Comics this week were a mixed bag as always. I bought issue # 18 of the Superman/Wonder Woman ongoing series mainly based on the stark drama of the cover, on which two young men in Superman and Wonder Woman costumes are regarding each other with grim expressions. On the inside, it turns out the issue takes place in some kind of radical alternate continuity in which a) Superman has no cape and can’t fly (indeed, seems to have largely his 1930s power-set), b) Superman’s secret identity as Clark Kent has been revealed to the entire world, and c) not only has some super-villain stolen the old Kent Family farm house from Smallville, that same somebody has also stolen the buried corpses of Ma and Pa Kent. It’s a wacky what-if story writer Peter Tomasi has concocted (with good but very grim artwork by by Doug Mahnke, depicting Superman as a no-nonsense mid-30s tobacco addict European runway model), and I’ll probably buy the next issue just to see how the whole mess comes out.

The usual arrogant-asshole “New 52” Superman was front and center in the plot of the first issue of Justice League of America, written and drawn by fan-favorite artist Bryan Hitch. The bit of plot revealed in this issue is boringly familiar from the Bryan Hitch/Warren Ellis school of Impossibly Enormous Evil Threats Dreamt Up While High – some evil thing is stalking its way through parallel dimensions wiping them out/enslaving them/popping all their eyeballs, and that evil thing is on its way to our Earth, and only the good guys stand in its way, yadda yadda yadda. How’s Hitch put it this time around? Ah right:

I can tell you that the whole future is going to end. Whatever is coming is going to change everything. The future, the present, and the past. It’s already happening. We are already part of it. Your death is tied up in this, like a fixed beacon in time, across all time. A universal extinction level event and the shockwave reaches back to the beginning of time.

It’s entirely possible that Hitch is the only person left in the comics world who doesn’t realize that you can’t really keep doing this kind of End of Everything EverEverEver thing more than once without it becoming comical. And the gimmick is undercut right in this issue, since some unrelated bad guys spring the old Superman villain the Parasite (he absorbs energies and superpowers on contact) on the Justice League – and he proceeds to mop the floor with them. Just the one Superman villain nearly dismantles the team without really trying – which doesn’t really speak well to the team’s ability to handle a universal extinction level event going back to the beginning of time.

The only Marvel comic I bought this week was a spin-off of the company’s new “Battleworld” continuity-revamping mini-series event. It’s called Thors and features a script by Jason Aaron and artwork by the great Chris Sprouse – and the gimmick is that in this alternate continuity (I think it’s alternate – who can really tell anymore?) all the various versions of the comic book character Thor that have appeared in Marvel comics over the years. I soaked up the great artwork, but I couldn’t help noticing that one variation of Thor was entirely missing from the issue: the blond, clean-shaven heroic version who starred in Thor comics for fifty years. The Thor I’ve chronicled here at Stevereads for years now. I’d have loved to see Chris Sprouse draw that iconic character – maybe next time.