Hugo Awards 2026: Ballots for Dramatic Presentation and Graphic Story

Finally, here come my rankings for the "visual" Hugo categories, namely, the two Dramatic Presentation categories, and then Best Graphic Story or Comic. (Is it still called that? I feel like they changed the name.) Unlike most people I know, I am very good at keeping up with reading and very bad at keeping up with tv. So while I finished my Hugo reading three or four days before the deadline, and even had some time for non-Hugo reading throughout, I had to watch two movies and four episodes of tv during my last week, and I finished my last film at midnight the day before votes were due at noon.

(Get yourself a wife who, when you sleep until 11am, wakes you up and checks that you remembered to submit your Hugo ballot on time!) 

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Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

[UNRANKED] The Wheel of Time 3x04: "The Road to the Spear", written by Rafe Lee Judkins, directed by Thomas Napper

 

Back in 2022, I watched a previous episode of this show when it was a finalist, and I accidentally watched the wrong one first, so I have been bored by this show twice already. I certainly wasn't about to subject myself to it a third time.

 

5. Murderbot 1x10: "The Perimeter", written by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, directed by Paul Weitz 

Say what you will about The Murderbot Diaries, and I have, but the thing the books undoubtedly have going for them is the cynical narration, from a character who largely wants nothing to do with other people and their feelings. Strip that out, and you mostly get a bunch of schmaltz.

4. Murderbot 1x09: "All Systems Red", written by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, directed by Roseanne Liang

 

If an episode of a serialized show is a Hugo finalist, I typically don't watch the other episodes. You either wow me on your own, or you do not. I had a slight advantage coming into "All Systems Red," though, because I have read the first Murderbot book on which the first season is based. I thought this was decent but a bit broad; I was not very convinced by the actors playing all the humans. Some good jokes, but the occasionally sitcomesque tone was jarring. 

 

3. Plur1bus 1x01: "We Is Us", written and directed by Vince Gilligan

 

This was a very well done first episode of a show with an interesting premise that I will probably never watch any more of. Works on its own in the sense that you can understand it just fine; doesn't work on its own in that it's all setting up interesting ideas, so what will be done with these interesting ideas is still to come. I thought the actress playing the main character was very good and there was some striking imagery. I wish a friend hadn't told me the premise at some point, because I think it would have been interesting to work it out while watching it. Much more involving than Murderbot.

 

2. Severance 2x10: "Cold Harbor", written by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Stiller

 

This feels less like a nomination for this specific episode of Severance and more a nomination for the second season as a whole... and indeed, two years ago, the first season as a whole was a finalist. I don't know why that didn't happen again this year. I enjoyed the second season a lot, if not quite as much as the first—I love the premise and the leads, and there's lots of great character work and good twists, but my feeling is that some of the decisions made by the antagonists would fall apart under scrutiny. (Why can they hire whole marching bands but not, like, pay one guy to watch where Mark S. goes?) Still, I enjoyed the season finale a lot, which delves into some of the ethical implications of severance in a really interesting way... but the season ends on a cliffhanger, just like the last one did, so the pleasures of resolution are continually deferred, and that's a thing I just hate about contemporary television. Thus, even though I feel like this was probably better than Doctor Who in most senses, I am penalizing it.

 

(Interesting to note that three of the five tv shows are Apple ones. Are they the only interesting streaming service left at this point?) 

 

1. Doctor Who 2x05: "The Story & the Engine", written by Inua Ellams, directed by Makalla McPherson

 

To me, the best episode of the second season of the largely mediocre Disney Plus Doctor Who revival was "Lux," where the Doctor and Belinda battle an evil cartoon. But this one, set almost entirely within a Nigerian barber's shop, about the power of stories, was probably second best. Not perfect, but bubbling over with ideas, and something you couldn't have done with any other Doctor. Not Doctor Who at its greatest, but largely more interesting to me than the stuff I've ranked below it.

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Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

6. Frankenstein, directed and written by Guillermo del Toro

 

Look, maybe this is unfair, but I have more opinions about Frankenstein than probably most anyone you know, and this adaptation has largely uninteresting takes on a novel that I find intensely interesting. I was not a fan of reducing it all to Freudian family melodrama, especially its very unearned ending. I liked the earlier parts of the film better; the introduction of (essentially) Victorian Elon Musk was an interesting idea (though it doesn't really go anywhere in the end), and the bit where jaunty exciting music played while Victor was cutting up corpses was probably the best part of the entire film. If it had all been that clever and that striking, I would have ranked it much higher. Too many fight scenes; the gruesome violence of those got old fast.

 

(I could be wrong, but I think this is the first Frankenstein movie I have ever seen! Seems weird that that could be true after forty years, but I am pretty sure it is.) 

 

5. KPop Demon Hunters; directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans; written by Danya Jimenez, Hannah McMechan, Maggie Kang, and Chris Appelhans

This movie has been watched in my household many times since it came out last summer, and the music has been played many times more. I am very familiar with all the music videos. But I had actually never seen the movie all the way through until I was forced to when it was announced as a Hugo finalist. It was cute enough. Not deep, but I did really like "What It Sounds Like," which I think is beautiful stuff. If it had only all been that good!

4. Sinners, directed and written by Ryan Coogler

I thought this was a well done vampire story with good period details. Surprisingly funny, which I had not expected from the somewhat earnest discourse around it. ("Maybe she ain't white" made me rewind to make sure I heard it right!) Some great moments overall, just not totally my kind of thing, so not as interesting to me as Andor but certainly more interesting than Demon Hunters. Anyway, anything from this point up strikes me as a totally worthy winner.

3. Andor Season Two, created by Tony Gilroy

In 2023, two episodes of Andor season one were finalists in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), which didn't really work, as Andor is one of those shows where the whole season is one big story. Thankfully, this year, the entire season was a finalist in Long Form. I know everyone loves Andor, but having seen a whole season of it now, I find it a very frustrating show. I think it's very well shot, it has lots of great, interesting characters (bar, weirdly, Andor himself), and every now and again there's a beautiful moment that just hits it out of the park: Mon Mothma dancing at her daughter's funeral, Mon Mothma's speech, the Ghorman massacre, Kleya Marki's infiltration of the hospital. But this series is structured as four three-episode stories, and it was hard for me to shake the feeling that every single one of these could have been cut down to two episodes and the show wouldn't have lost a thing. Its cardinal sin is that too often it's just boring! So I am ranking it above KPop Demon Hunters (clearly it is doing interesting things) but below Superman (which was never boring).

2. Superman, directed and written by James Gunn

I wanted to see this last summer (it came out on my birthday, even!), but didn't mange to get around to it. Now, having finally seen it, I would say it's good but not great. Clearly conceived as an anti–Man of Steel (every time the film shows massive devastation, it carefully demonstrates both that the area has been evacuated and that Superman scoops up innocent bystanders), it leans into a lot of stuff I like about the character, and obviously was made by someone who—like me—thinks of the Donner movies and the comics of the 1980s and '90s as the "default" version of the DC universe. Given I recently reread all the JLI comics, I of course appreciated the Guy Gardner stuff, though I wish Metamorpho's personality was more like that iteration; as someone from Cincinnati, I of course appreciated the Hall of Justice. But I feel like it never quite grabbed me; I found the emotional conflict supposedly at the heart of the film kind of distant and unclear. But anyway, obviously more to my taste than Andor, but not as interesting to me as Mickey 17.

1. Mickey 17, directed and written by Bong Joon Ho

This movie is about a guy who can't die—or rather, can die as many times as his masters need him to do so—sent into space as expendable support on a colonization mission. The boss of the mission is a sort of combined Donald Trump/Elon Musk figure; the movie as a whole uses these ideas of immortality to think about who we consider expendable in lots of different concepts, but especially imperialism and capitalism. Lots of weird tonal shifts, which I always like, and good, if dark, jokes.

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Best Graphic Story or Comic

6. A Girl and Her Fed, scripts by K. B. Spangler, art by Ale Presser

 

This is a webcomic that has been running since 2006; its third act concluded in 2025. (It's apparently not concluded yet, but the author's blog indicates Act 4 won't begin for a couple years.) Under the way the Hugo Awards handle serial narratives, that means the entire comic is eligible for the Hugo Awards as a unit. However, only the 2025 strips, which run sixty pages, are included in the Hugo voter packet. On the other hand, reading the comic since the beginning would mean reading over two thousand strips... and the art started out quite terrible! So I decided to read the comic from the beginning of Act 3, which started in 2020, and is a more manageable 469 pages, though I did skim some of the very early strips for context.

 

Anyway, that means it's not totally the comic's fault I was often lost, but there are a lot of characters with a lot of history to keep track of here. That I didn't mind too much... what I did mind is that the actual stakes of the act where amorphous and unclear. I don't know if that would have been better if I'd read the whole thing or what; there's apparently a big time gap between acts 2 and 3, and from context, I think a lot of what confused me was new to Act 3. The basic thing here is that 1) ghosts are real, 2) seeing them has something to do with a brain chip (but I wasn't sure what; I think the chip lets you see ghosts but I also think there were unchipped characters who could see ghosts?), 3) the government is going to give everyone brain chips in order to connect minds to create collective empathy (the two leads are the president and first lady), 4) but this means everyone will also know about ghosts, causing a national freakout, so 5) they must figure out how to get the one without the other, and 6) contend with the Catholic Church, which has its own opinions on what people know about the afterlife. What I didn't get is why the president and first lady were so keen to give everyone brain chips. If they couldn't figure out a way to give people collective empathy without giving everyone ghost knowledge, then why not... just hold off? All the characters acted like there was a deadline of when the "Middle Bridge Project" was due to launch, but surely the launch date was chosen by the characters? It was also very unclear to me what the Catholic Church was actually trying to do. Like, they wanted to be in on it in some way... but what were they actually trying to do and how was it bad? I never really knew.

 

So with the stakes so unclear, I was pretty much doomed to not enjoy this.

 

Back in the 2000s, I was a voracious consumer of webcomics, and this struck me as "quirky" in a way very much typical of the era. It would have fit very well among the kind of stuff I read back then! It reads like a weird throwback in the 2020s, however.

 

(The good thing that came out of me reading this is that it spurred me to get the same creators' graphic novel Sidequested out of the library for my seven-year-old, and they loved it so much they read it three times in one week and then asked me to read it too.)

 

5. The Power Fantasy, Volume One: The Superpowers, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Caspar Wijngaard

 

Kieron Gillen is one of those writers who gets on the ballot no matter what he writes at this point: since I started voting in the Hugo Awards, he has been a finalist every year since 2020 except for 2024. Gillen is a good writer... but surely not that good. The Power Fantasy is a case in point. I like to flippantly refer to him as "a poor man's Brian K. Vaughan," but Power Fantasy is actually a poor man's Alan Moore or Warren Ellis: in its depiction "what would it really be like for there to be people with superpowers on Earth?", it seems to do little we didn't see already in Miracleman or The Authority. (The super-fetus is very clearly Miracleman-derived!) It even seems to be derivative of Gillen's own work; the squabbling group of superpowered humans with complex histories is right out of The Wicked + The Divine. Of course, one of the most obnoxious things a critic can do is write something off by telling you it's like some other thing they've already read... but I found this offered little original within the medium or genre, and it definitely felt like one of those things that thinks it's being original.

 

But at least I (mostly) understood what was going on, so I ranked it above A Girl and Her Fed. Hopefully this series doesn't become a perennial finalist in this category like Gillen's Once & Future was.

 

4. The Space Cat, script by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford

As I said in my full review, I thought this was fun but slight. I don't know that it feels particularly award-worthy... but at least it wasn't derivative, so I ranked it above The Power Fantasy.

3. Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon; script by Kelly Thompson; art by Hayden Sherman, Mattia De Iulis, et al.

As noted in my full review linked above, I found this solid, well-done superhero comics... but nothing transcendent despite some of the hype it has received. Similarly, I thought Space Cat was a solid, well-done example of its genre. So they pretty much rank equally to me; I broke the tie because I'm just more into the genre that Absolute Wonder Woman belongs to than I am the genre that Space Cat belongs to.

2. A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel: Book One of Earthsea by Fred Fordham

In the oddball Hugo category that is "Best Graphic Story," one common type of finalist over the last five years is the graphic novel adaptation of an acclaimed prose work: see 2021's Parable of the Sower (which won) or 2023's Dune (though that's technically the comic of the movie of the book!) or 2024's The Three-Body Problem. I feel like the appearance of these kinds of finalists on the ballot say more about 1) the original prose work, and 2) the limited graphic novel reading of the Hugo electorate than anything else. That said, Fred Fordham's adaptation of the first Earthsea novel is clearly the best of these adaptations to ever appear on the ballot. Fordham's art is beautiful, and overall, this reads as a comic in a way that, say, Parable of the Sower did not, with the images doing the storytelling and very effective use of panelling in the storytelling. The magic still manages to feel magical, even though it's been moved out of Le Guin's beautiful prose into (arguably) the more straightforward visual medium. I did think some episodes became a little too abbreviated to follow, but overall this was very effective. (It's not totally fair to the book, though, but I do think my reading experience was diminished by the PDF provided in the voter packet rendering each two-page spread as a single page, which made the pages kind of small when read on my tablet.)

1. The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio

If you read my review linked above, you will see that I was highly skeptical about 1) a picture book being a finalist in this category, which has up to now entirely been comics (despite picture books technically qualifying), and 2) it being a picture book not created by people who normally do picture books (if you are a parent, you will know there is normally nothing worse). But this turned out not only to be pretty good, but to be the strongest finalist this year! I don't know that I would have thought so in a different year (I would have ranked it third in 2025 or 2024, for example), but this year the category was weak, and I think Invisible Parade clearly had the best storytelling of everything I read from a graphic standpoint: not in the quality of the images qua images, but in the way the images tell the story from page to page.

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Overall Thoughts

I think that serialized streaming shows continue to be a point of difficulty for the Hugo Awards. Normally I'm loathe to propose adding categories, but I think Dramatic Presentation should be rejigged into three . I don't know what to call them, but duration-wise, they would be something like:

• <60 mins.: for single episodes of tv shows (or other short things; like Dirty Computer from a few years ago); hopefully the nominators would concentrate on things that actually do work on their own
• 60-180 mins.: for films
• >180 mins.: for entire seasons of streaming television programs; hopefully the nominators would concentrate on things that need their entireties to work, like Andor, Murderbot, and Severance

Right now, it's dumb that I have to judge "Cold Harbor" on its own when it clearly doesn't work on its own, but it's equally dumb that I'm comparing twelve hours of Andor to two hours of Mickey 17.

Overall, I thought both Dramatic Presentation categories just fine. I didn't love most of Short Form, but I appreciate that much of it is widely loved, so the category is presumably doing what it's meant to; as always, I am grateful to Long Form for introducing me to a couple interesting movies I probably never would have gotten around to otherwise (this year: Sinners and Mickey 17).

Best Graphic Story is the usual hodgepodge this year, but to be honest, it's probably been worse. A Girl and Her Fed was pretty bleh, but even that, I can appreciate the scale of the achievement. I suspect this category is still not really finding and rewarding the best of sf&f comics, but I also suspect it never will.

DC Animated Universe Hybrid Chronological Viewing Order

My seven-year-old is a fiend for DC Comics, and it's been making me nostalgic for the way I was introduced to a lot of DC characters, the DC Animated Universe. So I started thinking about trying to get them to watch it with me... which of course meant I wanted to work out a proper order!

Lots of people have made timelines, of course, but the problem with timelines is that there were two series set in the future compared to the others, but watching those at the end doesn't make sense; the assumption of the series is that when Terry from Batman Beyond pops up in Justice League or Static Shock, you know who the character is because you've already seen Batman Beyond. I suppose one could watch in a strict broadcast order, then, but that seemed to have its own downsides; I wanted something that captured more of a chronological flow, where you were moving back and forth between shows that happened simultaneously instead of watching in big chunks as seasons aired.

So here's my attempt:

The first tab shows the broad-strokes organization; the second gives you an episode-by-episode breakdown. Similarly, I'll give a broad-stroke explanation here, and then drill down into the details.

Broad-Strokes Organization 

The episodes of Batman: The Animated Series are notoriously confusingly ordered, either as produced or as broadcast. I used this Reddit thread as a guide to a totally new order, with some small tweaks based on the comments. I timed Superman: The Animated Series relative to it and The New Batman Adventures, such that the two crossovers between the two characters ("World's Finest" and "The Demon Reborn") lined up correctly. 

Once both shows come to an end, they are replaced by Batman Beyond, Justice League (later Justice League Unlimited), and Static Shock, so at the same time you are following the Justice League and Static in the present, you are following the new Batman in the future; thus when he pops up in both shows, you know who he is. Finally, there's the other DCAU future-set show, the Batman Beyond spin-off The Zeta Project; I timed this to start when Zeta first appears on Batman Beyond and wrap up around the same time JLU ends.

There are obviously some times when there are big gaps between when things aired: for example, B:TAS finished airing Nov. 1994, while New Batman Adventures didn't start until Sept. 1997. Similarly, there was a big gap between when NBA and S:TAS ended (Jan. 1999 and Feb. 2000, respectively) and when Justice League started (Nov. 2001), where just Batman Beyond and Static Shock aired. But in all of these cases, I just had things carry through as continuously as I could.

Detailed Organization

Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures 

I used Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures as the organizing spine of the first half of the timeline. I added in the Batman-adjacent DCAU movies based on the Reddit thread above:

• Mask of the Phantasm between "Prophecy of Doom" and "Night of the Ninja"
• SubZero between B:TAS and NBA
• Mystery of the Batwoman after "Sins of the Father"

This gave me 105 installments of Batman, which I numbered sequentially. (I did accidentally leave out "Two-Face, Part II," so it got added in as 15.50. I hope I didn't miss out anything else!)

Justice League and Justice League Unlimited

The two Justice League–focused shows ran the longest of everything that came after B:TAS and NBA, so I used them as the organizing spine of what was left. The regular stories were thus numbered 106 to 167 on my list. Then, at the end we got:

• 168. Justice League vs. the Fatal Five: released years later, supposedly in continuity with the DCAU, after the end of JLU
• 169. "Epilogue": the season two finale of JLU, but entirely set in the future timeline of Batman Beyond and designed to function as a coda to the whole DCAU

There's also a Batman & Harley Quinn movie that takes place between seasons of JLU, so I numbered it 154.50. 

Superman: The Animated Series

This began during the gap between B:TAS and NBA, and continued in parallel with NBA. S:TAS and NBA crossed over in the S:TAS story "World's Finest," which is set before "Sins of the Father" (80.00), the first episode of NBA. I thus numbered "World's Finest" as 80.50. I decided that prior to that, I'd like it if the shows just pretty much alternated, so I numbered all the preceding stories of S:TAS backwards from there: the one immediately before "World's Finest" ("Father's Day") would be 79.50, the one before that ("Ghost in the Machine") 78.50, and so on. Working backwards, this gets you to the series premiere, "The Last Son of Krypton," as 56.50, so basically, fifty-six B:TAS stories in, you begin alternating the two shows up until you get to the crossover.

The next key story was "The Demon Reborn," which is another crossover with NBA. This story sees Batman and Superman teaming up, and so many place it simultaneously with the NBA episode "Girls' Night Out" (97.00), where Superman and Batman are away on a mission. So I numbered "The Demon Reborn" as 97.50. In between "World's Finest" and "The Demon Reborn," I just distributed stories evenly, which came out to intervals of 0.89. So mostly alternating between NBA and S:TAS, but sometimes you'd get two S:TAS stories between stories of NBA.

That left just one S:TAS episode, the series finale "Legacy." I decided to make both NBA and S:TAS wrap up at about the same time, and thus numbered it 104.50, placing it before the last episode of NBA, "Mad Love" (105.00). This creates a decent gap between the last two S:TAS episodes, but that actually reflects how they were broadcast, months apart.

Static Shock

Static Shock started out totally standalone, but ended up crossing over with the wider DCAU a few times. The first of these is "The Big Leagues," a crossover with NBA, which probably goes after the end of that show according to the fine folks on Reddit.

There are then two Justice League crossovers, "A League of Their Own" and "Fallen Heroes." These both need to go before the Justice League episode "Starcrossed" (130.00), before the league was reorganized as the Justice League Unlimited. So I numbered "Fallen Heroes" as 129.50.

I then decided that I'd like Static Shock to pretty much just start when S:TAS came to an end, so that there wouldn't be a point after the end of S:TAS before the debuts of the other shows where you were only watching NBA. Thus I numbered its first episode, "Shock to the System" as 98.50, picking up right off from S:TAS's "The Demon Reborn" at 97.50.

I then distributed the Static Shock stories between those two episodes evenly, which meant they occurred at intervals of 0.76. So between NBA stories (and later, Justice League stories), you'd typically have one or two episodes of Static Shock. Doing this gave "The Big Leagues" a placement of 108.33, so after the NBA finale (105.00), which was right, and "A League of Their Own" a placement of 120.43, so again, in the right spot.

After Static Shock came to an end, the character appeared in the JLU story "The Once and Future Thing" (142.00). So I set the last episode of Static Shock ("Power Outage") as 141.50, and distributed all the episodes between "Fallen Heroes" and "Power Outage" evenly at intervals of 1.33.

Batman Beyond

In terms of broadcast sequence, Batman Beyond picked right up from the end of NBA, so I set its first episode, "Rebirth," shortly after NBA's final episode (105.00) at 106.50. Batman Beyond had forty-nine stories, plus a movie, Return of the Joker. There is a Static Shock episode where he travels to the future and meets the future Batman, "Future Shock" (127.23). The DCAU wiki suggests that Return of the Joker must take place before "Future Shock," so I numbered Return of the Joker as 126.85.

That meant I simply distributed all Batman Beyond stories evenly between those two points, at intervals of 0.42. So you are watching quite a lot of Batman Beyond in between episodes of the Justice League and Static Shock.

The Zeta Project

The last thing to place was the other DCAU future-set show, The Zeta Project. Zeta first appeared in the Batman Beyond episode "Zeta" (117.30). There actually was a decent-sized broadcast gap between Zeta's first appearance in Batman Beyond and their own show debuting, but I decided it was more satisfying to pick up right away, and thus set the first episode of Zeta Project ("The Accomplice") at 117.51. Zeta Project crossed over with Batman Beyond again in the episode "Shadows," which the DCAU wiki says occurs after the Batman Beyond episode "Countdown" (126.44), so I set "Shadows" as 126.65. I then distributed the intervening episodes at even intervals of 1.31. 

Lastly, I decided it would make sense to wrap up Zeta Project before the future-set episode of JLU, "Epilogue" (169.00), so I set its series finale ("The Wrong Morph") to 167.50. I then distributed the episodes in between "Shadows" and "The Wrong Morph" evenly at intervals of 2.40.

Epilogue 

I think that's everything! In practice, this gets you the following periods:

1. fifty-six sequential stories from Batman: The Animated Series
2. alternating stories from Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series
3. (roughly) alternating stories from New Batman Adventures and Superman: The Animated Series
4. (roughly) alternating stories from New Batman Adventures and Static Shock
5. lots of Batman Beyond, with interspersed stories from Static Shock and Justice League
6. lots of Batman Beyond, with interspersed stories from Static Shock and Justice League and the occasional episode of Zeta Project (four shows at once!)
7. (roughly) alternating stories from Static Shock and Justice League Unlimited, with occasional episodes of Zeta Project
8. Justice League Unlimited, with occasional episodes of Zeta Project

The caveat here is, of course, I haven't watched it this way! And it's been a long time since I've watched any of this; if you have any advice or corrections, I'd love to hear them.

Review: Superman vs. Wonder Woman by Gerry Conway, José Luis García-López, and Dan Adkins

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 1977
Acquired and read: December 2020

Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two

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Writer: Gerry Conway

Artists: Jose Luis Garcia Lopez and Dan Adkins

Letterer: Gaspar Saladino

Colorist: Jerry Serpe

 

My journey through the comics of Earth-Two is always revealing things I missed and have to go back for; when looking up the history of Baron Blitzkrieg while reading All-Star Squadron, I discovered that he was the villain of issue #C-54 of All-New Collectors' Edition in 1977, a giant "tabloid-size" comic set during World War Two. I decided I would go back and read it before returning to WWII in The Young All-Stars, but quickly realized that doing so would be prohibitively expensive: the original issue goes for $50+ on-line, and while it was reprinted in Adventures of Superman: José Luis García-López, Volume 1, that collection is out of print and goes for $200! But in a total coincidence, right at the moment I had given up reading the story, DC announced a facsimile-sized reprint, and in another coincidence, that reprint was released the month I was due to start reading The Young All-Stars!

 

That dude is my favorite.

 

The story is set in June 1942, and involves Superman and Wonder Woman independently discovering the existence of the Manhattan Project, as well as an effort by the Axis powers to steal its secrets. Though both don't want the bomb in Nazi hands, Wonder Woman doesn't want it in any human hands, while Superman has greater faith in America to do the right thing, and in the end, the two come to blows over it all-- though of course, they set their differences aside to punch some Nazis.

 

Wonder Woman!

The story, to be honest, is not the point. The point of this is to see Superman and Wonder Woman battling rendered in the beautiful art of José Luis García-López at an enormous size. In this regard, the book utterly delivers. Superman fights robot planes; Wonder Woman throws cars at Nazis; Diana Prince sneaks into military file rooms; Superman and Wonder Woman fight each other in Chicago and then on the moon. It all looks great.

 

You might notice a bias toward cool Wonder Woman moments in my scans-- that's because the story itself seems to be biased toward Wonder Woman over Superman, perhaps because Conway was at the time a regular writer of Wonder Woman?

Perhaps for this reason, the book fudges some Earth-Two details. Superman and Wonder Woman are drawn how their Earth-One versions looked in the 1970s, not how their Earth-Two versions looked in the 1940s. But given García-López created the style guide all DC merchandise was beholden to in the 1980s, why would you have him draw anything other than these characters' most iconic forms? The book also has things like Clark Kent working for Perry White at the Daily Planet, not-- as would be the case on Earth-Two-- him working for George Taylor at the Daily Star. On the other hand, it features Earth-Two villain Baron Blitzkrieg, and even includes a footnote referencing the Earth-Two-set World's Finest vol. 1 #246 for those who want to know his origin. So I think writer Gerry Conway is trying to have his Earth-Two cake and eat it too; use the iconic Earth-One versions of the characters because this is a story with broad appeal, but slip in some Earth-Two references for the dedicated comics nerds who worry about how such a story can exist in continuity. (Conway was at the time the writer of the adventures of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman in her self-titled comic and in World's Finest.) As far as weird continuity details go, we also learn that the moon of Earth-Two is home to the ruins of an extinct civilization, one that destroyed itself with the atomic bomb. Did any other comics writers pick up that weird nugget?

Roy Thomas would also go on to use Sumo in the Commander Steel storyline in All-Star Squadron.

While the story doesn't need to be very good, it actually has some nice touches that elevate it. It's framed as a series of declassified reports, the moral conflict is a good one, the appearance by Albert Einstein is fun, the way Diana Prince infiltrates military records is a great sequences, and the ending has a sharp piece of irony with President Roosevelt declaring to both superheroes, "As long as I am president... America will never use the bomb to kill. Never." Ouch. I understand that Roy Thomas depicted a post-Crisis version of these events in the Young All-Stars storyline Atom and Evil (as of this writing, I am on YA-S #14, and Atom and Evil begins in issue #21), but I would have liked to have seen him weave the pre-Crisis version of All-Star Squadron into these events, which I'm sure was his long-term plan.

 

The idea that Conway and his artists are reconstructing a story from declassified documents doesn't make a ton of sense, but it is cute.

Anyway, if you are at all interested in this story, this oversized reprint is a gorgeous way to experience it, and I highly recommend it. (Unfortunately, my scans here can't do justice to the best of its art, because its full-page panels are too big for my scanner!)

This post is the fourteenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment is a supplement discussing the Earth-Two Wonder Woman comics. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
    

Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman: Final Post and Reflection

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #594
(art by Mike Wieringo & Lary Stucker)

What makes a good run?

This is the question I'm trying to answer, but I think it requires us to step back and ask another question first: What makes a run?

People always talk about "runs" in comics, but I think we're talking about a couple different things.

1. When a single creator or creative team defines a character or title from beginning to end. Good examples of this would be Neil Gaiman on The Sandman, Matt Wagner/Steven T. Seagle and Guy Davis on Sandman Mystery Theatre, James Robinson and Tony Harris/Peter Snjejbjerg on Starman, Roy Thomas on All-Star Squadron, Walter Simonson on Orion. Though most of those titles had existences outside of those creators, there are versions of those titles entirely defined by those creators. There was a Sandman vol. 1 and a Sandman before Neil Gaiman, but every issue of Sandman vol. 2 was written by him. The character of Orion existed before Walter Simonson, but the comic book called Orion was primarily his work as writer and artist. 

2. When a creator or creative team takes over a character or title, but that character/title extends beyond that creator. Here I'm thinking things like Geoff Johns's The Flash vol. 2 #164-225, George Pérez's Wonder Woman vol. 2 #1-62, Paul Cornell's Action Comics vol. 1 #890-904, Judd Winick's Green Arrow vol. 3 #26-75/Green Arrow and Black Canary #1-14. There were 163 issues of The Flash vol. 2 before Geoff Johns and another 22 after him; Geoff Johns was just there for a time.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #596
(art by Mike Wieringo & Jose Marzan, Jr.)

But you can identify another way of looking at a "run":

A. The telling of a discrete story with a beginning, middle, and end. Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos's Alias, for example.

B. When a writer is just in charge of a character/title for a while. There's no "climax" to the run-- it's just a series of stories. Mark Waid's The Brave and the Bold, or Gail Simone's Birds of Prey. This doesn't mean that there are no arc elements, just that there's not One Big Story being told.

Of course, there's certainly a midpoint between type A and type B. Cameron Stewart and Brendan Fletcher's Batgirl vol. 4 #35-52 is a good example of this, as it (as I recall) tells three discrete stories, but each one leads into the next. Or there's the Mark Waid and Barry Kitson run on Legion of Super-Heroes, which tells two over-arching stories.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #600
(art by Mike Wieringo & Jose Marzan, Jr.)

So these two typologies overlap. I could draw you a chart with four quadrants if I wanted, but I'll just make a list of examples:

• 1A. Single Title, Single Story: Gaiman's Sandman; Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos's Alias; Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta's The Vision
• 2A. Partial Title, Single Story: Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee's Superman; Don McGregor and P. Craig Russell's Killraven
• 1B. Single Title, No Overarch: Matt Wagner's Sandman Mystery Theatre; Paul Cornell's Captain Britain and MI13
• 2B. Partial Title, No Overarch: Paul Cornell's Action Comics; Gail Simone's Birds of Prey; G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel; Walter Simonson's Thor

Okay, why do I bring all this up? Because I think comic fans and comic critics tend to prioritize type-1 runs and type-A runs. Obviously a type-1A is the best: a single creative vision, no extraneous stuff you have to disregard (imagine if there was a Sandman vol. 2 #76 by John Ostrander!), a a beginning, middle, and an end. It's hugely satisfying to read and discuss-- comics at its best. Type-2A and -1B runs aren't quite as good, but they're still very good. You either get a complete creative vision or a complete story.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #602
(art by Pete Woods & Jose Marzan, Jr.)

In the era of the collected edition, the type-1A is king. You can get a nice set of Sandman volumes, an Alias Omnibus, and a complete Vision hardcover. 2A doesn't do too badly. Azzarello and Lee's Superman fit nicely into two trades. Both type-B variants fare less well. DC has fizzled out doing a run of SMT collected editions twice now; you can get all of Paul Cornell's Action Comics in trade, but I doubt there will ever be an omnibus.

But then type-2B runs languish at the bottom of what we appreciate. This is, perhaps, silly on the face of it. People love Simone's Birds of Prey and Wilson's Ms. Marvel. But I think it casts its effect on the way you read it. It's a little tough to get into Birds of Prey because these characters have some not-quite-explicated history. The whole run kind of fizzles out without a climax if you leave when Simone does. On the other hand, if you keep going, Tony Bedard takes over, and he maintains some stuff, but up-ends the status quo in other ways.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #610
(art by Derec Aucoin)

And Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman is probably more type-2B than most 2Bs! There's no one big story here; in fact, Casey's run was often in service to other people's stories. In the 35 issues of his run, eight were part of crossovers with other Super titles, not to mention that there were two other fill-ins, and one issue wrapped up the previous writer's story arc. That's almost a third! What was left was not telling one big story; the closest the run got to that was #612-16, just five issues. 

And Adventures of Superman had a long history before and after Casey wrote it. (His run was #588-623; Adventures of Superman ran from #424 to 649, plus before and after that, it was just called Superman vol. 1, which ran from #1 to 423 and 650 to 714. He's just a drop in the bucket!) His run begins by trying up someone else's, as I said, and the early parts of the run in particular are very dependent on you knowing what Superman had been up to in Action Comics, Superman, and The Man of Steel. He's happily married to Lois, he's on a break, they're together; he's happily employed, he's fired from the Daily Planet, now he's not.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #612
(art by Derec Aucoin)

It just doesn't satisfy as a cohesive unit. I wanted it to. I felt like there's a really good story to be told about Superman's growing uncomfortable with the amount of power he possesses and what he does with it... but this, to be honest, isn't it. It's jumpy, it's not always in focus, and the thread doesn't come to a climax so much as a stop.

But is this fair? Am I judging a type-2B run by the standards of a type-1A? Why should the best comic book runs be ones where a single creator tells a single story? Isn't that just the imposition of a certain kind of storytelling that came into vogue in the late 1980s? Comics didn't do that for fifty years prior. Maybe I should be judging Casey's run by what it was actually trying to do (telling interesting individual Superman stories focusing on his power while weaving in and out of Big Events), not what I wanted it to do.

Type 1 isn't better than type 2; type A isn't better than type B. They're just different ways of writing comic books, with their strengths and weaknesses.

I think what bothers me, though, is that the part of this type-2B run with the most potential to take off was often the most frustrating. The set of stories where Superman is a pacifist didn't work for me! Casey sets out a great challenge for himself: to tell Superman stories where he can't win through force. Yet the ways he does win often seem as arbitrary as the fact that he's always the strongest guy around. Many of the run's later issues invoke great ideas, but fail to climax satisfactorily (e.g., #603-05, 614-16, 617-18, 619-20, 621-22). I love of a lot of the premises here, but too often Superman doesn't do anything that feel brave or clever, and instead he wins just because. Plus, I really wish there had been a story that tested his pacifism. (Ending Battle is kind of this, but it felt hollow, and it actually comes before he's a pacifist!)

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #619
(art by Derec Aucoin)

Indeed, if I list the individual issues I liked the most, most of them, though not all, come from early in the run (e.g., #590, 594, 596, 599, 600, 608, 610). I feel like Casey did some of his best work when he was constrained by the overall plan of all the Super titles. Maybe because he couldn't tell complete stories based on external conflicts (as those ran across the Super titles), so he had to settle for stories based on internal conflicts purely (as those he could handle in a single issue on its own). Or maybe he just wasn't that good coming up with Superman plots on his own, but as part of a group doing it, he was just fine.

I don't know. This makes it seem like I really didn't like the run, and while I did groan my way through both Return to Krypton stories and The Harvest and big chunks of Our Worlds at War, most of my problems with those stories can't be laid at Casey's feet.

When he was writing, I was enjoying what I was reading more often than not. Casey himself has a good grasp on Superman as a person, and on the sense of humor and playfulness a good Superman story should engender. It reminded me of All-Star Superman in that regard, without being quite so on the nose about it. And both Casey's main artistic collaborators, Mike Wieringo and Derec Aucoin, were great in very different ways. I always like me some José Marzan, Jr., and it was nice to see early Pete Woods. And even if the story doesn't lead to a satisfying climax, there's a great continuity of theme: the stuff that will come into the open with Superman's pacifism in #616 is clearly layered at least as far back as #590, over two years earlier.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #623
(art by Derec Aucoin)

This was solid Superman stuff on the whole.

I guess I just feel like I was promised spectacular, and this isn't it. I think I went in thinking I was getting a type-1A run (even though obviously I couldn't be!) or perhaps a type-2A, and that's why a type-2B was doomed to disappoint me. If you read Casey's Adventures of Superman, judge it on its own terms as much as you are able.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

I link to my usual reading guide above. A couple thoughts on it now that I'm done:

• Reading the Super title events that included Casey's Adventures (e.g., Return to Krypton, Our Worlds at War) was the right move even when I didn't enjoy them.
• The Superman/Batman story Casey wrote in 2009-10 (The Big Noise) is utterly terrible and utterly skippable, but it you are going to read it, definitely read it where it seems to go chronologically (S/B #64 after Adventures #588; S/B #68-71 between Adventures #596 and 597). If you read it in publication order, it would be a very dismal way to go out. Chronologically, it just reads like another mediocre Super titles crossover.
• Jay Faerber's fill-in (#607) was worth it.
• The Joe Kelly stuff I added in (Lost Hearts, The Harvest, Hungry Ghost) mostly wasn't worth it, and it contradicts what Casey was doing in Adventures. I probably should have saved it for, say, a Traci Thirteen-focused read, if I had to read it at all.

Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman #621-23: Superfiction, Part 3

"The Mack Minute" / "Mighty Bubbles" / "Bittersweet"

The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #621-23 (Dec. 2003–Feb. 2004)

Writer: Joe Casey
Art:  Derec Aucoin
Colors: Tanya & Richard Horie
Associate Editor: Lysa Hawkins
Editor: Eddie Berganza 

Joe Casey's run on Adventures of Superman comes to an end with three final issues. The first two (#621-22) make up one story. All the children in Metropolis five and under turn into insects at the same time that Supeman has to contend with an attitudinal new vigilante in Metropolis, the Minuteman (because he defeats bad guys in under sixty seconds). These things turned out to be linked (the fact that the Minuteman is the mail cart guy at the Daily Planet is just a gigantic coincidence, though): the Minuteman is training for the arrival of the Anti-Angelica, insect creatures from another dimension. The Anti-Angelica cannot breed in their home dimension, so after they get married, they travel to another dimension and, as they say, "we can become parents. We borrow... and we breed..."

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #621

To be honest, it doesn't really work. It might be the very weakest of all the non-crossover stories by Joe Casey. First, there's the big coincidence of the mail guy being the Minuteman, and then once the Anti-Angelica show up, what Superman does is kind of lame. He accidentally gets sucked into the Anti-Angelica honeymoon suite, where he does (very easily) free the kids, and then accidentally gets sent by the Minuteman to the Anti-Angelica dimension. There, he talks to them for a minute, and then just... goes back home, trading places with the Minuteman, who is sealed in the Anti-Angelica dimension. Like, he doesn't even do anything, and I don't really get what the point of it all is supposed to be. No one does anything clever or particularly inspirational, we don't learn anything about Superman or his beliefs, despite some banal ruminations on the final page. I don't know that any of the post–Ending Battle stories worked for me 100%, but this one worked least of all.

The final issue of Casey's run is "Bittersweet" (#623)... and it's bittersweet. (Unlike every other non-crossover story in his run, it actually has been collected in English before, in a 75th-anniversay collection of standalones with the unwieldy title of Superman: The Man of Steel: Believe; I think it was meant to tie into the Man of Steel film.) In this issue, Clark and Lois go flying together while they have A Talk. Their sometimes rocky marriage has been a consistent but also inconsistent background element of Casey's run: they have endured multiple separations but also reaffirmed their love for each other.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #623

Here, they talk about their relationship, but occasionally pause as Superman narrates an old adventure for Lois, so we get a series of synopses, ranging from one to three pages each, of exciting adventures that happened elsewhere. A lot of them have a whiff of bullshit about them: these are the wacky kinds of adventures Superman would have in the Silver Age, not the more "realistic" ones of the post-Crisis era. For example: Superman helping Santa when all the reindeer are sick with a viral infection, someone remote controlling a ghost quarterback, Superman up against the entire (mind-controlled) JLA, the Earth turning into a single-cell organism, and so on. I've seen this kind of thing done well elsewhere-- I feel like this a trope of final issues, though now of course I can't think of any examples-- but I don't feel like these ones entirely work. They're all... too easy? too boring? too distant? I dunno. I know I've seen this kind of montage/snippet adventure done well, and I expected something more interesting here.

What does work is the conversation between Lois and Clark. Clark acknowledges that "We haven't seen much of each other..." because he's been so busy, and in a particularly neat bit, they reflect on the beginning of their relationship sitting atop the house of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings gave Lois the name "Superman" when she first reported on him. She acknowledges how that shows her uncertainty about him; Clark's rejoinder that "They called his philosophy 'realism'... which is probably the furthest thing from describing me..." feels a little bit like a metatextual jab at those who want to downplay the character's more fantastic elements. Lois acknowledges that their marriage will never be typical: "I get selfish, too... having to share you with the rest of the world, but I know how important you are... what you mean to people..." It's a good portrayal of the Lois/Clark relationship and its complications; it's great being married to Superman, but it will never be easy.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #623

The last few pages of the comic intercuts panels of ordinary people doing good, but with the Superman symbol prominent in some way: a fireman wearing a Superman t-shirt beneath his jacket, an EMT wearing a Superman cap in the cold, a doctor with a Superman tattoo on his arm... It's a decent pay-off of some of the stuff set up in #610 about Superman's relationship to ordinary people. Even if he's off in space instead of helping the "little guy," he still helps ordinary people through the virtue of the example he sets, helping us help each other.

It ends with an affirmation of Lois and Clark's marriage as Superman flies off into the sunset. The issue as a whole might be a little rocky, but its closing moments certainly nail it.

That's my last issue... but I'm not done! Come back next week for my overall reflections on the entire Joe Casey Adventures of Superman experience!

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE