Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman #590-92: "Don't Cry for Me, Bialya" / "Strange Behavior"

"Don't Cry for Me, Bialya" / "Strange Behavior"

The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #590 & 592 (May & July 2001)

Writer: Joe Casey
Pencils: Derec Aucoin and Mike Wieringo
Inks: Jose Marzan, Jr.
Letters: Bill Oakley
Assistant Ed.: Tom Palmer, Jr.
Editor: Eddie Berganza 

In the lull before the next big Super titles crossover event (Our Worlds at War, coming to you here next week!), we finally get Joe Casey doing his own thing, with two issues where he's not wrapping up someone else's ongoing story, or tying into a crossover. So maybe here we can get a glimpse of what makes Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman Joe Casey's. (I skipped issue #591 because it wasn't by Joe Casey; in June 2001, there was a crossover between all four Super titles called Infestation, but most of its issues were by Marv Wolfman instead of those titles' regular writers.)

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #590
(art by Derec Aucoin & Jose Marzan, Jr.)

The two issues are very different, so I'll tackle them separately. The first issue, "Don't Cry for Me, Bialya" (#590), deals with some of the fall-out from Lex Luthor's election to the presidency, which happened shortly before Joe Casey came along. Luthor asks Superman to go into Bialya (one of the DC universe's all-purpose fictional Mideastern countries) and liberate a captive American journalist. I'm not particularly into stories that try to insert Superman into realistic geopolitics, because I think they reveal some unavoidable problems with the conceit of Superman as a character. Here, Superman justifies his actions as not being political and not at Luthor's whim; he tells Luthor, "Finch is in Bialya as a journalist, correct? [...] His gifts are meant to benefit the world... as are mine," and he tells the dictator of Bialya, "I am not here representing any nation or political ideology. Regardless of your issues with the U.S., I am taking back an individual whose human rights are clearly being violated..."

But if Superman cares about the human rights of people in Bialya, why does he spend most of his time flying around Metropolis, beating up street thieves? Why isn't he liberating all the unjustly held prisoners of Bialya, not just the American one? If you follow this chain of reasoning to its logical endpoint, of course, you'd end up with a very different Superman comic, and one that wouldn't be tenable as an ongoing adventure series. (Miracleman, The Authority, and Red Son all explore these kind of issues.) But that's why I think Superman comics are better off avoiding these issues altogether, rather than raising ones they can't really ever resolve.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #590
(art by Derec Aucoin & Jose Marzan, Jr.)

But perhaps all that is beside the point, because "Don't Cry for Me, Bialya" is a really well done comic book. It opens with Superman going to talk to Luthor, and after three pages, transitions to Superman's mission to Bialya. But while this mission unfolds, the left margin of the comic continues to depict Superman's conversation with Luthor through color-coded image-less dialogue. It's one of those neat things that it's hard for me to imagine another medium doing as well (film/tv can overlay a conversation, but it would be confusing for there to also be a conversation beneath the overlay), and the two sides of the story give each other weight. We know how important Superman's actions in Bialya are because we read his deliberations over it, and we know that those deliberations matter because we see what actions he takes as a result. It also lets the comic pack more information/events in than it would be able to if it handled these events in chronological order.

The end of the story clearly has Superman rethinking his relationship with President Luthor, and the kind of violence he carried out on Luthor's behalf. I assume (I hope) that this will continue to be an issue Casey explore going forward, and that it plays into the transformation that I know the comic will eventually undergo.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #592
(art by Mike Wieringo & Jose Marzan, Jr.)

The second issue, "Strange Behavior" (#592), is kind of weird. There's a storm in Metropolis on a night where Jimmy Olsen is playing a new RPG with his buddies on a Brainiac 13-enhanced gaming console. Jimmy get sucked into the game, but then Superman shows up and resets the console and Jimmy is fine. I don't like people-trapped-in-computer-game stories because the tension always feels forced, but this one didn't even try to create tension; there was a lot of set-up, and the problem was resolved almost as quickly as it was created. Meanwhile, Superman briefly encounters "Strange Visitor," a superhero with electrical powers I guess he met sometime before, but then she vanishes. This is clearly set-up for something to come, but not interesting on its own.

I hope that going forward, this comic is more like #590 than 592. I prefer an interesting standalone drawing on the ongoing background story than a flimsy tale that only seems to exist to foreshadow the ongoing background story.

Incidentally, #592 is the first issue where the lettercol discusses an issue I have actually read. All four letters about #588 reprinted here focus on the use of the triangle numbering system; there are no letters about the issue's actual content!

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