Monday, January 29, 2007

Super-sickness

So it turns out being really, really disgustingly sick puts one in the perfect frame of mind to appreciate crazy-ass Silver Age Superman comics. There's something about being in a vaguely feverish state that makes the insane leaps of plot, logic, and characterization found in such tales seem perfectly sensible (which is slightly different from rational). Grant Morrison is right -- for all the weirdness of the storytelling and plots of these things, there's often an oddly resonant emotional core to many of them, under the high concepts and giant krytonite gorillas and Phantom Zone villains, as when Superman thinks his dead foster parents have traveled to the future to visit him in Metropolis and he's showing them around. Sometimes it just takes lots of over-the-counter cold medicine to see that.

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