While getting into DC Comics after decades away, one of the first steps I took was to search for the best stories of characters I was interested in. With all various continuities and timelines, DC has made it easy to take that approach: dip your toe in and feel out a concept without concerning yourself with history. “Best of Bizarro” is very much something I have been interested in, but have had a hard time finding a good consensus.
There’s something gleefully grim in Jason Aaron’s take on Bizarro, which has taken up the villain’s trademark goofy reversed statements and destructive nature and applied it to the world at large. As sort of “common sense and moral decency” flipped switch zombie plague, the whole Metropolis civilization has been turned into Bizarro versions of themselves.
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Action Comics #1062 opens with a nice montage of the zany ways a Bizarro city might behave: firemen starting fires, brain surgeons being operated on by their patients, policemen arming criminals. Lois Lane is burning books, for god sake.
With a spreading Bizarro plague, Superman is faced with a crisis uniquely his own: no matter how much he struggles, his endless power and endless self-reliance are taxed to their breaking point. Superman cannot save everyone.
Even those Superman asks for help to sway Bizarro’s spell – Zatanna, Fate, Constantine, Blue Devil (and, obviously, Bats) can’t stem the tide. The danger spreads.
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John Timms does a wonderful job at illustrating the chaos in the streets and the insanity of the populace, but he does an especially great job at making the reader feel Superman’s exhaustion. It’s not a condition often seen on Superman, and it seems somehow more brutal than even his Doomsday-inflicted blood-and-bruises due to its visceral humanity.
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It isn’t a surprise that Aaron’s first Superman story jumped out of the gates with magic as its centerpiece, since he spent years playing with the magic underlying the Marvel Universe. Magic in DC is a very different beast, however, and Bizarro’s accumulation of his magic by means of physical brutality last issue only confuses Superman’s inherent weakness to the mystical; you can punch your way to a possession spell but you cannot punch your way out of it.
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It’s that beloved DC hokiness that allows this issue’s final dramatic beat to land without its inherent silliness somehow spoiling it; we’re more accepting of the cartoonish in this universe than we are in others. We root for the zany here, and the idea of Good Guy Joker (dressed in his swanky best and made somehow square-jaw handsome) is indeed zany. It’s zany in a way that the reader gets very excited to experience it. What Jason Aaron did with mic drop moments in Thor—skin-chillingly badass moments of Jane Foster dropping the hammer, heart-breaking moments of self-sacrifice—we get here over something as simple as a Hero/Villain team-up.
This run of Action Comics already feels like it’s built to be a classic. This story will almost certainly end up in “Best of Bizarro” Reddit lists because it so simply connects with the character’s idea, if not the character himself. It embraces the lunacy of the thing lovingly, and it sets up our hero to struggle in a way that makes us feel for him.
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