Comics: Good Old Lois & Clark!
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Last week’s comics haul from my beloved Comicopia here in Boston yielded quite a bit of good stuff (including the third issue of Captain America: White and the first issue of Sam Wilson: Captain America) and one item that was as confusing as it was heart-tugging for me: the first issue of what looks to be a regular ongoing series called Superman: Lois & Clark, written by Dan Jurgens and drawn with signature deftness by the great, unappreciated Lee Weeks.
In this first issue, we watch as Superman – not the popped-collar A-hole from DC’s “New 52” company-wide reboot, but the real Superman, built like a high school gym coach, wearing red underpants on the outside, sporting a spit-curl, standing for Truth, Justice, and the American Way – watches the New 52 Justice League fight Darkseid in their first adventure together. He notes that these 
new kids are young and brash and full of themselves, but he doesn’t intervene – because this new world is “suspicious, doubting, edgy – without faith.”
Instead of helping out against Darkseid, my Superman flies back to a dilapidated farm house where my Lois Lane – the smart, world-class reporter who’s also the love of Superman’s life – is waiting with the little baby we saw born to the couple during one of those numerous and annoying “Convergence” spin-off titles (likewise drawn by Weeks) that we saw over the summer. In a touching scene, Lois & Clark decide that if this new world where they now find themselves doesn’t trust its own superheroes, it’s certainly not going to trust them, so Superman retires his iconic costume and they resolve to stay in hiding while they raise their child.
Flash forward a few years, and the baby is a healthy normal boy who knows nothing of his father’s powers and abilities (although in a Marvel-style slip-up, the cover of this first issue reveals that he’s soon going to find out); Lois is a best-selling anonymous author, and Clark, wearing a variation of his old black post-Doomsday unitard, is secretly ‘helping out’ against natural disasters – and also keeping an eye out for the people who went on to become his supervillains back in his own reality. It’s a solid enough set-up, instantly possessing more humanity and believable pathos than all the New 52 re-inventions combined – and costume or no costume, it was joy to see the real Superman again. That was the heart-tugging part.
The confusing part came from wondering what in the Sam Hill was going on. I confess, I sort of drifted away from following the narrative train-wreck that was Convergence, so I didn’t catch how it ended. But is THIS how it ended? With all the pre-reboot versions of DC’s iconic characters alive and well in the New 52 reality? In this issue, Superman mentions that his versions of Green Lantern, the Flash, and Supergirl at least survived but decided to leave Earth for one reason or another, but what about everybody else? What about the pre-reboot Justice Society, or Batman, or a version of Wonder Woman who isn’t a thuggish, superpowered Conan the Barbarian in a corset?
And even if it is just Superman, isn’t that enough to royally screw around with the oh-so-carefully planned New 52 continuity? So the whole time we’re reading the adventures of the new Superman, we’ll now know there’s an older, more powerful, and quite simply better version of the character out there hiding someplace? Or are Jurgens and the DC powers that be going to integrate the black-clad version of the character into the new continuity? And if he can be integrated – if, say, he teaches his stupid New 52 comrades how to be aspirational superheroes instead of brooding dickwads – then wouldn’t he send up a flare to all the other reality-
displaced pre-reboot characters, telling them to come back to the spotlight and reclaim their lives?
It seems like a crazily sloppy way to end an event like Convergence, a half-thought kink in the careful planning of DC’s new continuity. But as long as I get a Superman who loves Lois Lane, saves people, and stands for something, I’ll keep reading now matter how confusing it is. Now that DC has seen fit to give me some kind of ‘return of Superman,’ the only thing the company needs to do now in order to return entirely to my good graces is to give me the return of a certain 31st century super-team …