Agreed. It really started to feel like the entire gimmick of using time-travelling references to Superman's Twelve Labours early on was to trick readers into thinking Solaris had been properly set up at all.
That said, I've developed a real appreciation for All-Star Superman. I feel like, way back, I got off on sort of the wrong foot with this book. My first exposure to it was in eight preview pages for the first issue, years ago on the SupermanHomepage. I mentioned that I thought the S looked dumb needlessly simplified and why can't artists just draw it normally for once. It looked like this:
I got a bunch of flack for that and people talking about how Quitely's S looked so this and that and worked on aesthetic theories and was a better choice for this story and so on. Later the actual issue comes out:
.... so somebody working on the book apparently agreed with me. Not that I saw any complaints when the change happened.
That kind of set the tone for what seemed to me like a strange trend of fans giving EVERYTHING about the book blind, total praise, and since there are so many things about it that reflexively rubbed me the wrong way, this put me on the defensive(or offensive, or whatever).
I was never crazy about the more ridiculous Silver-Age Superman and felt a regression into that stuff - specifically right after
Superman Returns had blown a vast opportunity to tell a realistic, relevant Supes story - was the wrong way to go, but I worked to overcome that when reading it.
What really got me was the way that so many people online were insisting, well before the brilliance and heroism of the series' latter half, that this book was the perfect, continuity-less timeless story that anybody could pick up and learn everything that was great about Superman. Aside from the fact that "He broke both the Greek god Atlas' arms on the front page of the Daily Planet because Atlas called him a coward!" is soooo not a part of "everything you should know about Superman and why he's great", the continuity-less jump-right-in-stuff is bull****. Bull****. In real life, I've had to explain to every non-Superman geek I meet who looks at the book that "This isn't retarded, it's
an homage to [x] from the "Silver Age" where stories were sillier and Jimmy Olsen would morph into different creatures and Superman knew Hercules" and so on and so forth to get them to make any effort towards respecting the story and taking it seriously. In fact, if you read back through this very thread, people have to post stuff like this
dozens of times, and we're the geeks who should've understood the angle in the first place. There's also stuff like
Jimmy Olsen turning into
Doomsday to stop
Evil Superman, whose gravity you simply cannot appreciate the way it's intended if you don't know who Jimmy and Doomsday traditionally are. But the internet is still full of people who insist the opposite. It drives me crazy that online, it always feels like I'm the detractor of the book while off line I'm defending it.
There's also Quitely's artwork. I can see now why people love it, I really can, and another artist would've changed the entire flavour of the story, but I still find it riddled with flaw. After that first, horrifying picture of Superman up there, he proceeds to draw him looking virtually identical to Samson, who is in turn extremely similar to Lex Luthor(even in details like the shape of the nose). It's the same exact thing I see Jim Lee get the most criticism for. Furthermore, a couple panels are just outright, can't-believe-this-made-it-to-print, Liefield-bad. Look at Superman's reaction to the Ultrasphinx grabbing Lois and explain to me how that isn't a repulsive error of a drawing.
That said, his Lex-drawing is spot on. Everything about Lex in the book is spot-on. For my money, it's
the Lex Luthor depiction, and always has been since I read Issue #5 the first time back when I didn't like 1,2,3,4 or 6(to be honest, I still don't like 6).
I feel like I should do a second post soon highlighting the stuff I think is great about the story. If anyone actually read
this essay of a post, I appreciate it.
