SUPERMAN #180
"The House of Dracula"
Not Recommended (2/10)
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DC Comics
Writer: Jeph Loeb
Artist: Ian Churchill
Artist: Norm Rapmund
Colors: Tanya & Richard Horie
Letters: Comicraft
Editor: Eddie Berganza
Price: $2.25 US/$3.75 CAN |
When Jeph Loeb's run on this series began back in the fall of 1999, the first thing that grabbed me about it was his appreciation of the reality of journalism. As a reporter, the super-hero genre's distortion of the profession is a pet peeve, and Loeb is among a select group of comics writers who got it right. Here, he gets it wrong... dead wrong. Maybe the point is to set one's disbelief aside for the sake of a riff on the source material that inspired the story -- Bram Stoker's Dracula, to be precise -- but there's just too much in the way of almost laughable plot elements here. Suspension of disbelief isn't even an option here.
After years of living in seclusion in Eastern Europ, Count Rominoff is finally granting an interview, and he has chosen Lois Lane as the journalist to hear his story. But it's not her reputation as a journalist that interests him, but her apparent connection to Superman. Lois, Clark and Jimmy travel to his gothic home... but will they survive?!?!
Well, of course they're going to survive. What's amazing about the story is how obvious it is and how oblivious these seemingly experienced journalists are to what's going on around them. Dracula keeps bottled blood in his wine cellar? Fine, I can deal with it. But he labels them with the names of the people whose blood is contained therein? And that's not enough to send the Man of Steel into action? Things at The Daily Planet are so slow that Perry White can spare not one, not two but three journalists to travel abroad for a feature-story interview? Loeb is capable of far better than this.
Churchill and Rapmund's art tells the clunky story clearly, but that's about the end of its strength. Churchill's portrayal of female characters is predictably sexualized and gratuitous. An entranced Lois wanders around in clothing that covers only what it absolutely has to. The designs for the monstrous characters are rather familiar and uninteresting. The Hories try out an interesting coloring scheme in the early half of the book -- bleaching out skin tone and emphasizing blood red tones -- but it's abandoned for no apparent reason by the end of the book.
The shame of it is that there are a couple of interesting plot elements in this issue. Lois finally reveals why she's been distancing herself from her husband (or at least his caped identity), and it's a powerful one. Furthermore, the notion that General Zod has set himself up as a dictator in Europe is an interesting one, as is the idea of a vampire as leading a small neighboring nation facing the threat of invasion.
In the end, though, the cliched vampire plot elements bury those interesting ideas. Perhaps the intent was to poke fun at the Dracula legend, but instead, the story revels in how played out it's become.
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