Review: Superman: For Tomorrow

Blood red. That should have been my first hint. Maroon is not a color I associate with the last son of Krypton, and the cover of the first hardcover of Superman: For Tomorrow looked like it had just been dropped off from Mars. It’s a striking design, with Superman’s symbol in reflective ink, and the entire package is wrapped up very attractively, but unfortunately the story presented by Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee fails to do anything more than provide just that: an attractive box with very, very little inside.

The core of For Tomorrow is a very interesting conceit: a year ago, a million people disappeared from the face of the earth simultaneously, including Lois Lane. Superman investigates the disappearance and discovers how brutal mankind can be against itself and that no matter how much he tries to tell himself, he’s always going to be an alien on Earth. While on the trail, Superman battles the Elemental Giants, a genetically crafted supersoldier, and Wonder Woman and the Justice League in a desperate effort to bring back the lost and be reunited with Lois. Unfortunately, Azzarello’s simultaneously bloated and meager script turns an ideal six-issue series into twelve chapters with a highly unpleasant version of Kal-El in the middle of it all.

Azzarello, most famous for the crime epic 100 Bullets was chosen by artist Lee and while it’s obvious that he has a knack for multi-layered dialogue, his inability to write anything that doesn’t feaure a morally gray worldview hinders this story greatly. The churlish Superman that inhabits these pages fails to get any sympathy from me, and I’m the sort of person that spends a truly unhealthy portion of Superman: The Movie keeping tears at bay. Whether the script was written under a mandate to play to extremes in order to facilitate Infinite Crisis is unclear to me, but the truly unpleasant nature of the Superman in For Tomorrow is brought home in one bit of dialogue:

Batman: What’s this all about, Clark?
Superman: Kal. My name is Kal-El. And this is about some things I need get off my chest
Batman: Why don’t you start with the “S.”
Superman: I prefer to start with the man. I admire you. Through sheer, determined will you’ve made yourself the best you can be. You’re my friend…but I don’t like you.
Batman:I guess you do have something to get off your chest…

Superman goes on to make some very vague allusions to Batman keeping his chin up before flying off, but the entire scene rings false, mostly because Batman comes off being much more sympathetic than Superman. I can certainly see Azzarello’s desire with dialogue like this: he’s getting a chance to do something different with a character like Superman, a nearly seventy-year icon, but that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it? Where Miller played the Superman-Batman dichotomy for grim laughs in The Dark Knight Returns, Azzarello doesn’t lay the groundwork to lead to a scene like this – the turgid dialogue just chops wood randomly without anything more than allowing Batman to realize that Superman’s going to do something rash to bring back the lost by the next page. Yes, Superman has been confronted with a very dark part of humanity and his wife has been stolen from him but I can’t see the character not taking a final chance to make amends with Batman in a very, very different way.

Azzarello clearly revels in the characters he’s created for this story: the cancer-striken priest that Superman confides in and the mercenary Orr both shine brighter than the main character, and that’s the problem: they’re human and while both are essential to the story presented, they shouldn’t steal the spotlight from the main character as consistently as they manage to do for the entire twelve-issue story. When this is combined with the underwhelming nature of the “big” reveal and the by-the-books threadweaving at the climax, we get a Superman story that fails to excite – a cardinal sin.

Jim Lee struggles mightily to make this interesting. I’ve come around on his art, which I used to hold no small amount of disdain for, but there are some inventive layouts and while some of the dynamic poses that may break anatomy a bit, I didn’t mind. His male characters are all well-realized and he succeeds at making sure that his Superman isn’t just the Hush Batman without a mask, despite the whole “six foot two, black hair, eyes of blue” thing. Maybe there’s a little too much Photoshopping in some scenes – lens blur and flare are abused, certainly, but with the exception of Wonder Woman looking like she’s half-lizard and Lois Lane being generic in prettiness, it’s obvious that Lee has learned a lot about how to draw humans. Equus, however, is an unmitigated failure. Basically Seth from Millar’s run on The Authority, no amount of “clever” dialogue can make him anything more than highly derivative and dull as dishwater.

With Superman Returns coming to theaters, comics fans may want to check out what’s been up with the hero that started it all, but this is certainly not the book to do it with. When it comes to twelve-part storylines featuring a well-regarded writer and an inventive artist, I’d recommend the cheaper and much more enjoyable Birthright, where Superman’s origin gets retold for the umpteenth time to surprisingly pleasant effect by Mark Waid and Leneil Yu.