Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: All-Star Superman, Issue #4 – “The Superman / Olsen War…”! In the previous installment, Superman feeds Lois Lane some piss-colored and piss-flavored liquid that gives her Superman’s powers for a day! A whole day! 24 hours! And it gets wasted by spending a good chunk of that time with Samson and Atlas, a couple of super-strengthed douchebags who both vie for Lois Lane’s company. She flirts with them right in front of Superman, which earns a hearty laugh-out-loud from me.

That’s about it. She enjoys her time being Superwoman and then the powers run out. Happy birthday, loser.

All-Star Superman, Issue #4 [July, 2006]
Written by: Grant Morrison
“The Superman / Olsen War…”

Get him, Superman! Throw a fucking car onto his face! Woop woop!

“That’s it! We’re through, Jimmy Olsen!”

I don’t know who this is, but it is presumably Jimmy Olsen’s girlfriend, who is dressed like a pink stewardess in a porn film. “You’ve just been named the worst-dressed man in Metropolis for the second year running!”

Jimmy Olsen is like, hey, that’s not fair, I was wearing my burlap sack that day. The one with the feces smeared all over it. “Make all the excuses you want, pal. Rock Hansom, the space pilot, has asked me to go with him to the opening of Frankenstein on Ice and I’m seriously thinking about taking him up on it.”

Oh, I see what’s going on here! Jimmy Olsen is dreaming! No wonder he has a girlfriend that isn’t currently throwing pots and pans at his dick.

“ROCK HANSOM!!! I can’t believe you’d be so shallow, Lucy.”

“Believe it, Jimmy.”

“This is outrageous!”

“What are you going to do to reinstate yourself in my affections before it’s too late?”

“It’s all because that gypsy cursed me with bad luck until the next full moon, right?”

Hubba hubba, sir. Let me get a piece.

OK, well, now that that unpleasantness is behind me forever, we can move onto the next morning where Perry White throws pots and pans at Jimmy’s dick. He’s reading the paper and fawning over Jimmy’s decision to dress like a woman for his feature “I Was America’s Sweetheart… for a Day”, which means it wasn’t a dream? I’m confused! I thought this comic was about Super Men!

Remember Quintum? Jimmy is at his laboratory while he and his assistants compliment him on his “For a Day” features. They love them. “I Was Hitler for a Day”, that one was great! Well… not for a specific population of people. “They take seven minutes to read, which, quite coincidentally, is the time I personally require on the toilet,” jubilates Quintum. Blech.

Quintum is showing Olsen his “P.R.O.J.E.C.Ts” for reasons I don’t know or understand. Who’s this kid anyway? No one gives a shit. Anyway, Quintum is going to present to Olsen some weird lifeforms called the Electrokind. They have brittle gas exoskeletons and eat a lot of Lay’s potato chips. “Their language is purely optical,” Quintum continues, “and some sentences in this greeting may cause instant blindness.” Sounds cool, bro. Let me take off my sunglasses and get a good look…

So Superman, that dipshit, he saved a ship of Electrokind when it crashed into Saturn’s rings. Quintum has become a buddy and now he’s been invited to their home planet! Bring plenty of chip dip.

“Bon voyage, Mister Q!” Jimmy says as Quintum steps into some teleporter thing where he’ll likely get fucking killed. And now, FOR A DAY, Jimmy is going to replace Quintum and be a mad scientist. He’s going to screw something up royally within 25 minutes.

What an awful premise for this issue. Real D- stuff. I want to see Jimmy Olsen be a corpse.

Jimmy asks an assistant what “P.R.O.J.E.C.T.” stands for, and he doesn’t get a straight answer. He doesn’t even get a curved answer. He gets an answer that squiggles its way up his butt and back out. Something about haikus. I’m going to make my own acronym out of it: “Pretentious and Repulsive Objectives that Jumpstart Experimental Conditions and Testing.” How stupid.

Mr. Jimmy Quintum Imposter passes by a vault door that says “Do Not Open Until Doomsday” and Jimmy is like “ooooooooh, I wanna open it!” He wants to see some good shit: “the forbidden machines, the black ops monstrosities, the things from other planets.” He is told “no.”

Agatha, the assistant, tells the brat that the vault contains an apparatus that can turn a regular soldier into an unstoppable killing machine. Just like the Venom storyline of Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight! Only with less pill popping.

Jimmy is being taken down to the basement tunnels to check on the portal to the “underverse”. They’re exploring a world of superheavy gravity. Like the universe’s basement. It’s some strange, spooky stuff. I hope you’re wearing your diaper, you’re gonna need it.

They walk on a catwalk placed over a large vat of “time frozen to a solid”. Some idiot on a cherry- picker smashes into the catwalk and breaks it apart, sending Jimmy falling into the vat. He barely hangs on to a steel beam. “Don’t let go, you’ll be crushed to atoms!” Agatha cries while Jimmy cries.

Here’s to that corpse thing I hoped for! While Jimmy struggles with his impending death, mild-mannered Clark Kent is in Perry White’s office getting verbally handjobbed about his latest piece on, like, toupees or something. Clark is completely distracted, though, and tries to get out of the meeting by claiming his oven is still on at home. Then he runs out of there like a bolt of lumpy lightning, turns into Superman, and flies over to Plant Hoo-Hah to save Jimmy Olsen from the whatever.

And he does, but the cherry-picker dumbass died in the frozen time stuff. “CAUTION!” blares a loudspeaker. “SUPERHEAVY UNKNOWN INFRA MATERIALS HAVE PENETRATED NORMAL SPACE!” Well, oh no, this isn’t good! Agatha tells Superman that maybe he should try getting out of the vat, please. They need to use black kryptonite to contain the gravity in a bottle! They found it in the ground, ain’t it neat?

Captain Motherfucking Obvious and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

So, yeah, black kryptonite = bad. But not really! For some reason, Superman has become immune to green kryptonite! Huzzah! “Can’t say I feel any effects from this sample,” Superman says, smiling wryly. “I guess I’m fine.”

Jimmy breathes a sigh of relief… until he catches Superman gripping the table hard…

“Like I don’t have enough to do without bailing you out of some stupid scrape every other day,” Superman spits at Jimmy in creepy black speech balloons. “You’d be dead without me!”

Oh no, the black kryptonite has made the Super Man evil. He tries to fight back hard, but it doesn’t work. “Jimmy, I… I know what black K does…” his eyes turn fiery red. “…it makes me bad. And you know what? PART OF ME IS STARTING TO LIKE THAT IDEA!” Then Superman attempts to blast Jimmy’s scrotum and taint with laser eyeballs.

He fights back again, grunting and moaning. “Jim. I’m in a jam. I need your help.” Then he turns bad again and decides that Earth is full of human pests. “Who’s going to stop me from doing anything I want, Jimmy Olsen? You?” Ha, yeah, that is a silly thought. Jimmy can’t even velcro his own shoes.

So, long story short, we need to stop Jerk Superman.

Better than an Orange Emergency. This one is cherry-flavored!

“Superman himself helped create three anti-Superman weapons.” This is narration speaking now. “One was kryptonite-powered and currently ineffective. The second weapon, the Phantom Zone Cannon will shortly be released from lead shielding and fired from an orbital location.”

We don’t get to hear about Weapon #3 yet, because Jimmy holds his hands to his mouth and goes OH DEAR, NOT THE PHANTOM ZONE! JEEPERS CREEPERS THAT’S AWFUL!

Agatha tells this bonehead that they’ll have no choice. Superman could enslave humanity. He could crack the Earth in half. He could raise John Ritter from the dead and continue with new seasons of 8 Simple Rules. Nothing about this is appealing!

Weapon #3 is Doomsday. That’s the one where we kill the whole universe! It’s foolproof!

Superman fucks back over to Metropolis where he bypasses all manner of security Voyager Titans and Bizarro Clones. He plows through the big planet atop the Daily Planet building and is all like “HOO-AH!!”

“WHERE AM LOIS LANE?” he bellows. Obviously black kryptonite affects his verbal grammar as well. No matter, I’m sure Lois is safe and sound in the bathroom of a Denny’s or something.

“Superman.” Jimmy Olsen has shown up immediately to the front of the Daily Planet building via teleportation. “I can’t let you embarrass yourself like this.” He sports a big, “intimidating” frown, embarrassing himself fully.

Jimmy holds a gun that looks like one of those guns they have in sci-fi shows where you inject a tranquilizer into someone’s neck. I don’t think he’s going to be able to hurt something with it. He may even accidentally inject tranquilizers in his penis. Anyway, this is the Superman vs. Jimmy Olsen part of the comic where they “fight”. Agatha reports via Zoom that Doomsday is too unstable and dangerous to use at the moment. Try pummeling Superman about the neck and shoulder area and see if that works!

GROG MAKE FIRE! GROG CONQUER WOMEN!

Or, we can try Weapon #2 and send our dear friend to blissful oblivion. Meanwhile, it looks like Jimmy reflects a laser or the sun or five photons off of his INDESTRUCTIBLE WATCH and zaps Superman for a bit.

Then some weird rock monster pops out of the ground and starts beating Superman up. I’m not kidding. What the fuck. The thing I hate about Superman comics is that there’s 100 years of lore so you need to read Action Comics #1 – # 900,000 and the other four million Superman series in order to know who this rock monster is and why he popped out of the ground and be like “oh yeah, that’s normal.”

Agatha is on the horn with United States of America’s President George W. Bush to ready the Phantom Zone Cannon, even though he’s probably busy with other affairs like polishing Dick Cheney’s pitchfork.

The rock monster is like “RRRRGG” and then zaps Superman with laser eyes. This hurts him, I guess. Not so super right now, are ya, you black kryptonite pussy. “What am happen to me?” he grumbles. “No fair! Me get weaker… Me am die now? No die! Me scared…”

Superman burbles and sniffs and looks pathetic enough for the rock monster to hold back and have this teary look in his eye.

Ok, I get it. Jimmy Olsen turned into the rock monster because they initiated Doomsday anyway. The Doomsday juice ran out, and Jimmy regained control of himself.

And Jerk Superman has been thwarted, apparently.

I’ll put it in my trashed closet next to my tax documents and my bowling ball.

Crisis averted! We’re good now! That was a really grim three pages there for a hot minute. Jimmy lies on a couch recovering from Being a Rock Guy for Two Minutes. It has been pointed out that Jerk Superman actually got weaker as he got meaner, which was awfully convenient. “Jimmy, I can’t thank you enough. I’m glad I can always count on my pal to think fast in a crisis.”

Then they smooch.

Agatha tells Jimmy that they just used the entire annual budget in one day. Jimmy says no sweat, my pet. He checked the balance of the P.R.O.J.E.C.T.’s Zurich bank account. It has an infinity symbol.

Now, if you’ll excuse him, he still has 10 hours left of his “For a Day” stint as the director of P.R.O.J.E.C.T. He has plenty of time to fuck a lot of other shit up.

Jimmy returns home after a long day of stroking his schlong, basically, to his trampy Barbie girlfriend. She asks how his day was. He said it was BORING. *wink*

Now they’re going to have really ugly sex.

Final Thoughts

Garbage. All-Star Superman is supposed to be one of the good ones! This was worse than that time Superman took a shit on Lois’ face (The Adventures of Superman Issue #7,712)

EIGHT more issues to go?! Oh man…