SUPERMAN 4
Superman fights a new (I assume) villain called "Bloodsport", and gets some help from Jimmy Olsen -- who up till now hasn't done much.

This might be the best Byrne issue of Superman so far. It's still got the occasional clunker of a word-balloon, but the overall plot worked for me. And it was nice that Jimmy got to contribute so much to the story.

My only main complaint: What's with the jacket that Jimmy is wearing? Why is it so puffy? Jimmy looks like a goddamn clown. (I seem to recall that in the Joker issue coming up, Joker also wears this puffy-style coat. But he's supposed to be a clown, at least.)

Did people wear puffy clothes like this back in 1987... ?

Honestly, sometimes Byrne's creative decisions are just so baffling. Remember back in the 1970s, when Byrne drew that classic 1970s story, "Dark Phoenix," which took place entirely in the 1970s? Well, I seem to recall that everyone in civilian clothes looked ... pretty cool! And that was ugly '70s fashion! But Byrne made it look good.

Now in the era of his Superman, it seems like he's trying too hard, wanting to make his characters seem like they're really fashionable, but he tries so hard to be stylish that it comes off as more weird-looking than cool.

Of course if Byrne had a likable online presence, something like his big-ass coats would just be a charming quirk. Instead it annoys, because Byrne always acts like he's the only person who does comics "THE RITE WAY" and yet there are so many comics artists who can draw normal coats so what the fock, man.

Annnnyway.

It's fun to pick nits when it comes to ol' Flame-About-This-High-Guy, but actually I thought this one was really solid. The Vietnam stuff is arguably a little heavy-handed, but ... back in the 1980s, EVERY story about Vietnam was heavy-handed.

Bloodsport isn't going to ever join the pantheon of classic Superman villains, but for the purposes of this story, he worked. Giving Superman an enemy whose gimmick is guns and armaments is a fairly novel idea, really. Of course, a character with a ton of guns is ALSO very '80s, but in a Superman story it's something different. I thought it worked.

I don't know, I just liked it, okay? IS THAT SO WRONG?


1. Man of Steel 1
2. MoS 2 ***
3. MoS 3
4. MoS 4
5. MoS 5 ***
6. MoS 6
7. Superman 1 ***
8. Action Comics 584
9. Superman 2 ***
10. Adventures of Superman 424
11. Adventures of Superman 425
12. Action Comics 585
13. Superman 3 ***
14. Adventures of Superman 426
15. Action 586 ***
16. Superman 4 ***

They'll both change their mind once they catch up on this thread.

What did I say? And do I still agree with me?

I do like the work of both Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway. We're from the same generation (Jurgens is only a few months my senior) and read many of the same comics as children. So they have a first-hand grasp of Silver Age writing and art that shines through all their work.

As artists, they also both have that rare quality of being able to make any character they draw look "right", so they're great at doing crossovers. Very few artists can pull it off, even supremely talented ones like Steve Ditko, Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane... when I was little, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson made every character look right.

Bloodsport is such a '90s name.Sounds more like a character from an Image comic. Forward thinking JB does it again..
Like the "flat tire" joke.JB can be funny on purpose.
This was the debut of Maggie Sawyer,and maybe also the debut of Karl Kesel's inks,who gave JB some of his best looking art.
Dunno about the coats,but Jimmy is still sporting a bow tie. Plus la change...

If the bow tie were the only goofy thing Jimmy was wearing, I'd be on board. The bow tie plus the puffy coat ... just distractingly weird.

Kesel is awesome!

Maggie is a great addition to the mythos. Kudos to JB on that one.

Chris Claremont tried to name a Wolverine villain "Bloodsport" about a year or two after this. (Kind of like how he created his own "Malice" in X-Men after Byrne did a "Malice" in Fantastic Four.) I don't know if DC came at Marvel over the Bloodsport thing or what, because when the time came for the character to appear in the first issue of OHOTMU "Update '89," he was now "Bloodscream." And under "Previous aliases" they DIDN'T say Bloodsport, as if they were trying to just sweep it all under the table. Bloodscream he has been, ever since, and the idea is that he was always Bloodscream, from the very start.

But the real ones remember. Claremont gave us the ORIGINAL Bloodsport -- with "original" in this case meaning the one after JB's Bloodsport, and also well after the Van Damme movie.

I like Jerry Ordway's art it's just that he was saddled with poor stories on AOS for the first year. Marv Wolfman wrote a better Luthor than John Byrne, but the other villains were pretty poor and he was reusing a number of ideas from his New Teen Titans run. I know at this point Wolfman had said he was suffering from bad writer's block as well.

The whole plot involving the group called The Circle seemed to have no point.

Well, what would anybody expect from a plot about about a circle? Circles in general are pretty pointless.