Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Superman: Y2K – “The End”!
This one-shot issue kicks off the Superman: Endgame collection. Only five issues in this one, but I’m happy to sink my pointy teeth into it.
Without further ado, because why bother with ado? Ado is overrated.
Superman: Y2K [February, 2000]
Written by: Ed Brubaker
“The End”
Man, remember Y2K? Maybe you don’t. Full fledged adults were born after the ‘90s now. I remember Y2K, and I vividly remember my aunt stockpiling canned food and water because she thought that aliens were going to zap us with moon lasers or a giant volcano was going to rise up from the ground like a Dr. Evil plot. I wonder if she ended up eventually eating all that food. There were a lot of cans. Sorry, I bothered with ado anyway.
This issue is pretty fucking long, so buckle up for a fucking long post. Feel free to enjoy the pretty pictures. And don’t forget that, if the cover is correct, TOMORROW DIES TODAY! Whatever that means!
Back on December 31, 1620, before Metropolis existed, a pile of shitty Pilgrims showed up to North America to defile the land, rape women, eat babies, and all sorts of other white person bullshit. The Indigenous Peoples are scared and pissed and will prepare for war if they must! One guy in particular screeches to the heavens and fire starts raining down upon the land, which, by all appearances, does more to damage the land than to protect it! I’m no fire expert, though.
Men run! Women scream! Children burn! I go to the fridge and get some leftover brisket!
In short, this one guy was evil for covering the land with fire, so the Pilgrims and Indigenous Peoples band together to fight the evil. Evil is quashed. The red guy shakes hands with the white guy, and a bond is formed!
See, that’s exactly how it happened! Thank you, fellow white guy Joe Kelly, for revising history in an even worse manner than before.
We now turn to a jacked, bald man fighting with swords against two jacked women, also with swords, while some bean-counter in a suit takes notes in the corner. It’s December 31, 1999. They are in what I assume is a banquet hall with the lights off. “If one mongoloid in catering doles out even a single potato puff… someone dies,” the bald man warns.
The jacked, bald man is Lex Luthor. This is impossible, because Lex Luthor is supposed to weigh 45 pounds of sinew and yesterday’s oatmeal. “The hors d’oeuvres shall remain unsullied by lesser tubers this evening,” the suit says. “Your millennium gala will be perfection.”
Cool. Cool cool cool. Perry White of the Daily Planet will receive a special gift of Cuban cigars with a note “Here’s to your continued good health”. Ha!
First of all, Lex Luthor does not know how to fight. Second of all, who the hell is “Superma”?! I don’t like the sound of that!
Lois Lane will be getting three dozen roses and Luthor’s penis through a box of popcorn.
One mention of Superman causes Luthor to falter, opening up for finishing blows from the two ladies. Business ends of both swords are half an inch from his back when Luthor shouts “Waterloo! Or if you prefer… ‘Uncle’.” He thanks the women for their services and welcomes criticism! OK, here it goes: you’re bald. AND…
“Your form was pathetic. Your strikes random and undisciplined. You wield the hatchet like an overfed infant. Most shameful. Your concentration was broken – with the utterance of a name. You give the enemy too much power. Take it back. Fight better, or you will die, sir.”
Thank you, thank you. That will be quite enough. Throw these two to the pit of wolves! I will NOT let a woman talk to me this way!
Lex Luthor is actually grateful for the honesty. Pennington, Luthor’s assistant, fears for his life for allowing these two callous women to talk to the Great One in such a manner, but Luthor insists that is nonsense! He’ll die another time! For now, let’s just focus on the gala. “Now run along and put that Harvard degree to use drawing me a bath. The gala begins in three hours.” YES SIR, RIGHT AWAY SIR, AND I’LL HAVE THE RUBBER DUCKY READY AS WELL, SIR.
Lex Luthor has to snap out of it. Metropolis is his city, and tonight will be all about that. “Tonight, the alien does not exist in my world.”
Let’s see what Superman is up to… ah, he’s on a ship outside the Florida Keys beating up a ridiculously-costumed villain. El Piton, a smuggler/wrestler extraordinaire who is attempting to be a dictator of an unnamed nation “outside the Florida Keys”. My guess is Billings, Montana.
“What are you going to do, Superman?!? We have them under complete control!” El Piton cries, speaking of the civilians on the ship. “A word and they drown themselves! You can do nothing to us!!” His extravagant use of exclamation points betrays his nervousness.
El Piton had promised a life of freedom and prosperity in this new world he’s taking his people to… and then wiped their minds with his fancy-schmancy mind-wiping powers and tools. Like a clock on a chain or one of those spinning black and white spiral wheels. Superman calls his bluff and tells him that, sure, let’s kill these people! Then he punches El Piton through the ship, busting holes all the way through the deck and the bottom of the ship’s hull. Ship starts sinking. Nice going.
Nothing like a Titanic reenactment to snap people out of their stupor.
Of course, though, this is all part of the plan! The civilians on the ship are all like “whuzzah” and “where am I” and “hubba wut”. Then they realize that they’re sinking and are all “oh god oh no” and “we’re going to drown” and “hubba wut”.
It’s all good, though. Superman lifts this 220,000 ton ship with one hand like it was his own little dick. Everyone is saved. Happy New Millennium. *clocks go haywire*
Back in Metropolis, the people are “partying like it’s 1999” for 10 days now. Ah yes, that Prince reference! I miss hearing that every day for two years!
“Y2K!!! BRING IT ON!!!”
“The end is here! The end is here…!”
The streets have a mix of drunk frat boys and millennium doomers. Perry White walks in a trench coat and a fedora and catches Jimmy Olsen singing his lungs out. “Olsen, what in the name of good taste are you doing butchering ‘Auld Lang Syne’? You soused?”
Jimmy slurs his way through an apology. “Uh… no sir!” he stammers, telling his boss that he’s here to do some of that photo-journalism that he has been, uh, hired to do, sir! Perry White accepts this for now, because what the fuck is he really going to do about it? This scene is superfluous and I’m sorry that I wrote about it.
No lip from you or else it’ll be curtains, see? Curtains. Lovely floral curtains.
Clark Kent travels to his snowy Smallville farm where is 30-year-old ass is positively trembling with excitement over spending New Year’s Eve with his old, boring parents instead of his sexy wife. Something about new beginnings and unwritten futures and other such happy horseshit that people get all weird about at the turn of the year. I wonder if Jon and Martha Kent stocked 400 pounds worth of kidney beans and tuna fish.
Clark walks in and sees Lois pouring tea! Jon Kent reclines in his chair obesely. Martha pulls a pie out of the oven. Clark walks over and nuzzles her ear. Lois’, not his mother’s, although that may happen off-panel for all I know. Lois wonders how some smart guy smartypants McDummy like her husband didn’t know she was in the house, the guy with x-ray vision. He answers with a confident “hubba wut”.
Jon is worried about the dang ol’ Y2K draining his retirement fund. Clark reminds him that it’s New Year’s Eve, not Armageddon, but Jon won’t hear any of this city boy talk. Poppa needs his farm pension. Martha reminds him that half the world has already gone into the new year without nanorobot dogs munching motherboards from bank computers. So cork it and relax.
While Clark bends over the pie and inhales it up his nose, the other three murmur about spilling some beans to Clark about something. Spilling 400 pounds worth of kidney beans, that is. “We were talking while you were gone…” Lois begins with a sheepish smile, hands up in the air, “and, let me throw a phrase out at you, and let’s see where it takes us, okay? ‘Change of pace’.”
Hot damn! Lois is gonna let him put it in her butt tonight! Heh heh. I’m still making jokes like this at 35-years-old, please put me out of my misery.
I don’t get to read about what this “change of pace” is right now, because the story wants me to go to some secret basement floor of LexCorp where two scientists are chatting about making all the computer systems Y2K compliant and, also, flipping some switches to cause a blackout in the building at midnight for lol reasons. One scientist notices a blip on one of those machines with a constant sine wave flickering across the screen. “Satellite 356… oh God! No!”
Red herring! The “oh God! No!” is the scientist spilling his coffee all over the computer console, successfully transferring $700 billion dollars to 8-year-old Per Kristiansen in Trondheim, Norway. “The satellite spike has passed, so it must have been a glitch.” Well, that’s good. Let’s put it out of our minds forever.
Is it time for another pointless New Year’s flashback?? December 31, 1847, Hob’s Bay in Metropolis. Back then it was a tiny town. The merchant center isn’t making much profit these days. Hard times, plus an Irish invasion stealing all the jobs from honest, hard-working Metropolish-ipolitans.
Taste my delicious Molotov cocktail, bog-hoppers! I will burn your Irish asses back to, uh, the Blarney Stone!
The Irish aren’t welcome! Go eat a potato, you Micks! Grrr!!
“STOP!” yells a 1847 ball gown-looking dressed lady with a hat and everything. The kind of lady who fans herself going “oh me oh my” about her vapors. Edna Luthor speaks up! She stands in her horse carriage ready to address the mob. “I have never been more frightened in my entire life,” she thinks, “…but the Luthors do not run from a fight. Ever.”
“Lads!” announces a fat guy with a cigar. “Whatever this trollop is up to, she’s in with the aliens–!”
Well, I didn’t expect that. Neither did some other members of the unruly crowd. One guy in particular gets pissed off, saying that Dame Luthor is an ally. She ain’t Irish, nitwit! She’s also hot, so let’s listen to what she has to say!
The dame has prepared remarks! “Two hundred years ago, aliens came to this land…” OK, well, I’m siding with the fat guy with the cigar already. Aliens. Preposterous! Oh wait, she’s talking about Metropolis immigrants, the ones everyone standing there descended from. Let’s keep listening. “Tonight, outsiders came to our fair city again, yet instead of welcoming the Irish as our own, we take up rods and stones against them.”
It’s like, yeah lady, they’re the filthy, stinking Irish! Dame Edna Luthor makes a good point, though. And, thus, New Year’s Eve, 1847 was saved!
In the present, Lex is talking to his toddler daughter about how the strong are strong and the weak are, in contrast, not strong. The weak die alone! The weak can’t lift rocks! The weak pull a muscle jerking off! The strong build robots and sleep with hundreds of sultry women and throw shade about town. Don’t forget that, youngling. Now enough with ye! Lex Luthor doesn’t have all night to have you sit on his lap with your poopy pants butt.
I’ll flip you to zero, you little shit.
Clark Kent is grumpy! Here was the change of pace: everyone wanted to spend New Year’s in Metropolis instead of Smallville. Surprise! No more cozy country vacations. Enjoy the big rape and murder city as the ball drops.
Lois tells her hubby to stuff it. Just enjoy, and maybe next year they can spend New Year’s in Cancun before 9/11 ruins the next New Year’s.
Near the moon hovers Lexcorp Satellite 365. There’s a glitch again! That makes two. Seems like it might be the Justice League’s own technological interferences jamming the signals? That would explain that. *dusts off hands*
Something that looks like a giant robot spider leaps from the satellite and falls to Earth. I’m looking forward to 40 pages of a big spider rampaging Earth that’s not Dr. Octopus. Oh wait… he’s an octopus.
Clark can hardly believe that his dear beloved Pa would agree to spending his time in the city, but, per Lois, Jon Kent’s exact words were “I’d sew a sweater on a swine to get a look at them Metropolis city loons on New Year’s.” Did you hear that click? That’s the sound of me pulling back the hammer on my gun while I aim it directly at Jon Kent’s temple.
That settles it. Ma, Pa, and Lois pile into the family pick-up truck and Superman flies their ass to Metropolis. Pa’s trying to give him directions like he’s not Superman. Bitch, he’s Superman.
Perry White walks around Metropolis speaking of it the way Batman speaks of Gotham. MY city, this is MY city, check out MY city. People are going nuts. Stores are completely empty of champagne and canned goods. Meanwhile, he maintains his Incognito Mode as he makes his way to Luthor’s gala event.
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