Superman #90 (June 1994)
Superman #90 (June 1994)
“THE BATTLE FOR METROPOLIS,” Part 3! Things are BOOMING in Metropolis! Last issue ended with Lex Luthor (we can probably drop the “Jr.” by now) remotely detonating a bomb right next to Superman and the badly injured Guardian. In this one we quickly find out that there have actually been several Lex-triggered explosions (Lexplosions, if you will) all across the city. Lex watches the mayhem from his yacht, maniacally shouting that if he has to die, he’s taking the whole city with him.
Meanwhile, from the safety of his comfy office in Project Cadmus, wily ol’ Director Westfield decides to take advantage of the chaos to get rid of those pesky Underworld clones once and for all. He secretly launches a series of missiles that spread deadly gas throughout the city’s sewers, killing several peaceful Underworlders who were just chilling there (when he could have waited a few days for the Clone Plague to get them). Renegade geneticist Dabney Donovan, who has hidden cameras all over Cadmus, notices what Westfield is doing and doesn’t like it, not because he’s the Underworlders’ “father” but because he wants to keep experimenting on them.
Meanwhile meanwhile, Superman takes the unconscious Guardian to Cadmus and bumps into Westfield, who rudely invites him to leave. Superman, who has never liked Westfield, lets him know as much and warns him that as soon as the current mess is over, he’s letting everyone know exactly how much he sucks.
Westfield brushes him off and is like “No one will ever bring me down! I WILL LIVE FOREVER!” Then, while Superman is distracted dealing with one of those missiles, Dubbilex’s telepathic powers suddenly pick up “a presence in Cadmus” he “hasn’t felt in a very long time…”
That’s right, you guessed it: it’s freakin’ Psi-Phon and Dreadnaught!
Wait, no, that was Dabney Donovan. And yes, he just murdered Paul “King of the World” Westfield with some poison gas. Official cause of death: irony. CONTINUED NEXT WEEK (or whenever we write that post) IN ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #513!
Character-Watch:
And that’s the end of Director Westfield, who has been a pain in the ass since 1991’s Superman #58. It says a lot that, unlike everyone else who dies at Cadmus, they’ve never brought this jerk back via cloning… or have they?! (Geoff Johns: “No, they haven’t.”) I’m not sorry to see him go, but I do think that his death makes certain future revelations regarding the character kinda anticlimactic.
Don Sparrow says: “Quite a fall for Westfield. In the Bloodhounds storyline he seemed like a tough, if flawed leader. But in this book he’s exactly as bad as Luthor.” Yeah, he seemed like a somewhat reasonable authority figure until “Funeral for a Friend,” when he started his slow descent into supervillain status. Maybe a more satisfying ending for him would have been turning him into an actual supervillain, perhaps via Dabney’s ironic experiments… It’s not too late to tell that tale, DC!
Plotline-Watch:
- The best part of the issue is Superman saying he “almost hates” throwing one of those poison gas missiles into the stratosphere because “half the time I throw stuff into space it comes back even more dangerous!” We’ve been documenting that tradition for years, so that was satisfying to read. To my knowledge, that missile never became sentient and came back as “Missile-O” or something, but I could be wrong.
- Superman tells Westfield that “cloning ruined my home planet.” We saw that story (with sweet, sweet Mike Mignola art) in the World of Krypton miniseries.
- Dabney Donovan says he wants to continue studying the Underworlders to “create new life that will survive the coming apocalypse.” I’m not sure if by “apocalypse” he means this storyline or a… future one. Also, keyboard, multiple monitors, a big and probably expensive microphone – is Dabney a Twitch streamer?
- Westfield teases Superman because he can’t be in multiple places at once, musing that maybe he’ll create a being who can do that as his next experiment. So if he hadn’t died, the next Cadmus creation would have been Madrox the Multiple Man.
- Some impressively dumb Lex-Men chase Lois and shoot at her for “ripping off corporate secrets” (actually that tape of Lex killing his trainer from last issue). When she says they’re making a big mistake, they laugh at her and one says “You ain’t got a prayer, lady! Not unless you got yourself a guardian angel!” Are they… not from Metropolis? That would explain why one bothers trying to blast Superman “to smithereens” once he inevitably shows up.
- After Superman takes care of those goons, Lois notices there’s a camera in one of the helmets and uses the opportunity to tell Lex that he’s screwed. He shouts: “NO! Who’s her informant? Packard? Happersen? Or somebody else?” Lex, you’ve got exactly three recurring employees in this era. Come on, it’s not that hard.
Patreon-Watch:
This post was brought to you by Aaron, Chris “Ace” Hendrix, britneyspearsatemyshorts, Patrick D. Ryall, Bheki Latha, Mark Syp, Ryan Bush, Raphael Fischer, Kit, Sam, Bol, and Gaetano Barreca, the Superman ‘86 to '99 Patreon Gang!
And also by everyone’s pal Don Sparrow, who wrote the section after the jump…
Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):
We begin with a great cover, of an anguished Superman in the rubble of Metropolis. I’m gonna assume that this is moments before Superman leapt into action, and helped all those people behind him with the recovery effort, but you gotta take a minute or two to grieve. Joe Rubinstein is a legendary inker, to be sure, but his inks never fully jibed with Dan Jurgens pencils, it seems to me, and this cover shows a little bit of that. The rim lighting on the arms going so far from the edge makes Superman look almost excessively lean/defined, but that’s only noticeable when you stare at it as long as I have.
Inside the book we have guest pencils from Brent Anderson, whose art can be hit or miss for me, over the years. His Astro City stuff, for example, was terrific, like a modern Curt Swan, but at times, but in other instances—like this issue—there can be an unpleasantly rushed feel to his art. The surface detail is always terrific, and Neal Adams-like, but sometimes his forms can go a bit wonky. The very opening splash page is a good example of this.
At first glance, this seems like a terrific page, a great montage of different things happening over Metropolis. But then when you zoom in on both Guardian and Superman’s faces (particularly Guardian), things seem a little asymmetrical. This is not to say that there aren’t some excellent moments—there are! Page 5 has a great tall panel of Superman soaring into action. Dabney Donovan is looking quite Dr. Robotnik-like as he surveys Westfield’s final solution for the Underworlders. Page 12 unfortunately boasts another wonky Superman face, almost saved by the surface detailing. The absolute weirdest Superman face appears a little later, during the guardian angel exchange, where Kal-El is looking like he sproinged off the pages of Mad Magazine.
There’s another good flying shot comes on page 17, where Superman darts out of a sewer pipe. On the whole, a pretty inconsistent looking book, with backgrounds being a particularly weak point (apart from the extreme perspective shot of Metropolis early on). Story-wise, not a ton happens, apart from Superman zig-zagging to and from disasters, though we do get a little movement on the clone illness (that Guardian is apparently immune) and a recap of last week, revealing that Lois has damning evidence against Luthor.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS:
- Lex’s soldiers are pretty sexist, in addition to being willing murderers. How does a guy list when hiring for that position?
- Funny note as Superman launches the poison gas missile into space, as he muses “half the time I throw stuff into space, it comes back even more dangerous.” Certainly true of the Eradicator, but I’m trying to think of other examples. [Max: Off the top of my head, there’s the time he threw that living cemetery into space and it turned into a murder cloud, the time he left a lab suspended in orbit and it eventually spawned the Cyborg Superman (who did his own space-tossing with Doomsday), and, hmmm, does the time he threw himself into space and came back with a deadly artifact count?]
- Very Obi-Wan-like reaction from Dubbilex, as he senses Dabney Donovan’s presence. I always thought that Donovan was somewhere nearby as it was, so it’s odd that Dubbilex would only now sense his brainwaves.
- How does the gas hurt Westfield to the point that he’s choking blood, but not at all affect the maskless Donovan? [Max: Maybe he was a poison gas-immune Dabney clone who only thought he was the “one and only”?]