Superman #85 (January 1994)
Superman #85 (January 1994)
Cat Grant in… “DARK RETRIBUTION”! Which is like normal retribution, but somehow darker. On the receiving end of Cat’s darktribution is Winslow Schott, the Toyman, who suddenly changed his MO from “pestering Superman with wacky robots” to “murdering children” back on Superman #84, with one of his victims being Cat’s young son Adam. Now Cat has a gun and intends to sneak it into prison to use it on Toyman. She’s also pretty pissed at Superman for taking so long to find Toyman after Adam's death (to be fair, Superman did lose several days being frozen in time by an S&M demon, as seen in Man of Steel #29).
So how did Superman find Toyman anyway? Basically, by spying on like 25% of Metropolis. After finding out from Inspector Turpin that the kids were killed near the docks, Superman goes there and focuses all of his super-senses to get “a quick glimpse of every person” until he sees a bald, robed man sitting on a giant crib, and goes “hmmm, yeah, that looks like someone who murders children.” At first, Superman doesn’t understand why Toyman would do such a horrible thing, but then Schott starts talking to his mommy in his head and the answer becomes clear: he watched Psycho too many times (or Dan Jurgens did, anyway).
Immediately after wondering why no one buys his toys, Toyman makes some machine guns spring out of his giant crib. I don’t know, man, maybe it’s because they’re all full of explosives and stuff? Anyway, Toyman throws a bunch of exploding toys at Superman, including a robot duplicate of himself, but of course they do nothing. Superman takes him to jail so he can get the help he needs – which, according to Cat, is a bullet to the face. Or so it seems, until she gets in front of him, pulls the trigger, and…
PSYCHE! It was one of those classic joke guns I've only ever seen in comics! Cat says she DID plan to bring a real gun, but then she saw one of these at a toy store and just couldn’t resist. Superman, who was watching the whole thing, tells Cat she could get in trouble for this stunt, but he won’t tell anyone because she’s already been through enough. Then he asks her if she needs help getting home and she says no, because she wants to be more self-sufficient.
I think that’s supposed to be an inspiring ending, but I don’t know… Adam’s eerie face floating in the background there makes me think she’s gonna shave her head and climb into a giant crib any day, too. THE END!
Character-Watch:
Cat did become more self-sufficient after this, though. Up to now, all of her storylines seemed to revolve around other people: her ex-husband, Morgan Edge, José Delgado, Vinnie Edge, and finally Toyman. After this, I feel like there was a clear effort to turn her into a character that works by herself. I actually like what they did with Cat in the coming years, though I still don't think they had to kill her poor kid to do that – they could have sent him off to boarding school, or maybe to live with his dad. Or with José Delgado, over at Power of Shazam! I bet Jerry Ordway would have taken good care of him.
Plotline-Watch:
Wait, so can Superman just find anyone in Metropolis any time he wants? Not really: this is part of the ongoing storyline about his powers getting boosted after he came back from the dead, which sounds pretty useful now but is about to get very inconvenient.
Don Sparrow points out: “It is interesting that as Superman tries to capture Schott, he at one point instead captures a robot decoy, particularly knowing what Geoff Johns will retroactively do to this storyline in years to come, in Action Comics #865, as we mentioned in our review of Superman #84.” Johns also explained that the robot thought he was hearing his mother’s voice due to the real Toyman trying to contact him via radio, which I prefer to the “psycho talks to his dead mom” cliche.
Superman says “I never thought he’d get to the point where he’d KILL anyone – especially children!” Agreed about the children part but, uh, did Superman already forget that Toyman murdered a whole bunch people on his very first appearance, in Superman #13? Or does Superman not count greedy toy company owners as people? Understandable, I guess.
There’s a sequence about Cat starting a fire in a paper basket at the prison to sneak past the metal detector, but why do that if she had a toy gun all long? Other than to prevent smartass readers like us from saying “How did she get the gun into the prison?!” before the plot twist, that is.
Patreon-Watch:
Shout out to our patient Patreon patrons, Aaron, Murray Qualie, Chris "Ace" Hendrix, britneyspearsatemyshorts, Patrick D. Ryall, Bheki Latha, Mark Syp, Ryan Bush, Raphael Fischer, Dave Shevlin, and Kit! The latest Patreon-only article was about another episode of the 1988 Superman cartoon written by Marv Wolfman, this one co-starring Wonder Woman (to Lois’ frustration).
Another Patreon perk is getting to read Don Sparrow’s section early, because he usually finishes his side of these posts long before I do (he ALREADY finished the next one, for instance). But now this one can be posted in public! Take it away, Don:
Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):
We begin with the cover, and it's a good one: an ultra tight close up for Cat Grant firing a .38 calibre gun, with the titular Superman soaring in, perhaps too late. An interesting thing to notice in this issue (and especially on the cover) is that the paper stock that DC used for their comics changed, so slightly more realistic shading was possible. While it's nowhere near the sophistication or gloss of the Image Comics stock of the time, there is an attempt at more realistic, airbrushy type shading in the colour. It works well in places, like the muzzle flash, on on Cat Grant's cheeks and knuckles, but less so in her hair, where the shadow looks a browny green on my copy.
The interior pages open with a pretty good bit of near-silent storytelling. We are deftly shown, and not told the story—there are condolence cards and headlines, and the looming presence of a liquor bottle, until we are shown on the next page splash the real heart of the story, a revolver held aloft by Catherine Grant, bereaved mother, with her targeting in her mind the grim visage of the Toyman.
While their first few issues together meshed pretty well, it's around this issue that the pencil/inks team of Jurgens and Rubinstein starts to look a little rushed in places. A few inkers who worked with Jurgens that I've spoken to have hinted that his pencils can vary in their level of detail, from very finished to pretty loose, and in the latter case, it's up to the inker to embellish where there's a lack of detail. Some inkers, like Brett Breeding, really lay down a heavier hand, where there's quite a bit of actual drawing work in addition to adding value and weight to the lines. I suspect some of the looseness in the figures, as well as empty backgrounds reveals that these pencils were less detailed than we often see from Jurgens.
There's some weird body language in the tense exchange between Superman and Cat as she angrily confronts him about his lack of progress in capturing her son's killer—Superman looks a little too dynamic and pleased with himself for someone ostensibly apologizing. Superman taking flight to hunt down Toyman is classic Jurgens, though.
Another example of art weirdness comes on page 7, where Superman gets filled in on the progress of the Adam Morgan investigation. Apparently Suicide Slum has some San Francisco-like hills, as that is one very steep sidewalk separating Superman and Turpin from some central-casting looking punks.
The sequence of Superman concentrating his sight and hearing on the waterfront area is well-drawn, and it's always nice to see novel uses of his powers. Tyler Hoechlin's Superman does a similar trick quite often on the excellent first season of Superman & Lois. The full-bleed splash of Superman breaking through the wall to capture Toyman is definitely panel-of-the-week material, as we really feel Superman's rage and desperation to catch this child-killer.
Pretty much all the pages with Cat Grant confronting Winslow Schott are well-done and tensely paced. While sometimes I think the pupil-less flare of the eye-glasses is a cop-out, it does lend an opaqueness and mystery to what Toyman is thinking. Speaking of cop-outs, the gag gun twist ending really didn't work for me. I was glad that Cat didn't lower herself to Schott's level and become a killer, even for revenge, but the prank gun just felt too silly of a tonal shift for a storyline with this much gravitas. The breakneck denouement that Cat is now depending only on herself didn't get quite enough breathing room either.
While I appreciated that the ending of this issue avoided an overly simplistic, Death Wish style of justice, this issue extends this troubling but brief era of Superman comics. The casual chalk outlines of yet two more dead children continues the high body count of the previous handful of issues, and the tone remains jarring to me. The issue is also self-aware enough to point out, again, that Schott is generally an ally of children, and not someone who historically wishes them harm, but that doesn't stop the story from going there, in the most violent of terms. In addition to being a radical change to the Toyman character, it's handled in a fashion more glib than we're used to seeing in these pages. The mental health clich\xc3\xa9 of a matriarchal obsession, a la Norman Bates doesn't elevate it either. So, another rare misstep from Jurgens the writer, in my opinion.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS:
I had thought for sure that Romanove Vodka was a sly reference to a certain Russian Spy turned Marvel superhero, but it turns out there actually is a Russian Vodka called that, minus the "E", produced not in Russia, as one might think from the Czarist name, but rather, India.
While it made for an awkward exchange, I was glad that Cat pointed out how her tragedy more or less sat on the shelf while Superman dealt with the “Spilled Blood” storyline. A lesser book might not have acknowledged any time had passed. Though I did find it odd for Superman to opine that he wanted to find her son's murderer even more than she wanted him to. Huh? How so?
I love the detail that Toyman hears the noise of Superman soaring to capture him, likening it to a train coming.
I quibble, but there's so much I don't understand about the "new" Toyman. If he's truly regressing mentally, to an infant-like state, why does he wear this phantom of the opera style long cloak while he sits in his baby crib? Why not go all the way, and wear footie pajamas, like the lost souls on TLC specials about "adult babies"?
I get that Cat Grant is in steely determination mode, but it seemed a little out of place that she had almost no reaction to the taunting she faced from her child's killer. She doesn't shed a single tear in the entire issue, and no matter how focused she is on vengeance, that doesn't seem realistic to me. [Max: That’s because this is not just retribution, Don. It’s dark retribution. We've been over this!]