Robots are great. In the saccharine world superhero comics and Saturday morning cartoons, you can do things to robots that the power-that-be would never let you to do to a living character. Just look at Batman: The Animated Series. Episodes like "The Last Laugh" and "Heart of Steel" pit the Caped Crusader against mechanical menaces, allowing him to cut loose with a level of violence that was never unheard of. Heads are smashes, limbs are torn asunder, and LED eyeballs are crushed underfoot. You can't kill a robot, and therefore, you can't be accused of masochism if your antagonist is a synthetic, no matter how lifelike.
I was a pitiless robot-hater myself until the Animatrix installment "Second Renaissance" turned me around. Or maybe it was Ghost in the Shell. Maybe these artifical beings were developing an intelligence that could be compared to human consciousness . . . perhaps their own capacity for compassion could even rival our own.
Naw.
Silver Age Superman knew the score: robots are meant to be used as slaves for fighting crime. The Supes of the late 50's and 60's era comics employed an entire troupe of S-shield wearing helpers, using them for everything from aiding him against threats to acting as body doubles when that sneaky Lois Lane was a little too close to putting two and two together and realizing farm boy Clark Kent and her costumed savior were one and the same.
John Byrne's Man of Steel miniseries ushered in a new "down to Earth" Superman, stripping away some of what were considered the "sillier" elements of the hero's lore. Byrne would go on to have his time at the helm until another wave of creators took the reigns in the 90's. Cue the "death" of Superman. Cue the marriage between Lois and Clark. Cue the Electric Blue costume. And once these new and exciting ideas had been exhausted, the authors behind out monthly Super-adventures looked to the past to reinvigorate the series.
The Superman robots had found their way back. Into our comics and our hearts.
By spring 1999, there were still four main Superman titles: Action Comics, Superman, Man of Steel, and Adventures. They were interlocking, with a new issue of each dropping every week and advancing the weekly soap opera. This practice barred me from being a huge Super-fan for a while, for in my humble burg I could only find two out of the three titles at any given time.
A reboot of sorts was just around the corner. I'd read in Wizard magazine that a new wave of writers and artists were set to take over the books in the fall--names like Jeph Loeb and Joe Kelly and Geoff Johns, just like how Mark Schultz and Louise Simonson had done nearly a decade prior. The current creative teams were ramping up their storylines and bringing everything to a head, with a new galactic baddie named Dominus going to new and terrifying lengths to disconnect Superman from his friends, family, and even the rest of the JLA.
Dominus appealed to Superman's sense of responsibility, slowly warping it over time into a mix of vanity and paranoia. Recent events had made Superman more aware than ever that he could not, in fact, be everywhere at once. He fashioned a new wave of Superman robots to help him patrol the globe, while withdrawing from his Clark Kent persona entirely. Naturally, the Superman robots under his (and Dominus's) command were over stepping their boundaries are leaving world authorities on edge. Who knew the global police state would come wrapped in a red cape and blue spandex?
Man of Steel #88 sees Superman coming to his senses, at least to some degree, after Lois Lane and the cosmically-powered faerie-like creature Kismet appeared at the Fortress of Solitude to slap some sense into him. (Well, Lois throws a boot at him, but you get my point.) The world is on edge, preparing to declare war on Superman and his robot army, and it may take more than the usual fisticuffs to settle things.
It takes a kiss. A fairy tale, cosmically-endowed kiss.
Doug Mahnke provides the art in this issue, and his Superman robots are definitely the highlight. They aren't quite as humanoid as their Silver Age predecessors, instead sporting a raw mechanical look that just scream, "Break me!" His human figures are nice too, but he's years away from becoming the modern master we'd see in the more current Green Lantern and Justice League titles. Looking back at this issue, I was surprised to see how long Mahnke had really been in the game. He's one of DC's go-to guys, that's for sure.
Scripting this one is the aforementioned "Mr. Science" Mark Shultz. He seems to come from the Elliot S! Maggin school of Superman writing, using the character and his world to ask those vaunted "big questions" about society and the state of our world. However, this issue in particular has a personal touch to it. There's even a flashback to Clark playing spin-the-bottle with Lana Lang in his younger years. Love and sex conquer hate and death. The Kismet/Dominus stuff is almost a Jim Starlin-like cosmic opera, but the feels creep in a little more than in any issue of Warlock I remember.
And that cover. Awesome. When you're an adolescent like I was at the time, darker, edgier characters like Spawn are constantly stealing your attention (and allowance) away from classics like Supes. All it takes is an action packed, mechanical bone crunching cover like that to draw me back in.
I never managed to get every chapter of the Kismet/Dominus story, but I must've liked what I read because those issues seemed to have stuck with me while other ones from the time have faded from my memory, and my collection. The Loeb/Kelly run that was about to start was arguably the stronger material, but aside from President Luthor and Our Worlds at War, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what any of those issues were about.
But I guess that's what this rambling little blog is for!
Thanks for reading!
Twitter: @ChrisBComics
E-Mail: backissuechris@gmail.com
More heroes in peril: Gotham Animated
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