Simultaneously a celebration of a unique body of comics and a liberal application of salt to long-open wounds, DC Universe by Alan Moore is, as one would suspect, a collection of the odds-and-ends of Moore’s superhero work during his important, often tumultuous tenure with DC Comics. But for the exception of the author’s work on Swamp Thing and Batman: The Killing Joke, all of the work Moore did under the standard of DC Comics is here. Also included, presumably both as a lure for those who already owned the 2006 version of this collection and given the WildStorm Universe’s integration into the DCU under the banner of The New 52 (still called that, somehow, two years into the initiative), is a majority of the non-America’s Best Comics work Moore produced for Image Comics. The result is a volume that both unifies many of the comic books Moore did that are too short to justify individual collected editions while presenting the influential author’s superhero works in schizophrenic disharmony, the 1980s books of a hungry genius rubbing elbows uncomfortably with his more mercenary late-90s output, already largely an extreme response to his Watchmen and V for Vendetta.
The highlights here, of course, are two of the seminal stories in the Superman cannon, “For the Man Who Has Everything” and “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” Along with Superman/Swamp Thing team-up “The Jungle Line,” Moore only wrote four Superman comics, but they’re enough that his legacy, among other things, will hold him up as one of the best writers to’ve ever worked on the character. Moore begins each with the conceit that Superman is either in mortal peril or already dead, and works quickly to establish that fact in ways that are asynchronous to the Superman mythos. When Superman “died” in 1992, it was at the hands of larger-than-life monstrosity Doomsday. While titanesque marauders threaten Superman here, as well, big bads like Mongul and the Kryptonite Man pale in comparison to biology and ingenuity. In “For the Man Who Has Everything,” Superman receives a strange plant for his birthday that latches on to him and grants him a hallucination of his heart’s desire. In “The Jungle Line,” it’s a miracle fungus spore that survived the trip from Krypton, as Kal-El himself did. “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” feints with the threat of a Lex Luthor/Brainiac team, but Luthor’s mental prowess and Brainiac’s galaxy-spanning A.I. pale in comparison to the machinations of fifth-dimensional imp Mr. Mxyzptlk, to whom they are mere pawns. (more…)
