Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

One of the purposes of DC’s “New 52” project when it first released was to create a new entry point for readers. This is an eternal problem for comic books, especially those with as long a history as many characters have. Superman’s been around since 1938 with Batman following just a year later and Wonder Woman hitting newsstands in 1941, and that kind of archive creates a barrier for a lot of potential new readers who don’t want to have to deal with nearly a century of backstory and history before diving into the most recent adventures of characters. DC has been trying to correct this perceived problem for almost half of its existence now, with the aforementioned Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986 intended to “reset” the timeline and start afresh; even further back, however, they were faced with the problem that a character introduced around the time of WWII should have aged quite a lot by the era of the Silver Age of comics that began in the mid-fifties. At that time, DC introduced several more modern versions of their older heroes, with the two biggest examples being the creation of the Barry Allen version of the Flash, the iconic red speedsuit with the lightning bolt replacing the older, unmasked version of the character who wore a helmet, and the modern Green Lantern, with test pilot Hal Jordan serving as the face of an intergalactic organization on Earth, rather than the older version of Alan Scott, with his red outfit and green cape. 

This presented a conundrum, however, as readers were now expected to follow a contemporary Justice League, in which the big three teamed up with the new Flash and Green Lantern in the then-present, while also knowing that the same trinity had teamed up with Jay Garrick’s Flash and Alan Scott’s Green Lantern during and after WWII. In an attempt to cut through this Gordian Knot, DC decreed that all JSA stories took place in an alternate dimension on “Earth Two,” and that their contemporary products were taking place on a primary Earth. This lasted a while, but that bandage couldn’t cover everything as DC continued to expand, either because their writers introduced another dimension to this multiverse or because they had bought out another comic company and needed to integrate those characters into their own books. This was the impetus behind Crisis on Infinite Earths, to take that infinity back down to a manageable single continuity. But nothing’s ever really gone, as comic continuities blew back out to intracosmic proportions, and had to be whittled back down again. 

Fourteen years after Crisis, DC rival Marvel was facing a similar problem. Instead of the Crisis-to-reboot pipeline that would become DC’s favorite plot device, they took a different approach, through the creation of the “Ultimate” sub-print. Books with this label could take a ground-up approach to telling stories from a new beginning (Peter Parker’s earliest days as Spider-Man, a new first/original class of X-Men, a Black Widow whose backstory didn’t rely on the Soviet Union, etc.) while setting stories in the present day (for better and for worse, as the Avengers equivalent The Ultimates is one of the most immediately post-9/11 things that you’re likely to read). This was a huge success for Marvel, as it ensured that longtime fans with an investment in the classic continuity got what they wanted, and new and old readers alike could check out newer comics that didn’t require you to keep track of how many Xorns there are or understand the finer points of Genoshan law. You may have never heard of the Ultimate imprint, but you’ve definitely seen its influence: it was in the pages of The Ultimates that Nick Fury was first portrayed as a Black man (and drawn to look like Samuel L. Jackson to boot), and Miles Morales was created as a character in Ultimate Spider-Man. A few year later, DC was still about half a decade away from doing what it always does—reboot everything, all at once, and use the same building blocks to create a new, singular continuity—and they decided to give their own version of an ultimate continuity a chance with their All Star imprint. 

It was, unfortunately and in many ways, dead on arrival. Frank Miller’s flagship series All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder was widely anticipated but was the immediate target of well-deserved mockery and disdain. It infamously featured a panel in which Batman asks young Dick Grayson “Are you [slur for disabled people] or something?” that you’ve no doubt seen as a meme floating around and perhaps even dismissed as edited, but which I can assure you is very real. It would be an easy metric to compare the success of the Ultimate line versus the All Star line by just comparing their lengths; the former ran from 2000 to 2015, while the latter only managed to eke out an existence from 2005 to 2008. Even that isn’t a good metric, however, as that entire three year run only covers All Star Batman, which ran for a mere ten issues with an absurdly erratic schedule; notably, Issue #4 released in March of 2006 and Issue #5 didn’t hit shelves for over a year, releasing in July of 2007. Although several other titles under the imprint were announced, including All Star Wonder Woman, All Star Green Lantern, and All Star Batgirl, the only other title that was released was All Star Superman, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely. Although this one had some schedule slippage like its counterpart, with new issues released about every two months other than a six month gap between issues 5 and 6, it was much better received (DC even divorced it from the rest of the All Star continuity at some point, trying to put some distance between the prestige and the stink). I don’t think that discontinuity was initially intended, but it’s been a long time since I read that run so I can’t be certain of my hypothesis—that Morrison intended for this to be an ongoing book and, when he read the writing on the wall, decided to shift course and aim toward a more definitive, rewarding finale. Still, given how widely popular the All Star Superman run became, it’s no surprise that DC and Warner Premiere would want to adapt it into one of their animated films, and with the entire story complete, they were able to condense it some and better foreshadow the ending. 

Released in 2011, All Star Superman is, essentially, a story about a god who walks among mortals resolving his final business before he dies. As the story opens, the titular big blue boy scout (James Deaton) must fly to the sun and rescue some scientists whose research mission has been sabotaged. In the process, he absorbs an extraordinary amount of solar radiation, which leaves him supercharged (no pun intended) but also dying. He sets out to complete any remaining work that he can and ensure that anything that must continue after he dies is left in the hands of a worthy successor. This includes confessing his secret identity to his love, Lois Lane (Christina Hendricks), and depositing a city of shrunken Kryptonians on a new planet that they can live on, among other things. In the comics, there was a rough correlation between the issues and the individual feats of strength of Hercules, and while this film doesn’t have time to adapt every single one, it does encapsulate the best of them, and shows us what a Superman story made by someone who loves the character can really achieve. 

After revealing his identity to Lois, he takes her back to his selenite clubhouse and gives her the grand tour, where we learn that his life is otherworldly in ways that we don’t normally see; he keeps an extraterrestrial being called a “sun-eater” as a pet and feeds it tiny stars that he creates on his “cosmic anvil,” for instance. It’s goofy Golden Age nonsense, but it’s treated with such sincerity that it works. He has a host of humanoid robots that he created to maintain the place as well as countless other gadgets that he uses for his various missions to help humanity: curing diseases, ending hunger, ensuring peace. And, behind the door that he forbids Lois to enter like some kind of well-meaning Bluebeard, he’s creating a serum that she can drink and have his powers for a day. After their day of superheroing and adventuring together, he takes off for a while to deal with the aforementioned shrunken city, only to return and discover that two Kryptonian astronauts have come to Earth with the intent of colonizing it; Superman stands up to them emphatically despite their greater strength and power, and when they turn out to be dying, still treats them with empathy and kindness. Finally, in his guise as Clark Kent, he visits Lex Luthor (Anthony LaPaglia) in prison, where he learns that the incarcerated super genius was behind the earlier solar mission failure, as a means to ensure that even after he is executed for his crimes, he will have finally killed Superman. Lex’s final defeat comes when, after using a similar serum to give himself powers, he sees the world as last son of Krypton does, down to the forces that bind matter together, and realizes that all of his justifications about why he couldn’t save the world because of Superman standing in his way were self-defeating, and that he could have changed everything if he had allowed himself to be inspired rather than enraged. 

The relationship between Superman and Lex is a beautiful nugget at the heart of this story. Morrison portrays the former as an all-loving god, who, even as his time grows short, still takes the time to appear to Lex as his clumsy, bumbling alter ego to implore the world’s richest man to see through the lies he has told himself and be better. Despite all his brilliance, Lex can’t see through the Clark Kent facade not because it’s such a good mask, but because when he looks at his foe, all Luthor is capable of feeling is diminished by his existence, rather than empowered by him. As Clark “accidentally” trips over a wire that was mere moments from electrocuting Luthor to death, Lex doesn’t see through his ruse because he simply can’t imagine that a being as powerful as Superman would ever bother with such sleight of hand, because Lex himself wouldn’t. It’s one of the best explorations of the relationship put on the page (and adapted to screen), and it’s fascinating to watch it play out. 

I have a mixed relationship with Frank Quitely’s artwork. It’s certainly distinctive, and among the pantheons of comic artists whose work is immediately recognizable, like Jim Lee, Jack Kirby, and even Rob Liefeld. His previous team up with Morrison on the turn-of-the-millennium run on New X-Men was widely praised at the time for its narrative, but I find it rather difficult to read based solely on how ugly it is. Around the same time, the two also worked together on the DC book JLA: Earth 2, and my criticism of that is the same. By the time of All Star Superman, however, he had matured a lot as an artist, and although his hallmarks are still very present, a random page from that comic shows a huge leap forward, showing characters with similar builds but distinct body language that differentiates them, as well as poses that aren’t just action and modeling posture but those that tell a story with their subtlety, like Lois’s coyness in the linked image. This film follows that same art style, and it ends up looking gorgeous on screen, and I’m glad that they followed Quitely’s designs. It makes this film feel distinct from the others in this series (similar to how New Frontier’s translation of Darwyn Cooke’s style still makes it stand out from the rest of the films), and it’s suited to this epically influenced narrative. This is one worth checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond