to gaining a lot of new, younger readers…doesn’t really know what the tastes of wider mainstream audiences are. And that includes Grant Morrison himself. I know he’s said in interviews that he’s not trying to just play off of Golden Age concepts for reasons of nostalgia…but he really is. Most of what’s on the page here seems dictated by Grant Morrison’s reaction to what he liked in old Superman comics. And that’s backward-looking nostalgia, period.

But that’s okay. At least it’s Golden Age nostalgia instead of the Silver Age nostalgia that we usually get so much of. But excessive nostalgia is a big reason why the comics industry is in this predicament in the first place. The very fact that DC is still putting most of its effort into selling so many 70-year-old concepts as if they could still light the world on fire is very telling. When DC hired Siegel, Shuster, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, they didn’t tell them: “Eh…come up with a Robin Hood comic. And a King Arthur comic! They loved them heroes hundreds of years ago and some people still like a good flick with knights ‘n’ swords in it!” When Marvel got Stan and Jack to rebuild their company in the 1960s, they didn’t say “Hey guys, please make us some comics about Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Bros. and the Hunchback of Notre Dame! People loved them properties in decades past!”

But that’s really what this comic is like. It’s very anachronistic. It’s from a British writer whose socio-political outlook is still uneasily stuck in “Wow I sure used to hate Margaret Thatcher”-mode…and he’s doing an homage about a 70-year-old character…and he’s writing it to play off of specific 70-year-old comic motifs. And this is being billed as a new way to get young (mostly American) kids excited about comics?

From that perspective…it’s just weird, guys. And most of what I’ve said in the past few paragraphs doesn’t have anything to do with how I would rate the comic. Those are just circumstantial thoughts about this comic within its context. And it’s not like I’m not a fan of Margaret Thatcher. Nor did I even think Morrison came off as particularly political in this comic. But it’s clear that he’s wrestling with these issues. It’s like he wants to say something provocative based on his younger self’s viewpoints, but then he’s filtering that impetus through the mind of slightly older/wiser Grant Morrison, who knows that his younger self’s views were very naive in some respects. Let’s face it: Morrison has a lot of baggage. A close study of his work makes it seem like he has a lot of personal issues that he has to fight through in order to write anything. I got the impression that a LOT of thought was put into this comic, but at the end–after Morrison’s own point-counterpoint tempered a lot of the own ideas–there wasn’t much substance left, period. Not any provocative political stuff, and, more importantly, not a lot of character stuff. And a plot that’s quite thin.

Still, I do think this was a decent comic, and I expect the series to get better once Morrison has more chances to flesh out the characters’ personalities and motivations. But as it is now, I thought this issue was pretty bland. Sorry to say.

I’m sure the rating system below is going to screw up my input, so I’ll tell you right here:

Story: 2.25
Art: 3.25