Adventures of Superman #510 (March 1994)
Adventures of Superman #510 (March 1994)
Bizarro’s World, Part 2! Bizarro has kidnapped Lois Lane and taken her to a warped replica of Metropolis he built in a big warehouse within the real Metropolis, like the plot of Synecdoche, New York but with a defective Superman clone instead of Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Despite being a big ol’ dumbass, we find out that Bizarro definitely retains some parts of Superman’s original personality, like his love for Lois (hence the kidnapping) and of course his profound hatred for Jimmy Olsen (hence the part where he blows up a mannequin dressed like Jimmy with his heat vision).
Meanwhile, Superman thinks it’ll be easy to find Lois with his newly augmented powers, but turns out they’re SO augmented that he can’t even focus his super-hearing and ends up having a sensory overload, so he’s pretty much useless right now. Fortunately, Lois is very capable of saving herself, which she eventually does by climbing to the top of the “Daylee Plandit” building and pushing the crude globe replica on top of poor Bizarro.
Before escaping, Lois also figures out that Lex Luthor Jr. is somehow responsible for Bizarro’s creation, which she deduces mainly because just hearing Lex’s name made Bizarro start screaming and breaking stuff.
So yeah, Superman isn’t very useful in this issue, because we’ve reached the point where his “enhanced” powers have officially become a problem. Lois tries to comfort him saying that she wants a husband, not a bodyguard, but only one thing can make Superman feel better: punching the crap out of Bizarro for a while. Continued!
Plotline-Watch:
The best part of this issue are the Bizarro-speak Easter eggs throughout Bizarrotropolis, like the mouse with a sign that says “Kad” (Cadmus), the mannequin wearing a bib that says “O” (Bibbo), the Daylee Plandit employee whose head is a bottle of Perry water (wait, has "Perry White" always been short for "Perrier White"?), and others I probably missed.
Curious that Lois thinks “This creature really is some Bizarro version of Superman,” since the term “Bizarro” comes from, well, Bizarro. Where did it originate in this universe? I was gonna say Seinfeld, but the "Bizarro Jerry" episode aired in 1996, two years after this issue (and was probably called “Guy Who Is The Complete Opposite of Jerry” anyway).
The scene where Superman loses control of his hearing powers is pretty similar to the moment in John Byrne’s Superman #10 when the same thing happens, only that time they actually pulled word balloons from various other DC comics that came out that month, which was pretty cool. This time, the only piece of dialogue that sounds like it might be from another comic is “wish I was like Barry,” but I checked the March 1994 issue of The Flash and there’s nothing like that (it does sound like something early ‘90s Wally West would say on any given issue, though).
An increasingly Lex Luthor Sr.-looking Lex Luthor Jr. summons his mole in Project Cadmus, Dr. Packard, to find out what they know about the mystery illness afflicting all clones in the city (which includes Lex himself, as Packard is shocked to learn), but Cadmus has no idea what’s going on either. All they know is that Guardian seems to be the only clone who doesn’t feel like crap right now, for some reason. It’s worth noting that none of the other clones are losing their hair like Lex, so presumably that’s not the Clone Plague but just regular alopecia.
Time’s Up for Vincent Edge! Cat Grant goes off script during her show’s live broadcast to #MeToo her boss, who’s been aggressively hitting on her for the past few months – the old incorrigible horndog didn’t even give it a rest when Cat’s young son was murdered. This issue includes Vinnie’s worst line yet when he tells Cat he wants to help her career because “Nothing would please me more than to see you on TOP. If you know what I mean.” My headcanon is that he’s arrested by the cops at the end of this issue specifically because of that line.
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Don Sparrow's section below is all-new, though, so click on to keep reading:
Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):
We start with the cover, and I love it--a great callback to Man of Steel #25, right down to the font. I love the detail of the crystalized flesh flaking off of him, showing the deterioration plaguing Bizarro, and his fellow clones.
Inside the book, we get a look at Bizarro's World, a shanty play-village version of Metropolis. Karl Kesel is one of the funnier writers on the Super-team, so there's a cleverness to the phonetically constructed signage (which to me also read as a nod to the old "Bizarro #1" sign that Superman's imperfect duplicate would hang around his neck). But I can't get past the refrigerator logic type questions, like--wouldn't it be harder to learn the concept of an egg sitting, rather than "exit"? And how does he have any written language skills, having only been born a few hours ago? But, it's comics, and as we saw in the Man of Steel mini-series, there's some sort of intellectual imprint on Bizarros from the original article.
Page 4 has a great flying shot of Superman searching the city for his duplicate…
…and page 10, apart from Vinnie's painful (and if Max is right, flat out illegal) play on words, we also get a look at some extreme 90's blazer tailoring on Cat Grant. The panel of Bizarro lost in his rage at the mere mention of Lex Luthor is an appropriately frightening one. Quite a nice drawing of Lois lifting herself through the skylight, later that scene.
It's a cool detail that Cat's broadcast uses the same candid photos of Superman and Lois from the previous issue's broadcast, redrawn here by Barry Kitson.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS:
Nice to see that Cat Grant does her own re-writes--she has long been established to be a legitimate journalist, having grown out of her gossip columnist roots.
Cute silver-age callback to the cube globe Bizarro world, as Lois tries to scale the top of Bizarro's ersatz Daily Planet.
We've covered this ground before, but it's astonishing to me that decades after this issue came out, sexual harassment in TV news remains endemic--it might actually even be worse today than when this story is published. But it's cheering to see Cat Grant take down another powerful Edge, again with the truth of journalism as her weapon. [Max: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this is the second Edge boy Cat brings down… and she didn't even have to sleep with this one. Progress!]
It's pleasing that Lois rescues herself, rather than Superman finding her, but it also meant Superman didn't get up to much Adventuring this week. The "Superman is over-protective" angle gets its first mention here and will come to matter a lot more during the David Michelinie era of stories.