#hawman

ACTION COMICS #600, SUPERMAN #18

May/June 1988

By John Byrne, Roger Stern, Geroge Perez, Kurt Schaffenberger, Mike Mignola, Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, Jerry Ordway, Dick Giordano, Karl Kesel, Tom Ziuko, Petra Scotese, John Costanza, Bill Oakley, and Albert DeGuzman.

Superman and Wonder Woman go on a date, but they find themselves in Mount Olympus, fighting against Darkseid (story started in Wonder Woman #16).

Lex Luthor discovers he made a huge mistake.

Lois Lane realizes she is no competition for Wonder Woman, and in a moment of weakness, feels attraction for Clark Kent.

Jimmy helps Superman as a wave of Kryptonite radiation hits Earth and he will have to get help from him. Man-Bat.

Then the Haws will take Superman to the place where Krypton was, where Superman would hallucinate a different way history could have gone.

SCORE: 10

I was never a fan of the date between Superman and Wonder Woman, and I have to say that it is not the reason this story accomplished a perfect score. It has more to do with all the other plots (including "Return to Krypton", which wasn't my favorite story either, but it's visually impressive).

Action Comics #600 brought back some of the most recognizable Superman artists (it was Superman's 50th Anniversary after all). It was also the end of Superman's "run" in Action Comics. He would continue for forty-something issues in a short serialized story, but the book would become weekly and disconnected from the other Super-titles.

The reveal of Luthor losing his hand because of Kryptonite radiation was a vert smart touch, and another reference to the silver age (when Luthor used to blame Superboy for the accident where he lost his hair).

The last story in the book connects with Superman #18, as Man-Bat goes to ask the Haws for help. Now, have in mind that these Hawks are a temporal inconsistency (one of the results of reintroducing them five years after Crisis), but hopefully that won't ruin the experience.

"Return to Krypton" was always a very sad story. The planet was in a way reforming, but it would take so long for that to happen, that Superman would never properly get to see it again.

The story also introduced recent visual concepts from the "World of Krypton" mini-series.

But there are many thoughts that you can take from this story, beyond the simple "you can never go home again".

It establishes that Superman being the only survivor of Krypton, was "the right choice", as Kryptonians on Earth would have gone mad with power, and Kal-El himself would be used to maintain that power.

It also reinforces the idea that Superman doesn't belong anywhere but Earth.

And in the end, when he tries to replicate the cure for Kryptonite he saw Jor-El do in his hallucination, he realizes it was inert and that it was probably a good thing that something could take him out, just in case he got corrupted.

The whole thing was beautifully drawn by Mike Mignola, who you wouldn't normally associate with Superman, but at the time was doing super-hero work.

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