(Cover All-Star Superman #6 by Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant)
Thursday was one of those days, well -- one of those mornings. What with the MSP payment fiasco and me being shunted to-and-fro down the pneumatic tubes of Computerized Telephone Systems, but it looked up when I went downtown and picked up the sixth issue of Quitely/Morrison's All-Star Superman. Things looked up after that, especially when I paired the comic with some sushi for lunch.
The comic opens with a mournful, hazy shot of the distant moon - a harvest moon, full and ripe-yellow. The successive panels shift the focus, bringing us to a field that the moon looks over, with a ramshackle scarecrow that looks about ready to fall over, then switches to silhouettes of a man, a boy, and a tractor. Pa Kent stands out in a field with young Clark looking up at the big Kansas sky with Clark back for a vacation from Metropolis University. Pa recounts Clark's mysterious arrival as a baby and embarasses his son up until Krypto shows up.
This is a young Clark Kent and yes, Michael, there was a Krypto: Kal-El's white puppy of indistinct breed, rocketed to Earth to arrive after the kid. A dog in a red cape with all the powers of Superman. Pa watches his boy and the dog leap up into the sky to sail off at impossible speeds and grunts, laughs, walks back up to his wife. Bathed in tractor headlights (shining directly over their shoulders at the "camera" as the credits roll) the two ponder their son's growing powers until a shadow falls across Pa's shoulder and Martha peers over at the shadow's owner.
A tall man in a button-down buttoned up to the neck, short blue-black hair like their very own son's. "Evening, folks. I hear you're on the lookout for some good men, Mister Kent. For the harvest." Followed by the story's title: Funeral in Smallville. This whole page - the Kents, the stranger, the blistering headlights - sum up to a Ray Bradbury moment, and you know something terrible's going to happen. I immediately thought young Lex Luthor, which was dead wrong, but there you go.
In the distant present, fresh from his interview with death row inmate Lex Luthor, Clark Kent is collected by a gathering of his own descendents to help them stop a monster that barrelling backward through time and eats people's lifetimes -- a beast tracked down to Smallville back when Superman was just a young man. Plot's incidental in this one, the time-travel is a weird and twisting rope that you never quite get ahold of, but that's not the point: this is the day that Pa Kent dies, while the young Superman is off saving the day. Clark Kent is given the opportunity to go back in time and does so, taking time to see his father for precious moments before his father dies. It's Orpheus and Euridice turned on its head; our Super-Orpheus can't allow his presence to be known and must come disguised, with no delusions of saving Pa's life. He just wants to free himself of an old regret - a regret, oddly, that helped make him Superman properly. As the future Supermen state, if Pa hadn't died he might not have stayed in Metropolis and gone on to father their line.
Even with the time-travel madness and the flashy Supermen of the Future -- including Kal Kent from the year 853,500 with his slinky-and-shiny sexy supersuit -- the story is a quiet meditation on the regrets of middle-age. We're given a scene with Clark's childhood friends Lana Lang and Pete Ross, the supporting cast of the Superboy comics ("The Adventures of Superman as a boy!") where they both clearly know who Clark is but continue to play the old games despite how they really feel. I was impressed more by this version of the Silver Age Lana Lang in two pages than I ever was of her previously - she was always a stand-in for Lois in the original comics, a rival for her on occasion, and it was only more recently in the mainstream comics that they've done anything particularly interesting with her, as Clark's best friend with subtext. "Why do you both act like I don't know who he is?" She asks that when Clark excuses him because of some "stomach problems" (to rush off and stop something monstrous) and all Pete can say is, "Don't make me talk about this, Lana." They've had to play this game for so long and she's tired. She's seen through all the deceptions and just wants to be honest but Clark? At this point in his life, Clark's too anxious to come out of that closet and admit he was Superboy and is Superman. Or, in that time frame, on his way to calling himself Superman.
Good comic, ripe with pathos and weird action as strange Superman from Brave New Worlds fight a ravenous monster all mouths and hands and eyes and MY GOD I can't imagine looking at that directly if it was a real thing, and the plot manages to have the whizz-bang while not actually being the whizz-bang.