Action Comics #14 (DC)

writer: Grant Morrison
artist: Rags Morales

Recently I've been filling Comics Reader with a lot of perspective, why you should care about current projects, how they connect to stuff you may be familiar with.  My review of the latest Action Comics will be no different.

Basically Grant Morrison has been telling his Batman epic in miniature.  He's been writing Batman on a regular basis since 2006 and has along the way done a number of really amazing stories, although if you're not careful you could easily become confused by some of them.  Perhaps "Batman R.I.P." best illustrates my point, and is actually most pertinent to his work on Action Comics.

"R.I.P." is all about another of those master criminals thinking that they've created the ultimate web of destruction against Batman (much in the way the cumulative Leviathan arc is working its mojo through Batman Incorporated now).  To that point Morrison had sewn a lot of threads through his stories, until introducing Doctor Hurt and and saying "this is where it all led."  (Although, again, as it turns out it wasn't Hurt but rather Leviathan, but a lot of that is because of Batman's response to his experience with Hurt.)

In Action Comics, much of what Morrison has done so far is to explain how Superman responds to the world, and at the start this was done by way of an updated origin story that made the Man of Steel a little more human than he's sometimes been portrayed, most obviously with the signature t-shirt costume change, although in accord with other appearances he's since taken on a slightly more traditional look.

Yet, as in his Batman stories, Morrison has also been building toward one big threat (call it the Buffy Technique if you must), which I will not spoil for you here but it's been just below the series arc from the very beginning, tied in with Superman's alter ego Clark Kent, and what Morrison has cleverly extrapolated from the best aspect of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies, his relationship not with Mary Jane or Harry Osborn but the apartment residents (I'm thinking less of the grumpy super than his cute daughter whom Peter Parker remains obvious to for all three movies) he spends his most human time among.

Action Comics #14 spends most of its time on an problem-of-the-issue event, though, so you don't have to worry too much about the arc that's rapidly drawing to a close (sob!), as well as whole Morrison's tenure.  Although if you want another association, it's very much like an issue of Morrison's All Star Superman, which was widely considered to be brilliant.

There's also the regular backup effort from Sholly Fisch, which remains a highlight of the series.  Here it's actually more important to this specific issue than the lead.  Both stories involve Superman interacting with scientists, but Fisch gets to have him experience an unexpectedly moving reunion with his birth planet, the kind of moment that would probably never occur in anything but a backup feature but is something that probably should have happened a long time ago.  Maybe it did.  But for now I will use it as evidence of Fisch's considerable talents.