SUPERMAN: THE DOOMSDAY WARS
He killed Superman, and now he's back! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's Dan Jurgens!

Writer: Dan Jurgens
Artists: Dan Jurgens, Norm Rapmund
Colorist: Gregory Wright
Letterer: John Workman
Trade Peperback
Published by DC Comics/Titan Books 1999.
$12.95

Reviewed by Andrew Wheeler

When Superman tries to save the life of the newborn son of two of his oldest friends, he doesn't count on the level of opposition standing in his way. Doomsday, the villain who famously succeeded in killing the Man of Steel, is back from the end of time, and this time he's a lot smarter. Can Superman hope to defeat the unstoppable monster, and will another innocent life be lost in the process?

In movie terms, the phrase 'auteur' is usually used to describe a director who writes his own films - or a screenwriter who films his own scripts, which is just the same thing on a lower wage scale. The term describes the likes of Orson Welles, Billy Wilder and Paul Thomas Anderson, and thus it has come to be associated with a presumption of high quality. The thinking is that having one single vision take the story from paper to screen is generally going to mean a better end product. Auteur theory. It's worth remembering that Ed Wood was an auteur too. Just because the word is French, doesn't mean it's classy.

To put it another way: more devoted music fans tend to praise singer-songwriters over manufactured acts, and in many cases the comparison is fair. However, being a singer-songwriter does not necessarily make you a good singer, nor even a good songwriter. An auteur must have both talents if he wants to earn respect. One or the other would be a good start.

"...any fool artist can write. Case in point; Erik Larsen."

Which nicely brings us to Erik Larsen. Mr Larsen recently quite publicly espoused a version of the auteur theory in comics. The work of the artist, he contends, is more valuable than the work of the writer, because writers cannot draw, but any fool artist can write. Case in point; Erik Larsen.

Wrong, Erik. There are some truly great writer-artists in comics. Will Eisner is the greatest example, while Frank Miller is perhaps the most obvious. Miller has the distinction of being one of the only writer-artists to have done excellent work both as a writer for another artist, and as an artist for another writer. These are the true tests of an auteur. You need to have talent in both fields if you're going to be any good. Otherwise, you're just another talentless hack taking the work away from the talented writers, and you're going to drive the readers away. The Larsen mindset would have us believe that artists can land a plane safely when the entire flight crew has eaten the fish.

I've managed to spend most of my life successfully avoiding the work of Dan Jurgens. Thus it was not until I read THE DOOMSDAY WARS that I realised he was an auteur too. I had read some of his writing on Marvel's THOR, and had not been impressed. Though I had almost certainly seen his art before, it had never registered with me. On reflection, this isn't surprising. The most remarkable thing about Jurgen's art is how utterly generic it is. Every image of Superman or Wonder Woman could have been lifted straight from a Burne Hogarth anatomy book. Perhaps even the same anatomy. The women challenge the men for the squarest jaws and the broadest shoulders. At best, the visual storytelling is adequate, but it tends to be a little challenged by fast-pitched action sequences. As a whole, it lacks distinction, but, as you might hope when the writer and artist are one and the same, it isn't too horribly incoherent either.

There's even a spark of an attempt to do something clever with the story. Juxtaposed against the contemporary tale of Superman fighting Doomsday, there is the story of a time before Clark was Superman, when his father lost his cows to a particularly fierce snow storm, and young Clark could do nothing about it. These brief interludes offer a more sedate and engaging storytelling style, and though the resolution of the story is gratingly whimsical in true LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE style, the effort to do something a little different should be recognised. Not very different, of course. In the list of "things to do to make the story different", juxtaposing the main story against a flashback must rate fairly high on the cliche scale. Let's just pretend it's the thought that counts.

"the whole confection is just awe-inspiringly shallow and nonsensical"

The writing is generally on a par with the art. It may be a guilty confession to say that at times I almost enjoyed it. That's not to say it's any good, but it has a stupid boldness that evoked some of the childlike dumbfoundedness I'm sure I must have once expressed when I first discovered superheroes. It was, at least, true to its core values. Not in the modern sense of realising the truly fantastic, or in the retrospective sense of revisiting bygone wonder, but in the sense that the whole confection was just awe-inspiringly shallow and nonsensical. The best word for it might be 'shameless'.

This is the comic book people are referring to when they talk about things being like comic books. This is too much tartrazine and sugar. Superman probably ought to have a little more protein to him than this. He ought to be a titanic hero with some extraordinary stories to tell. This, though it may be a workable story, lacks any sense of involvement or consequence. All it has is fighting and a formula, as if it has seen how it is done, but doesn't know how to do it for itself. What it needs is a better writer, and perhaps a better artist as well. What we get is another auteur in the Larsen mould. What fleeting stupid pleasure can be got from a book like this is worth nothing more than an idle grin. The rest is brain-rot.

There's room for all kinds of auteurs in the world. We need to have our Larsens and Jurgens as well as our Millers and Eisners, because it's only in the trying that anyone ever succeeds. The point is, we don't have to read it. If Erik Larsen believes that any fool artist can write a comic, then he's absolutely right. Anyone can write a comic. However, you have to be good to write a good comic. Not all comics are good. This one certainly isn't.

Not recommended.

Andrew Wheeler is a Staff Writer for PopImage.

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