Comics Out January 22, 2008 (Superman Beyond)

Superman Beyond 3D #2. I continue to find the 3D tech really far more interesting than I have a right to. I kinda wish lots more comic books were in 3D. The art here is passable -- although some times the heads look pasted onto bodies rather than being really connected with them -- but I wonder what the 3D effects would look like with an artist I like more -- Bachalo for example, or even Ashley Wood. A lot of people have wondered how this story fits in with Final Crisis, and the answer is that it fits in exactly like it should in a way -- it is a spin-off book from the main title, and is rooted in what is clearly a spin off idea from the lines Morrison was thinking in Final Crisis. Thinking up Final Crisis I imagine him free associating a note along the lines of "Bleed between universes -- cosmic vampires? Monitor Vampires?" That did not have a place in the main book with Darkseid, so here we go -- essentially a two issue series about something that could have been the subject of the main book if he had wanted to do that, and it looks like someone, maybe Morrison, will get around to telling the main story at some point in the future -- this serves as a prologue to that plot, basically. If you missed getting this expect a reprint just before the Vampire Montor Crisis of 2011 or whatever. He is getting some of this from Gnosticism by the way -- the "angel" figures who are corrupted by their participation in the fallen material universe. That I do not mind, but I will admit to getting a little weary with Morrison's fascination with magic meta-narratives the characters talk about. He has done such a good job with the idea in the past -- it reached an apotheosis in All Star Superman 10 I think -- that I wonder what it is going to take to give it a rest. Is he still trying to outdo himself on the topic? Because if he is, I think he is failing, and if he is not, isn't he just repeating himself? The image on the final page was especially nice, and made me wonder if it was a rejected final page of All Star Superman, which ends with an icon on a similar theme. I also loved the All Star Superman again -- "Sounds like a challenge to me" and "Superman Can." That seems to me how the character would really be. I also was really impressed by the idea that the Nazi Superman is not a bad guy, straightforwardly evil, but that he is a sad man adopted by a world he did not chose, trying to cope with "A Utopia built on human suffering. Mine is not any world you know."

Oh, and the big reveal that the Monitor Vampire was Dax Novu (was that a big reveal?) -- I have no idea who that is.