Adventures of Superman #41

[superfangirl1]

In the last issue of Adventures of Superman #40.

The Joker threaten Superman with denoting bombs all over Metropolis and Superman keeps Joker busy with talking to him and examining his motives.

http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/4611316.html#cutid1

Comments

[mrstatham]

This had me right up until it turned into yet another case of Batdickery. Was that really necessary?

[crinos]

I agree. Seriously Bruce, you want to test Supes so you let the Joker, THE. JOKER, run around in Metropolis. Mr. "Fuck it, we'll do it live?" The most unpredictable man in the world? Fuck you.

Also, Facepalming Joker also needs to be iconed (Man, we're batting a thousand on the icon fodder today.)

[freezer]

This had me right up until it turned into yet another case of Batdickery.

Then they got me back with Clark's reactoin.

[mrstatham]

Eh. That seems petulant for Clark to trash stuff, for me. I'd rather just not have this take on Batman at all, because it's fucking stupid; Given the Joker's usual MO, how many people ran the risk of being killed by him prior to arriving in Metropolis?

[lbd_nytetrayn]

I had to look up close a second time; on my device, I thought Superman had just backhanded Batman across the cave.

[icon_uk]

At first glance, so did I. A "Hulk punches Thor" moment, as it were.

[donnblake]

What did Superman compromise, there, Bats? He defused the bombs, saved all the innocents, and apprehended the Joker, without any casualties or particular brutality. Sure, he was vaguely threatening, but of all people, Bruce is hardly the one to criticize him on that.

[lissa_quon]

Honestly I am almost convinced that Superman didn't fail so much as Batman just got mad at how much more smoothly Supes took Joker down.

[crinos]

Yeah, what the hell did Supes do wrong? Because he actually engaged the Joker? Cause he pissed him off?

Maybe Batman is just salty that Supes did a far, far better job of putting Joker in his place than Batman EVER has. I mean seriously, Joker will never come back to Metropolis after that. Supes didn't just beat him, he HUMILIATED Joker, and that's just about the worst thing you can do to an egomaniac like the Joker.

[freezer]

If I had to guess, he somehow heard Supes say he doesn't have rules or limits and for Mr. Law & Order/Black&White Morality Personified, that was a greater moral failing than just wailing on The Joker until he gave up.

[randyripoff]

Sadly, some creators can only conceive of Bruce as an unfeeling jerk.

[junipepper]

Well, he vaguely threatened to kill Joker (in panels not scanned above), so that's something. I guess.

I preferred Superman back when he was generally polite, and spoke like a reasonably well educated adult. This guy is irritating.

[captainbellman]

Yep, it seems Landis' one approach to Superman is to have him state the obvious in a man-child dialect ("I can do lots of stuff"), then copiously exposit about his own motivations in a way which absolutely misses the point.

See also: Landis' stupefyingly dense, badly-researched short film on "The Death and Return of Superman", which was only just saved by its cast of cameos.

[nate_abril96]

How does it miss the point? Superman saying he only does what he thinks is right sounds like Superman to me. I'm generally curious now to find out. Also, agree with everything you said about Landis's Death of Superman short. That was just terrible.

[captainbellman]

It's slightly implying that Superman doesn't really have a code against killing (thus justifying very un-Superman behaviour such as, well, a lot of "Man of Steel"), and indeed further implies that Ma & Pa Kent's efforts to teach him to obey the laws of his adopted country/planet to as best a degree as he could were meaningless, if he only follows a specific moral code decided upon by himself alone.

Nobody just works out what's right or wrong all by themselves, least of all Superman - he learned to do that thanks to his excellent upbringing.

Also, the last panel with the babyish posturing is not at all Superman on his worst day. That it's probably lifted from Garth Ennis' "The Boys" - where the exact same thing happened, except with a small fighter jet and the Homelander, a Superman analogue who's meant to represent him without any of his moral code to reign him in - just makes it worse.

Superman doesn't need to remind Bats that he's very strong. Hell, if I'd been writing, he'd have just chuckled, shaken his head, and come back a second later with half of the other non-incarcerated Gotham villains tied up together in a bow.

[jlbarnett]

I think lecturing Superman after he admits to endangering people in Metropolis shows Bats needs a reminder.

[omgwtflolbbqbye]

You shouldn't poke Supes when he's having a bad hair day Bats...

[zapbiffpow]

I am so, so glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that.

It's like he fell asleep right after taking a bath or something.

[icon_uk]

Aside from the denoument of the bombs being a cross between "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" ("Tell me Toyman, do you know what radio waves look like? Because I do!") and that time Bart met the Riddler, I was right with this up until the notion that Batman would EVER let the Joker set something up like that as some sort of test case.

If we'd even found out that he had himself sneaked up and defused ALL the bombs beforehand, but no, he was relying on Superman to outguess a madman he himself has failed to outguess on a regular basis.... Nope, just... nope.

[freezer]

I'm just stunned at the thought Joker even trying to engage Superman while having that little idea of what Supes can do. They're new to the game at this point (righT), but still, treating Superman as "Flying Batman" is just stupid.

[beyondthefringe]

I rather like the idea of Superman running a psych ops/con game on the Joker to utterly demoralize him and discourage him from hitting Metropolis again. By proving that he's way more powerful and much less "fun" to play against, he convinces the Joker that he's not a worthwhile adversary like Batman.

I'm okay with Superman acting like a dick if it means his city is safe(r) from the Joker.
And I'm cool with him trashing Batman's car. Because using the Joker as a live fire exercise is ill-considered on every possible level.

[drtechnobabel]

True. You could even read Superman's vague threats of killing the Joker as a combination of a bluff and getting his point across that the Joker doesn't know him or what his limits are. He's not so much saying that he WOULD kill the Joker so much as he's saying that the Joker really shouldn't be trying to provoke anger in people that he doesn't know anything about, as they might end up being way out of his league.

[icon_uk]

Oh how I wish the Joker did that more often, it might prevent his ramped up "murder powers" from going to his head.

[lego_joker]

There really is something of a trend about having the Joker act rather... babied whenever he travels outside of Gotham, isn't there?

Sometimes, as here, he's in way over his head. Other times, his confident "I'm more than a match for anyone who isn't Batman" air is entirely justified. The latter is usually much more irritating, since the plot tends to bend over backwards to turn him into a superhuman-level threat (even the DCAU Batman/Superman movie fell victim to this).

Still, I'd actually like to see a take on the Joker who KNOWS that he's a small-timer who would be utterly screwed outside of Gotham. Who refuses to accept a single invitation to Injustice Leagues, who blows off every out-of-towner asking for his help, who engages in crimes that he knows only Batman would care about.

It should be his cruelty that's bottomless, not the scale of his crimes, nor his abilities. Poison Ivy has forgotten more about poisons than he'll ever know. The Penguin and the Riddler have raked in more cash than he'll ever see. Two-Face is a better leader of men. Croc and Bane could kick his ass any day of the week in hand-to-hand combat. Freeze is the techmaster. Scarecrow and Harley are better at mind-fuckery. And Ra's has a body count that he couldn't achieve in ten lifetimes.

And for all that, the sheer pettiness of the Joker's personality, and his utterly irredeemable nature, make Batman hate him the most of all.

[mrstatham]

I actually liked his role in the Superman-Batman Movie/the World's Finest 3-Parter. They made a big deal out of the fact that Joker had, for the most part, essentially lost his groove and become pretty pitiful during the 'redesign' season of BTAS, and that World's Finest was him getting back to form; I think it makes sense there that it's Lex, with no prior experience with Joker, who underestimates him, and not Clark, who briefly even had a way around the Kryptonite macguffin Joker had and generally defers to Batman regarding him.

The sense of scale there was also justified by Joker essentially being enabled by Lex, so to speak, who provides the weaponry Joker eventually seizes.

It also pretty much justified Joker's appearances in Justice League - his vindictiveness in using the Royal Flush Gang and the like could arguably be caused by the fact he's pretty much left to die at the end of World's Finest - and it gets taken to a logical conclusion in Batman Beyond.

[lego_joker]

Eh. I dunno - I was majorly bugged by the fact that Joker managed to track down a hunk of Kryptonite before Lex could. That in and of itself made the entire card castle come crashing down, since it established that there's no way he can be a blip on Superman's radar unless he's playing by the rules of Superman's world.

Also, it was kinda stupid of Lex to not just say "I'll buy the Kryptonite from you and let some PROFESSIONAL use it to kill Superman", was it not? Even if he has no experience with the Joker, there's nothing specific about him that makes him a prime candidate for an assassination job.

The Royal Flush Gang storyline in JL, while delightful, was also built on rather shaky grounds - we get a thirty-second clip of him somehow waltzing into Cadmus unopposed, and the kids for some reason follow his orders instead of ripping him apart (I can understand Ace doing it, but the others didn't seem "broken" in the least).

I also think that his reappearance in Batman Beyond shouldn't have gone into the whole laser satellite thing, and kept it to the small-scale cruelty of his torture of Tim Drake and the assault on the Batcave.

[icon_uk]

I liked his use in Young Justice, where he makes one appearance as part of a high profile criminal gang launching a major campaign, and he's only really a credible threat amongst them because he's teched out by his co-villains.

Then after they're stopped and captured we discover that those villains were the disposable ones, the front for the real scheme, and the Joker was smiply a pawn. I don't think we ever even see him again after that. It was nice to see him used as a distraction, since his ego would insist he put on a show, but not as a prime mover and shaker, since he really isn't that much of personal threat compared to the likes of Ra's and Grodd and his tactical skills are too chaotic.

I also liked how he was treated in Infinte Crisis, where none of the villains want him to join their supervillain alliance, because he's just too much of a "wild card" and is both completely unreliable and too unstable to be worth whatever benefits they might gain from having him around.

[lego_joker]

Yeah - in YJ, while they got his character rather wrong, it does kinda make sense that the actual masterminds wouldn't let him anywhere near the controls of their operation. Still, even there his presence had a hard time justifying itself - the only contributions he gave, Poison Ivy herself could've easily provided. And as for putting on a show... he seemed a little too orderly and subdued to do that effectively.

(It kinda makes me suspect that the writers just stuck him in to shut up all the fans clamoring for an appearance from him.)

The final battle in that episode was also rather hilarious, since all the other villains are pulling out flashy superpowers one after the other, and all Joker has... is a pair of knives. The whole time, I kept thinking, "If one of the other guys would just spare a second from his/her fight, or even get a stray blow in, he'd be jelly on the ground."

On Infinite Crisis, though... yes, THAT is the ideal Joker when it comes to multi-supervillain stories that take place outside of Gotham. Also a nice nod to Lex's bit of hypocrisy at the end, because if it was HIS plan, you can bet your ass that he wouldn't have invited Mistah J, either.

[lieut_kettch]

Gee thanks, Supes, now you've given a challenge. A goal to strive for. Next thing you know, you're brainwashed into thinking your pregnant wife is Doomsday.