All-Star Superman, Issue #6 – “Funeral in Smallville”

* Part 6 of 12 of the All-Star Superman limited series *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: All-Star Superman, Issue #6 – “Funeral in Smallville”! In the previous installment, Clark Kent gets an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with the incarcerated Lex Luthor. The whole issue boils down to the following:

“I hate Superman.”

“Waaahh, I can’t get what I want because of Superman.”

“My Superman obsession is not unhealthy! It’s NOT!”

“I killed Superman using the sun as a weapon.”

So if you didn’t read it, you didn’t miss much. All-Star Superman isn’t nearly as good as I was led to believe! I’ve got one more before I take a short break, so let’s just get this shit over with.

All-Star Superman, Issue #6 [March, 2007]
Written by: Grant Morrison
“Funeral in Smallville”

Oh shit, is Superman’s Pa gonna bite the big one? And more importantly, whose dog is that? And, even more importantly, didn’t anyone spring for some numbers for the tombstone? Birthdate and deathdate? Useless fucking chunk of stone.

“You maybe can’t imagine how it was for us… your ma and me, we’d been married, oh, it must have been ten years by then. And Lord knows, one thing after another, we both bitterly regretted that we couldn’t have a child.”

Final Thoughts

Pfft! That’s always funny. Anyway, old Jon Kent spent a lot of time praying in between masturbation sessions for a baby of his own to raise, neglect, and abuse. Then one day some kid in a tube bolted from the sky down to the fields, nearly scared the cows half to death it did! “A childless couple, blessed from above with a miracle boy from another world!”

Now wouldn’t it be quite funny if some other alien kid came down right now in its own space pod and landed on Jon Kent’s balding noggin at 75,000 mph? I don’t think I’d ever recover from the laughter.

Something does descend from the sky, but it ain’t no baby and it certainly didn’t land on anyone hilariously. It’s a dog in a Superman cape. “Krypto!” Clark runs toward the Superdog. “Where have you been, pal?”

Woof woof bark. Bark bark rowf. Woof rowf bark yip yip yip.

Clark pulls a dead tree up from the ground by its roots. “You ready? Catch!” He throws the tree to the Oort Cloud, and Krypto chases after it. Then Superman chases after him and everyone revels in the merriment and the love.

Dork.

In this version of Ma and Pa Kent, they look like a hella decrepit, old, fat couple. Pa looks like he has poop in his overalls, and Ma has all the diabetes.

Superman and Krypto fly to the moon and have a good long look at the Earth. It hasn’t been ravaged by irrevocable climate change yet, it seems, based on the blue part (ocean) and the green part (land). Meanwhile, Ma and Pa get accosted by a man interested in Pa’s services (blowjobs).

The next day, Clark notices three new men working in the fields. Ma tells Clark that Pa wants things done the old fashioned way and not the Super Guy from Outer Space way.

“Clark, I’d like you to meet our new farmhands,” Pa says jubilantly while he lets into the house a guy that kinda looks like Clark, a guy wrapped up like a mummy, and a tiny little man who looks strikingly like that Mister Mxyzptlk motherfucker. These are going to be Bad Guys, I can already tell. The Clarky looking hunk of meat introduces himself as Calvin Elder. The other two are thus far nameless, so I’ll call them Ribeye and Marmaduke.

Clark meets up with an old Smallville friend (Lana Lang?) to discuss the suspiciousness of Pa’s new farmhands, a thrilling topic to be sure. “Did the big city make you so cynical already?” says (Lana Lang?), forgetting the fact that at least two of the three farmhands are very creepy and very suspicious. Another old friend, Pete Ross, shows up to tell Clark he is indeed full of beans of all kinds. Lima. Kidney. Jelly. Clark is talking about how overwhelming the big city is, how much he likes farming, and how he hasn’t decided what he’ll be doing next. It’s all so very riveting.

Smile! We’re all ugly!

While Clark sits there like an over-muscled lump, he starts hearing whispers with this super-hearing! “…I saw him! It was the Kansas Superman!” “Ain’t no such thing.” “But he flew away…” “…with that old man!”

Superman goes catatonic and preoccupied even after Lana Lang (confirmed) asks him where he wants her to send that ugly fucking photo they just to. Clark pretends he’s going to shit his underoos and takes his leave…

Atop a silo about twenty miles away, Superman and Krypto observed “Calvin Elder” zipping around the farm like Superman. “See, Krypto? ‘Calvin Elder’ has superpowers and an action suit like mine!” I’ll give you an action suit, Superman. A class action suit.

The three “farmhands” talk amongst themselves. Something about how a chronovore ate a man’s life? Don’t care. Suddenly, they hear a faint heartbeat in the distance! As if there’s a person within a 45-mile radius! Let’s investigate…

Suddenly, Superman #2 appears behind Superman and Krypton, and Superman is floored that he was able to be snuck up on like that.

“Are you from Krypton, like me?” Superman asks in awe.

“No. I was born on Earth, Clark. 851 thousand years from tomorrow.”

Great. Time-travelling nimrods. Anyway, Kal Kent of 853,000 AD (although it should be CE instead, you unwoke scum). He’s part of the Superman Squad! Hut hut hike! A group of Supermen who protect the structure of spacetime by fucking around outside of their own time, apparently.

Oh fucking great, just what I fucking needed today. Someone get me my lithium tablets.

So these Supermen all have fun introducing themselves and getting to know one another and it’s all one big happy orgy. Anyway, they’re all looking for a “chronovore monster” that they’ve been hunting across ten centuries so far. Have you see it? About yea big and yea high.

“It’s come here to die… and spawn,” says Kal. “The distinctive energy footprint of the beast can clearly be seen in this frozen light image.” He holds up something he stole from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

Then the chronovore shows up. It’s a ball of little red balls with floating limbs and teeth. It is pretty scary, I have to admit. For a child. It’s all like raaawwwwwrrr lmao

“It’s aging everything it touches! It… it just turned Farmer Stone’s cows into the hamburgers they were destined to become!” Superman cries out as if this was even close to an awful thing. Sounds pretty fucking sweet to me. Well, good thing Klzzyzyzk Kzlazznazalt brought his “handy hyperpoon” with which they can “spear” the chronovore and “chain it with 5-D snares” until their “teammates” get there with their “tesseract cage”. The rest of the Supermen make slow jerkoff motions with their hands.

So, as it were, Clark’s getting in the way. The rest can, and will, and should, and shall, handle this without him! “I’m going with them!” he insists. “This is my home! These are my people to protect!” The rest are like “hands off, girlfriend”, but Superman blasts Kal with lasers and proclaims to the room at-large that something smells stinky and fishy.

Sloppy seconds again, Kzrtrzkzkkz Kntntlkplkzl? Thanks.

Clark tries to take down Kal, but Kal is too quick and fast and strong and smart and brave and cunning and dashing for him. Kal says Clark’s solar powers are merely in their infancy, no match for the swarthy talent of Kal from 853,000 CE! “Oh yeah?” Clark argues. “I have my dog!”

Good comeback, chump. The chronovore continues ravaging the land, turning animals into the food by-products they so richly deserve to be anyway. Meanwhile, one of Jon Kent’s “farmhands” congratulates him on a “heck of a harvest”. “You boys did a fine job,” Jon Kent responds even though they’ve only known each other since this morning. Oh wait, I get it, it’s chronovore time. Something about selling the farm and uprooting from Smallville. Whatever, I do not care.

Krzztl Krztztzlzl has the chronovore pulling him by a chain. He’s doing nothing to stop the chronovore, but he thinks he is.

“I tried to warn you,” Kal Kent mumbles as he witnesses Clark tackle the chronovore. “If you face the chronovore, it will eat a precious three minutes of your life. And in those three minutes… Jon Kent suffered a fatal heart attack.”

And here I am all like “what?” Incredible storytelling! Grant Morrison, you’re the best of the best and I’ve told this to a lot of orphans over the years.

Suddenly, in the midst of his fight, Clark can’t hear his Pa’s heart beating. “PA! PA!” This is Clark yelling “pa”. “PA! NOT MY PA! I CAN SAVE HIM!” He flies away.

Doofus.

…and finds his father dead in front of a dang scarecrow. Probably scared him to death! Ma always told him to get rid of the dang scarecrow!

“I CAN SAVE EVERYBODY! AAAAAA!” Superman screams, hair on fire. Laughing hard at this.

Nobody saves anyone. Next thing we all know, Clark has squeezed himself into a black suit and is now giving the eulogy. “Jonathan Kent taught me that the strong have to stand up to the weak and bullies need to be bullied back.” How very eloquent. The emotional capacity of a third-grader.

The funeral is full of sad faces as if people are sad or something. “He taught me that a good heart is worth all the money in the bank.”

Ma looks fat in her fat veil. “He taught me that the measure of a man lies not in what he says but what he does.”

The three imposter Supermen were allowed at the funeral too, for some fool-ass reason. “And he showed me by example how to be tough, and and how to be kind and how to dream of a better world.”

Much later, Clark is packing up to return to Metropolis. He doesn’t want to go, but he must. The big city beckons him! “I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” Clark says, hands in his face. Ma comforts him, even though it really should be the other way around. Ma lost a husband. Clark didn’t lose a husband!

The other three Supermen, far off in the fields, commiserate. Apparently, the chronovore is destined for the celestial zoo at Squad HQ, so they need to return to 853,500 CE. I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Mr. Bandaged Superman can finally take off his bandages, revealing himself to be Mr. Regular Superman! What a twist! “Thanks for the opportunity to see my Pa one last time,” he says, as if this could possibly be a treat to anyone.

Sorry, I’m hard on Jon Kent. Probably because he looks like he smells.

SuperBlondeWoman, Goldman Sachs, and Who-Cares-Boy!

Gold Superman has an indestructible flower from New Krypton! Consider it a gift for being so dang super! “For him, from all of us. In remembrance of all that we are. And all that we will be.”