The Four Color Media Monitor

I'd heard that the recent Superman storyline where the Man of Steel travels to New Krypton and its colony of Kryptonian survivors had anti-war themes featured, but it took some time to try and find the fitting info. Now, through Scans Daily, I've been able to gather a bit about the story in Superman #691 written by James Robinson and Greg Rucka, and it certainly leaves me feeling disappointed.

Let's see if I have this right: New Krypton is supposed to be a stand-in for Iraq/Iran? Let's be clear here: taking noble communities like the one Superman is descended from and making them stand-ins for what are enemy-run countries is really insulting. Another troubling part is the once presumed dead Sam Lane's shouting out to Superman and company to surrender, "or feel the might of America!" and is most likely meant to be interpreted as an illegal act of war by the US. I'm very disappointed in Robinson and Rucka for exploiting the franchise this tastelessly as a platform for their political biases, to say nothing of their failure to come up with a new fictionalized country/planet that could serve as a stand-in for Iraq/Iran. And the plot of getting Earth to hate Superman is no longer novel.

One of the replies to the topic also raised my eyebrows and left me shaking my head:

This is Sam Lane (aka James Robinson's) master plan? To have everyone hate Superman - again. The same plan Luthor came up with in Loeb's S/B: Public Enemies and upteenth times before that? I hate when writers have to make everyone in the DCU so fickle that they always turn on the greatest hero in the universe in a second. I also hate how they've turned Sam Lane who was always a hard-ass but never a b*stard into an even more one-dimensional Snidely Whiplash villain than Zod. So they kill Lois's sister (a character who goes back to the 50s) and make her father a super-villain, the next Wade Eiling. How lame. Is this the kind of stuff we have to look forward in Didio's "Year of Superman" next year.

And once again I have to say that Allura's insta-hatred and distrust of Earth is looking to be the right one. I wonder if Supergirl will realize this? Or Kal?

So aside from Sam Lane's being used as a means of villefying the army, Lucy Lane's become the next victim of DC's obsession with terminating minor supporting characters? Truly distasteful. What will be the outcome of this story in the end? There's every chance it'll be as awful as can be.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful writers, golden calf of death, politics, Superman