Action Comics Weekly #628



A surprising amount worth discussing in this week's issue, from the pay-off surrounding ACW's longest running and most engaging mystery, to some frank discussion from Mike Gold about this title's responsibilities to its younger viewers, and finally the answer to the question we've all been asking ourselves since ACW began.

Here goes...


Secret Six -- The Mockingbird Revelation: If you thought August Durant would end up uncovered in this issue, you were right. He was uncovered...in a body bag. Sure enough, the subtle clues all along led to the proper place: Mockingbird is Carlo DiRienzi.

Frank discussion from Mike Gold: Gold points out in the letter column something that I absolutely had not noticed before -- ACW never bore the Comics Code approval label. As he explains it:



He goes on to add that

.

With all the upset over Action Comics no longer being a Superman title, I find it just a little more tragic that DC's second oldest title, beloved by children and adolescents for generations, was no longer considered "for kids" anymore. Sure enough, the entire industry has since moved in that direction, but it's sad to see such a trend begin on such a legacy title.

And yet, while this helps to explain how Blackhawk had been pushing the boundaries of PG-13 comicdom for the past few months, Gold also goes on to decide that



So was this truly an issue of exercising good taste in attempting to delineate the borders between "For kids" comics, "General Audience" comics, and "For Mature Audiences" comics, or was Blackhawk so successful that this transition was going to happen anyway, and Gold simply took the opportunity to placate a few detractors concerned about the content?


And finally, the answer to our BIG question... This appears to be the point where DC and/or Gold decides ACW is a failure and will be terminated. As Gold writes:



Five months later, the title returned to a monthly Superman feature with Action Comics #643



As for the features, themselves...

Green Lantern: Owsley and Bright lose sense of the fun/absurdist interplay they'd begun to create between Hal and Captain Atom last week, this time having the two monologue excessively about their different approaches to justice and whether the two were truly all that different after all. Pretty tedious follow-up to a fun team-up that doesn't give me much faith in where the story is headed next.

Black Canary: Much as I'm supposedly on strike with this feature after far too many terrible chapters, I have to admit I skimmed this one and found a few impressive moments where Randy DuBurke's pencils, Pablo Marcos' inks, and Sharon Wright's dialogue all flowed together beautifully. Still, I can't stand Wright's plotting or pacing, so skimming is all I'll continue to be doing. Too bad such a top notch art team isn't paired with a better writer.

Nightwing and Speedy: Golden hired Marv Wolfman to do a Nightwing feature, and somehow that's progressed into a Speedy feature (no Nightwing appearance at all this time in a plot that is clearly centered around Speedy) written by Cherie Wilkerson (who, at the time, was best known for writing for the 1988 Superman cartoon, as well as Disney's Ducktales, and whose career in comics didn't really seem to take off after this) and simply co-plotted by Wolfman. Honestly, the story's not bad. The writing, pacing, and art all do a reasonable job. But is it a feature that anyone actually wanted? Still, I'm consistently impressed how hard ACW worked to be a platform for up and coming female voices in comicdom -- even if pretty much all of them ended up being disappointments.

Secret Six: We get the big revelation, but not much else. If you already had a pretty strong guess who Mockingbird was going to be, this issue wouldn't do much to excite you beyond confirming your awesomeness.

Blackhawk hits a serious lull while trying to get a new story arc in motion. The humor, action, and characterization that have made this feature enjoyable at times are all absent, as is the risque content Gold is now apparently so concerned about. Interesting side note: this chapter mentions the creation of the CIA, while the Nightwing and Speedy feature still uses the fictitious "CBI" agency in its place. There really is no inter-continuity among these features.



And then there was Superman...


"Wipeout!"
writer: Roger Stern
pencils: Curt Swan
inks: Murphy Anderson
letters: Bill Oakley
colors" Tom Ziuko
editor: Mike Carlin

grade: D

Five months left of this tedious plot line, apparently, and nothing much happens this time. Clark and Bob the Zealot are still trying to evade the bad guys in the desert, but Clark prods Bob to use his mental imaging powers to confuse the bad guys, causing them to bail out of their jets, and leaving them vulnerable so that Clark (or Superman) can get answers from them.

Really, even those fans who weren't turned off by Superman being reduced to 2 pages per week MUST have given up on the tedious pace of this thoroughly uninteresting plot by this point.