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superman86to99 · 15 days

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Adventures of Superman #515 (August 1994)

Massacre in Metropolis, Part 2: the ice cream heist turns fatal! As seen last week, Massacre and his wormy little sidekick, Skimmer, have come to Earth to steal ice cream for a space mobster, but Skimmer ends up doing all the work while Massacre goes straight to punching Superman. In fact, Massacre cares so little about completing the mission that he punches Superman right into the spaceship carrying all the ice cream, causing it to come crashing down and explode. Superman, Massacre, and Skimmer survive the explosion but the ice cream, sadly, does not.

Massacre gleefully pummels Superman, who's having trouble punching him back -- Massacre always seems to know exactly what his next move will be and act accordingly. After deducing that Massacre doesn't have psychic powers (otherwise he'd be taunting him with stuff like "I bet Lois is making out with Jeb Friedman right about now!"), Superman figures out that he's predicting his moves by "sensing nerve signals," whatever that means.

What's important is that Superman deliberately misses Massacre with his heat vision in order to drop a wall on him from behind by surprise, and then just starts beating the crap out of him while Massacre is too distracted to sense any nerves or whatever. The massacrer has become the massacred!

Meanwhile, Superman's own wormy little sidekick, Jimmy Olsen, is taking photos of the fight from a rather flimsy-looking half-destroyed bridge, as a worried Lois looks on. Skimmer, who is also worried about his guy losing (and ending up stranded on Earth), sneaks up on Lois and takes her hostage. Lois, however, is pretty used to being kidnapped by "meta-weirdos" by now, so she quickly frees herself...

...at which point the entire bridge starts collapsing due to a blast shot by Massacre. Superman is able to save Lois and Jimmy, but Skimmer is buried by the rubble and it looks like he's about to go the big Ben & Jerry's in the sky. Supes wants to take him to a hospital (it's Metropolis; they probably have a whole unit for aliens crushed by debris during fights), but a weirdly emotional Massacre says no. He says Skimmer may be a bug but he's his bug, so he wants to transport him to a "xeno-med" instantly, which is his only chance of surviving. Superman agrees, and as Massacre disappears with Skimmer, he says something about having "learned his lesson well."

On the final page, we see that, after leaving Skimmer at the space hospital, Massacre retired from punching and now works a normal office job at a space insurance comp-- wait, no. He actually just let Skimmer die while he sat on an asteroid, thinking about how he's glad his little pal is dead now, because that means his rivalry with Superman is now personal.

(No, he's not cheekily winking at the camera, he just got a swollen eye from the fight.)

Creator-Watch:

As with Massacre's first appearance, artist Barry Kitson is credited as plotter in this issue, with regular writer Karl Kesel handling dialogue. You can sort of tell they're working Marvel style (art goes first, then the writer figures out what the characters are saying) because the narrative style is WAY more action-driven than your average Kesel comic, and some of the dialogue has a distinct "OK, what do I make them say in this one?" vibe to it.

This might explain why parts of the fight feel repetitive, as Don Sparrow points out (but I'll let him talk about it in his section below!).

Plotline-Watch:

When he goes off to take photos of the fight, Jimmy leaves his clothes-scavenging partner Lucy Lane with the white-haired girl from Adventures #514, who turns out to 1) be named Case and 2) want to be a rock star. In fact, she and some friends are currently looking for instruments in the wreckage of a music shop so they can form a band called the Riot Grrrls and play at the upcoming Metropolis benefit concert. They're nice enough not to ditch her, but Lucy doesn't really fit in with the group; she's more of a Tiffany person, as we find out.

Lucy apparently doesn't realize that the "Babe" mentioned above is Jimmy's old friend Babe Tanaka, now a big death metal star (as mentioned in Man of Steel #36), whom she should probably remember from that time they were both turned into vampires and almost slayed by Robin. Or maybe Lucy does remember Babe but she's playing dumb because she's still jealous of that time two years ago when she saw her "kissing" Jimmy at the hospital...

The Massacre/Doomsday comparisons continue. Don Sparrow says: "Massacre gets more of a push, with still some more Doomsday invocations, as Lois' fretting establishes that Superman had an easier time fighting Doomsday than he did Massacre." Because, you know, he could actually lay a punch on Doomsday. Lois' concerns turn out to be misplaced (one distraction and Massacre turned into a punching bag) but I think we should cut the girl some slack; she did just watch her guy get beaten to death a few month's ago, in the comic's timeline.

After successfully ricocheting his heat vision to drop that wall on Massacre, Superman thinks: "And Ma said Pete and I were wasting our time in that pool hall!" Imagine young "aw shucks" Clark Kent and Pete Ross angering redneck hustlers by being inexplicably good at pool. Why wasn't that included in the World of Smallville miniseries?! Why wasn't the whole mini about that?!

Plug-Watch:

SPARROW ALERT! Don will be appearing at SaskAssemble AND Sask Expo Regina in September, so if you're from those parts, go there and confront him about his shameless Jimmy Olsen apologism.

If you're using League of Comic Geeks (sort of a Letterboxd for comics), I've started an account where I'm slowly posting blurbs from our older blog entries in the corresponding Superman '86 to '99 era issues, so feel free to follow along! I'll also be (briefly) commenting on the non-Superman comics I do read from time to time, including the '90s DC stuff I scour for Superman references for the Super Titles Round-Up posts. Be warned that you might suddenly see like 40 Zero Hour crossover issues show up in your feed...

Shout Outs-Watch:

Riot Grrrl-loud shout outs to our supporters, Aaron, Chris “Ace” Hendrix, britneyspearsatemyshorts, Patrick D. Ryall, Bheki Latha, Mark Syp, Ryan Bush, Raphael Fischer, Kit, Sam, Bol, Dave Shevlin, and Dave Blosser! Join them (and get extra non-continuity articles) via Patreon or our newsletter’s “pay what you want” mode!

Oh yeah, Don is also appearing RIGHT HERE AND NOW:

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):

We start with the cover, and it’s a little bit of déjà vu, a conceptual mirror image to last week’s Superman #92, where Massacre was decking Superman. On this week’s cover, Superman is striking back. Apart from the reference to the previous cover, this one is fine, but maybe a little stiff and static.

Inside the book, we’re greeted almost immediately with a big old explosion as Superman, Massacre, and Skimmer’s ship crash back down to the rubble that is Metropolis, miraculously hurting no one important.

An odd thing in these fire-lit pages is that aside from slightly curlier hair, it’s hard to tell Lois Lane apart from “Dis”, one of the Riot Grrrls. The image on page 4, though, of Superman’s fighting stance in the flames against Massacre, is a good one.

The art team seems to thrive at drawing teeth, which are prominently featured in a sequence of panels on pages 11 and 12. Say what you want about intergalactic villain Massacre—he takes care of his chompers.

The battle scenes here are well-drawn—generally Barry Kitson is a terrific and consistent penciller—but there is something repetitive about the fighting. Apart from Superman’s heat vision bank-shot, it’s literally just a slugfest, with the fight choreography just being haymaker after haymaker.

It’s not only visually a bit repetitive, but seems to forget that Superman learned to fight smarter (using his flight, heat vision and arctic breath more to his advantage) in his second fight with Doomsday.

To this point, Skimmer seemed like a harmless hanger-on, so it’s a bummer to see him go full villain, threatening (and very nearly groping) Lois Lane. Nice to see Lois do some hand to hand combat to free herself, and her dialogue about not being a damsel in distress is in-character.

The images of Massacre crying are unintentionally hilarious, as is Superman’s stern, vice principal like admonishing that so long as Massacre continues killing, they’ll remain enemies, BUT HE’S FREE TO GO. [Max: I always took the "crying" as a side effect of the beating, since it's only in one eye and it's the one that looks swollen on the final page. Maybe Massacre's blood is white? Or maybe Kitson intended it as blood but the editors toned it down to avoid implying Superman punched someone's eye off.]

I suppose Massacre staying would threaten Skimmer’s survival, since Massacre says he’s taking off to tend to his care, but still, this seems super weird and casual after they’ve built Massacre up as an unstoppable killing machine for three issues.

SPEEDING BULLETS:

You might be sitting there thinking an excessive amount of time is being spent on the characters Azuki, Case, Dis, Margo and Sinda forming a band, a band called the Riot Grrrls. If that’s what you’re thinking, you’d be right. [Max: Maybe once Kitson learned he'd be plotting the issue he said "Awesome, I can turn it into a backdoor pilot for my Riot Grrrrls comic pitch!"] Aside from taking up a lot of panels and not really advancing the story, I also have to chuckle at the on-the-nose band name, which Is also the name of a Pacific Northwest punk movement or genre. Calling your band Riot Grrrls would be as literal as naming your band “Seattle Sound” or “Grunge Music” in 1994. On the plus side, Dis mentions Bessolo Boulevard, which we’ve established is a reference to the adopted name of tragic 50’s Superman, George Reeves.

I had thought that Case’s mention of “Shonen Knife” was some kind of in-universe slang (the Legion books were always establishing future slang terms, as were off-worlders like Lobo, whose expression “Feetal’s Gizz” became almost like a catch phrase, or in Batman Beyond, the young people called things “shui”, an apparent abbreviation of the principle of feng shui) but that’s just because I wasn’t sufficiently hip to know that Shonen Knife was an all-girl Japanese pop-punk band. In our universe, even! So Case was dismissing her lyrics as being too close to a Shonen Knife song. Which one? I have no idea.

A little later in the story, the Riot Grrrls take up two more full pages to scavenge the rubble of a music store, called Tom N’ Nancy’s Music Mart. I believe this is a reference to frequent Karl Kesel collaborator Tom Grummett, and his wife, Nancy Grummett (a celebrated potter/artist in her own right, in these parts). [Max: And the store seems to be located in Grummett Ave., too!]

There’s also pop culture references, one to Teen Talk Barbie, the controversial 1992 Barbie doll who famously said “Math class is tough” (among 270 other less offensive phrases, including “I’m studying to be a doctor”) earning the ire of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The doll is misquoted in this issue as having said “Math is hard.” Lucy Lane also shows her pop culture illiteracy when Margo mentions lead singer/vampire harpy Babe Tanaka, and Lucy asks if she’s anything like Tiffany. Pop singer Tiffany (nee Tiffany Darwish) was largely out of the public eye by the mid-90s, and a far cry from a Riot Grrrl.

Seriously, it’s just so weird to try to give Massacre a heart, like he’s a big softie at the end! [Max: Whether he was crying or not, I still think he should join the Riot Grrrls and write a heartfelt song the sad passing of Skimmer.]

#superman #barry kitson #karl kesel #ray mccarthy #massacre #riot grrrl case #skimmer #lucy lane #massacre and the riot grrrls - skimming my heart #clark and pete: pool fiends

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