Superman: The Man of Steel #3 (September 1991)



(Untitled)
Script: Louise Simonson
Pencils: Jon Bogdanove
Inks: Dennis Janke
Colors: Glenn Whitmore
Letters: Bill Oakley

Grade: D


There have been a lot of company-wide events since Marvel's Secret Wars first got that particular ball rolling, and if you talk to enough people, you can find someone to defend each and every one of them, no matter how shameless and poorly executed they were. Heck, I've even found folks who will defend Millennium. But War of the Gods -- I'm honestly not sure I've ever seen anyone praise War of the Gods.

Just when Marvel was unleashing The Infinity Gauntlet, and DC desperately needed a hit, they spun an unwieldy crossover out of a title that had lost it's direction over a year earlier, and the crossover tie-ins felt both forced and like the writers themselves didn't understand what the hell the event was all about.

In this issue, for example, we have a Greek god calling upon the Aztec serpent god Quetzalcoatl to wreck havoc. Why? Because he wanted a distraction for Superman (even though he doesn't actually do anything while Superman is fighting this god) and he heard some random terrorists cry out this ancient god's name. What does this have to do with War of the Gods? Does Louise Simonson even know what War of the Gods is about?

This is subsequently neither an issue that someone following that series needed to read nor a story that works particularly well as a Superman adventure.

And it further drives home just how poorly managed the launching of this fourth Superman title has been. Next month's sales figures will show that Man of Steel is still significantly outselling the other Superman titles, coasting on the momentum of a new title launching, but the Superman Office forced their obligatory tie-in to this stupid event on this new team and title, seemingly totally unaware that this might utterly kill the financial success that this title has inexplicably proven to be after two terrible issues..

And the creative team behind this title ain't helping either.


Let's start with Bogdanove, because I just can't stop ripping on the guy. How did DC hire an artist who has no idea how to draw human proportions appropriately?





Do you think Bogdanove ever looked at one of these panels and thought, "Hmmm...maybe I should erase that and start over?" or was he just like, "Well, that's the best I'm ever going to do anyway"?

Fortunately, Bogdanove has Janke and Whitmore doing their best to compensate for his work. I especially love how Whitmore colors Lois here,



drawing a high contrast between the red of her hair and the blue of her eyes, bringing out Lois' intensity/fierceness. Her colors are far more muted in the other titles. I should note that the digital version I'm using for reference here has the colors far more pronounced than in the original floppy coppy, but the reds and blues still pop on those pages far more than usual.


Meanwhile, after two issues of not doing very much to further the mystery of Cerberus, Simonson flings us headlong into confusing intrigue featuring multiple parties that gets delivered at a hectic pace of non-stop talking heads before the whole thing gets resolved by a giant serpent god. We already knew that Lexcorp was forcefully taking over Tattamalia (though the details were never clear: in what way? why?) and that Cerberus seemed to be striking out at Lexcorp because of this. Now, I guess Cerberus did this without the authority of Tattamalia's leader and is now demanding an exorbitant fee for bringing Lexcorp to the negotiating table that Tattamalia can never hope to pay, while the common people of the island are resorting to terrorism to prevent this negotiation for...reasons?? It's very confusing and not explained in a way that compels us to care in the least bit. We have no opinion of the leader, of his people, of the folks currently running Lexcorp, nor even of Cerberus (which we still know NOTHING about after three issues), so we're not really invited to care. It's a poorly executed script. Perhaps it can be excused because Simonson was asked to make the big culmination of this storyline a tie-in to War of the Gods? But I doubt it. Nothing about this story seemed engaging, and I see no other way in which it should have resolved itself better without the giant serpent god showing up.


If there is one redeeming quality to this story, it's finally bringing a powerful, if utterly cliche, conclusion to the marriage crisis of Perry and Alice White:



Almost losing her made Perry appreciate her again.

Though, from a storytelling perspective, I'm still not clear on why Ma and Pa Kent ever had to be on this same cruise and along for this story. Simonson never creates a particularly memorable nor believable bond between them.


I've read enough from Simonson before to know that she isn't a bad writer, but she is proving to be a poor fit for this office. Far better alignment and oversight is needed when this three part story we've wasted all this time on ends with a lame gag:





This is just completely out of step with the tone of this office, which can be goofy as all hell at times, but not in this lame a fashion, and never as the culmination of a storyline that we are supposed to believe carried weight and substance.



Important Details:

- Mr. Z's crystal is back, though I'm at a total loss for why it was needed in order to resurrect an Aztec god:



Heck, I'm still at a loss as to why that Aztec god had to be resurrected in the first place.



Minor Details:

- Tattamalia has been devastated, presumably causing both Lexcorp and Cerberus to lose interest in it.


- Wait. Why does Quetzalcoatl need to go back to sleep after already having slumbered for nearly a thousand years?




- Or did he sacrifice himself to save his people?



I'm pretty sure that isn't what we just saw him do, and how does a god sacrifice itself anyway? And why would an ancient doom-and-gloom monster god sacrifice itself for the sake of its people? None of this gets explained at all.


Oh well. It's not like every issue in this franchise can be (ahem) Super.