Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
Longtime readers may remember my reviews of Love & Capes, a superhero romantic comedy about a woman dealing with being the wife of Supermanesque hero The Crusader. In one issue of the IDW run one of Crusader’s colleagues dies. Why do I bring this up? Because it’s how it’s handled that’s important. While the death is off-panel (rarely do we get to actually see any of the superheroics…kind of like the kid superhero sitcoms on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon) he does so saving lives. We see the heroes morn, how they cover for his secret identity, how his family (the ones that know anyway) deal with it, all of the work the heroes go through to make sure all the usual “coming back from the dead” tropes are unlikely, especially the evil ones. There’s a sense of loss and grief that so many superhero comics fail do, and without the usual reason–shock value to prove “@#$ just got real, yo”.
Compare that to the JLA issue I reviewed yesterday, where nobody showed up at Metamorpho’s funeral because death has become meaningless even with in the DC Universe. There are no morning civilians, not even his friends. None of the superheroes show up either. Everyone seems to think that he’ll be restored eventually (and I think he was), making even the pastor wonder why they’re bothering to bury him. It’s a death without meaning (although he does try to save the other heroes trapped on the falling satellite), a funeral without loss…and this is been par for the course with so many hero deaths. It’s because everybody wants to write “Doomsday/The Death Of (X)” but nobody wants to go through the rest of it.
“Funeral For A Friend” is the second arc in the Death Of Superman storyline. It features Superman’s friends and family each having to deal with not only his loss but the loss of Clark Kent, missing and presumed dead since he was supposed to be in one of the areas Doomsday rampaged through. While we the audience knew Kal-El would return the characters did not. How they dealt with that loss is an important part of this storyline and this next section of the novelization focuses on those 11 issues of the comic. How well does Stern showcase this part of the story? We begin to find out today.
