Written by Mark Millar
Illustrated by Francis Leinil YuDOUBLE-SIZED FINALE to the best new comic in years as the first volume of Superior draws to a close and the creators promise is the best fight-scene they have ever achieved on the printed page. It’s Superior versus Abraxas in the middle of New York and thousands of innocent people dying every time someone throws a punch. Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) has already snapped up the rights for this book meaning Millar has yet another movie franchise he can boast about. Buy this now while it’s still cheap. Plus: An exclusive 6-page lettered preview of the new Supercrooks series by Mark Millar and Leinil Yu, launching in January.
Superior, the six-issue mini, gets a seventh over-sized more expensive final issue to complete its tale. $4.99 for a comic book? What has this world come to!
Find out after the cut.
Mark Millar is, in so many words, one of those creators: you either love his work or you hate it. Millar tends to write works that are fairly polarizing overall, usually pigeon-holed to genres “action” and “Michael Bay.” If anything, Millar writes the Doctor Pepper Ten of comics (google the joke if you don’t get it) with the most recent examples of his work focusing on over the top machismo nonsense underneath layers of pop culture references and ultra violent gags. If nothing else, Kick-Ass and Nemesis both simply seem to exist as ways for Millar to team-up with high-profile artists and say, “Ok, what ridiculous nonsense can we get away with this time?”
But then, there is Superior. Superior has always been the odd man out with all of his recent work, because while it still suffers from the general over use of pop-culture references which will be dated in two years (tops) and certainly has its own helping of obscene ultra violence, it contains one key element that we haven’t seen in quite sometime: actual heart. Where other books might shout and cry and rage and smash faces and gouge eyeballs and swear bring the ruckus, Superior has a true story to tell; a story of bravery found in an unlikely source, of human capacity, and of textbook heroism. No, Superior is Millar once again actually trying, and not just eyeing the news and thinking about what might currently be edgy.
This element alone actually makes Superior quite an enjoyable little read. For five bucks, you get 30+ pages of a colossal showdown of gigantic proportions illustrated beautifully by Leinil Yu, capturing the great triumphs of bombastic superheroism and still infusing the book with a human spirit not often found in Millar’s writing anymore. Sure, there are certainly elements of his trademark goofball nature hidden in the gutters, with the villains doing things just to be villainous without any rhyme or reason, laughing all the way, but that is somewhat the point then, isn’t it? Superior is Golden Age ideas in a modern setting, combining Millar’s over obsessive cultural eye with everything that has ever made a superhero comic book great. If you took perhaps all the “classic” comic books to have ever been written, the books that inspire and show why we buy books weekly, and you threw them all in a blender, you’d get something like Superior.
Of course, with that there is still the elephant in the room: this is, without a doubt, Millar’s attempt at making a creator-owned version of All Star Superman. For some time now, all of Millar’s creator-owned work has been heavily reliant on pre-existing ideas with his spin on it: Wanted, where all the supervillains kill the superheroes, is a book chalk full of archetypes and parodies; Nemesis is just evil Batman; heck, Millar’s second run on Ultimate Avengers was basically just a zanier version of his first run on the Ultimates, which in turn was drawing its influence from his run on the Authority, which was just a hyper-politicized version of Warren Ellis’ original team. Millar recycles ideas as if its good for the environment, and he doesn’t pretend to be all too blatant about it — and Superior is all the things that makes Superman wonderful mixed together with Captain Marvel.
Continued belowSo if we’re being quite blatant about it, Millar is taking all the thematic ideas of All Star Superman (in which, to boil it down to one core essence, tells the true story of what makes a man a super-man while walking the path of the hero’s journey) and reappropriating it for this archetype character to tell a similar-but-not-as-good story. Millar is certainly writing a love-letter to the magic of comics from an escapist perspective, but its not exactly the most original thing he’s ever done. Truth be told, if you crossed out Superior on the cover and wrote Superman, I’m sure not too many people would notice the difference.
Then again, this in turn offers the final question: when presented with a comic clearly written with a lot of good intentions and heart is given to us that replays a lot of familiar scenes, builds up a hero in a way that is easily comparable to a certain other hero and features blockbuster and career-defining artwork, can we ultimately forgive it’s typical nature? When a comic’s soul is ostensibly to simply write a story about stories, using all the things the creators love about other books blended together for a “new” book, can we push past its obvious or simple nature and enjoy it at face value?
The answer? Yes. Yes, I think we can.
I think, to close with a more personal note, my final thoughts on Superior would be this: this is the first time in recent memory that I haven’t picked up a Millar comic and felt cheated. This is clearly Millar writing a film script and turning it into a comic book, but in a less maniacal fashion. In comparison with his other recent Millarworld offerings, Superior doesn’t ultimately feel like a book where Millar is simply using his comic celebrity status to see what he can get away with, but rather sitting down and, with Leinil Yu, crafting a story that plays off your comic nostalgia and your media familiarity to remind people that we used to read comics simply about heroes who wanted to make the world a better place — and this is coming from the guy who wrote Civil War.
Final Verdict: 8.0 – You did good, kid
