The SUPERMAN (2025) Take
Did you know? They made a film based on "Action Comics"! HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS investigates, PLUS: reviews that YOU requested so don't blame me.
In the past couple of years of comics, well-meaning people like Tom Taylor and others in and around DC Comics attempted to separate Superman from America, changing his values from “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” to “Truth, Justice, and A Better Tomorrow”. The reasons why should be fairly obvious to anyone that has been paying attention. First, let’s borrow the old cliché from Network: there are no nations and there are no people anymore, and by the immutable laws of business Superman belongs to the world, to T-Shirts in Brazil, commemorative coins in France, action figures in Australia, so on, and so forth. Second, and most obvious: America has decided to openly embrace fascism, with totalitarian powers at the core, and concentration camps at the periphery. And while corporations are deeply and profoundly amoral, artists and the people that give them money thought that Superman being a champion of America while America gave in to every fetid impulse of its atavistic id would make for a lot of stories they’d rather not tell.
Which makes SUPERMAN (2025), James Gunn’s first film under the DC Studios umbrella, particularly interesting, because his Superman is as American as it gets. How American is he? Well, he’s so American that the main conflict of the film revolves around his Manifest Destiny. The film pivots after the discovery that Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan, clad in pure white, their eyes somehow bluer than blue) had a vision for baby Kal-El that was a lot more “how the Manifest Destiny actually played out” than Superman’s deal of using his great power protecting all life anywhere and at any cost, even to himself. And then, it gets worse, with Lex Luthor’s (Nicholas Hoult, delighting in hearing himself talk in every other scene) machinations threatening to tear the world in half with the considerable means of an openly evil industrialist just to put Superman on trial, and ultimately give him the death penalty, same as it has ever been. In there, we have the seed of a lot of the big complex ideas that will be debated throughout the film. How do you deal with being a child of an Evil Empire? What do our parents give us, and what do we take from them? Do our structures of power as they exist, be it corporations, states, or others, exist to make the world more just, or are they an obstacle to actual justice? Why does Guy Gardner have that haircut? This film is saturated with these huge questions, and a lot of them are asked with clear-headed pragmatism by Lois Lane, played with the pitch-perfect cynicism of a former punk by Rachel Brosnahan.
To answer all of these questions, we have David Corenswet, playing both Superman and Clark Kent as the typical James Gunn protagonist. Which is to say that this Superman is a dude’s dude, charmingly clueless and passionate over some manner of kitchy nonsense, in over his head, and getting his face bloodied at least once per day, if not worse, trying to make sense of the violent screaming world that was bequeathed to him. Which is the polite way of saying that, as ever, this film doesn’t have much to say because it believes there isn’t much to say. Yeah, as it turns out, this shit is complicated. As it turns out, there is no answer that everyone will agree on, as there is no answer that will make the obviously evil stop being obviously evil. There are just people trying, and never really being ready, even when they have a dozen evil plans and just as many henchmen. But it’s not just Superman being caught unprepared. It’s the whole world. The film keeps throwing out groups and organizations that are named wrong on purpose. It’s not Lexcorp yet, it’s Luthorcorp. It’s not Stormwatch, it’s Planetwatch. And that team squatting in the way-too-big Hall of Justice isn’t the Justice League, it’s the Justice Gang.
The result of all that dissonance is a film that feels extremely playful, even when it occasionally veers into joyful tastelessness. The Grant Morrison in its DNA is self-evident, the accumulation of trials being straight out of All-Star Superman, while the Luthor stuff pulls from Action Comics, and in addition to all of that the true sickos will also detect traces of the darker satirical silver-age by way of the current culture wars elements from Seaguy in there. But any keen-eyed viewer with a taste for trash will tell you from a few shots that its biggest debt is owed to Troma, Lloyd Kaufman, and a general ethos of “just shoot it” that at times gives the cinematography a shaggy, ramshackle and handmade feel. It might not have the really gross body horror stuff, although there is some grody make-up work throughout, and there certainly aren’t funny dismemberments, but, I mean, for Pete’s sake, it has Anthony Carrigan playing the second best Toxic Avenger you’ll see on a screen this Summer, except they call him Metamorpho. And the film gets even more fun when it jumps into the wacky not-even-trying-to-make-it-look-real CGI spectacle, with the most joyfully surrealist scenes of super combat this side of Shin Kamen Rider.
What I’m trying to say, as true and as honest as I can say it, is that Superman is a film so profoundly earnest and humble it doesn’t even brag about pulling off its very strict “a week in the life” structure. It’s a film whose world expands so rapidly that it feels at once like a prequel and a sequel to itself. Gang, they let the guy that made that Peacemaker television show everyone seemed to love make a Superman film. It’s not exceptional, and I would never claim to like it as much as any given Zack Snyder film that has Superman in it. But it’s good, and it has set the terms of the conversation such that being good is enough. FOUR STARS OUT OF FIVE.
You’re reading HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS, a newsletter that tried to convince itself that no worthwhile comic came out in the last four months when really it had just burned itself out for years and kept making it worse with every attempted comeback. As it turned out I still could write, I just needed to write about something that wasn’t a comic at all first. But hey! Please! Take burnout seriously. Now, some reviews suggested by readers.
It was pretty clear, once Chip Zdarsky wrote a coda to his Batman run that dove head-first into every noir cliché at once while doing the whole ripped-from-the-headlines conspiracy thriller thing, that there would be a lot more Ed Brubaker adjacent things in his future. So, obviously, here we have Captain America #1, which, much like the Captain America #1 of twenty years ago, attempts to square the circle of a man of World War Two becoming a hero in the days after 9/11. But where that old comic was all allusions and metaphors, dropping a “You’ve been real violent lately and it’s worrying us” or an “Actually you shouldn’t slander the French” here and there, this one fully takes advantage of the benefit of twenty years of hindsight. As its object lesson, it features one David Colton, whose Captain America Origin Story begins in the dust and the rubble of the Twin Towers, and soon thereafter takes him to the fall of Saddam. And wouldn’t you know it, he’s being sent on a rescue mission with possible regime change implications once again. Except this one seems pretty doomed, on account of being set in Latveria.
There are pretty cool moves. There’s little doubt in my mind that the writer that kept having Daredevil realize that his drive to pursue hardcore ninja violence on the criminals might make him a cop, which is a bad thing, will find ways to make the comic relevant and provocative in equal measure despite being a flashback. At the same time, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that none of this feels particularly novel. By now, the history of the Marvel universe is littered with secret super-soldiers built for wars gone by, and there are enough superhero comics specifically about 9/11 to qualify it as a genre. Now, these comics don’t have the gentle expressiveness or the frantically kinetic action of Valerio Schiti’s pencils, or the subtly all-American twilight mood of Frank Martin’s colors, which might make them slightly less pleasant to read, but they had the boldness of being more timely. That doesn’t make Captain America #1 bad, it’s a satisfying action comic that might get you to think about stuff, it just makes it feel slightly superfluous.
I’ve been asked to review Absolute Green Lantern #4, and I think the plan there was to drive to madness for purposes as yet unknowable. But guess what, enemies: I’m not going to fall for it. I’m going to keep this review basic, and simple, and surface level, and you will not get me to speculate in any way about the five classical elements, Newton’s original color wheel, the pentatonic sccale, the Black Hand, the Philosopher’s Stone, nigredo, citrinitas, rubedo, the Great Darkness, the Green, the Red, the Rot, the Hole in things, the Blackstar, the Omega and the Alpha, the Weaponers of Qard, the Authority, the Outsiders, the Spectre, Judgment, The Star, The Magician, The Hermit, or Death. We don’t have time to indulge in this, please do not consider any of the above.
Let’s keep it to what we can observe, which is that this comic fucking rules. I love that, unlike Al Ewing’s other forays into the arcane and the esoteric (see: The Resurrection of Magneto), this is a comic that gives nothing away, not even narration from an outside perspective; if you don’t remember the basic timeline that’s set in the captions of issue #1, it’s fully on you and the book will make no effort to catch you up. I love that Jahnoy Lindsay’s pages have the urgency of manga and the rigid formalism of the more ambitious 9-panel comics, and how digital wizardry allows him to play in layers, with textures, transparencies, selective blurs and the odd chromatic aberration here and there to constantly surprise you. I love it even more when it breaks its own rules, mangling layouts for great effect.
And yes, god damnit, I love the mystery. I love that this comic has a real sense of place, of the middle of nowhere near the Nevada desert, a town well on its way to becoming a ghost. I love how it’s adding to characters one small touch at a time. I love that, in an Absolute line that’s all too eager to tell you what its comics are exactly, Absolute Green Lantern has the sheer bravado of making you wait for it. I don’t know that there’s a comic out there as willing to force you to deal with it at its own tempo. It’s great and you should read it and I am absolutely not drowning in tab after tab of near-impenetrable research that has driven me fully mad. So I win!
Finally: I’ve been asked to review the Marvel Swimsuit Special: Friends, Foes & Rivals, presumably because I’m a certifiable deranged pervert. Well, I’ll tell you right now that it is absolutely not worth your time. It’s a shitty cash grab meant to promote themed cosmetic downloadable content for Marvel Rivals, with a bonus code if you buy the issue for yourself. The gallery of variant covers is poorly curated and barely given enough context, and the comic accompanying them is an even worse waste of time. Yes, it has specific enough references to the Swimsuit Specials of old to remind you that Tim Seeley and Tony Fleecs love the 1990s, and no one other than Nick Bradshaw could make it look as joyful, but the satirical thrust around AI and environmentalism is limp and half-baked, which shouldn’t even have been a problem. What I take issue with, really, is that it only has people in swimsuits in it for one or two panels on all of four pages. If you don’t count the cover gallery, then, this is a swimsuit special without much in the way of swimsuits.
And it didn’t have to be this way! Consider for a moment the Marvel Swimsuit Specials of old, superbly stupid objects, aping the design and the style of magazine pictorials of the time, especially the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, complete with fake ads and fake magazine features! You had one bit to do, and you did absolutely none of it! Even DC Comics did it right when they made the G’Nort’s Illustrated Swimsuit Edition! They even had centerfolds! This was a waste of time. You’re welcome!
XOXO,
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS.