All Star Superman 4 by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Jamie Grant

It's a funny thing. When you give credit to the creators of a mainstream comic, you have to decide how far down the credits box you want to go. Here I have included the colorist because he is also the "inker." Am I giving short shrift to the letterer. And how often does anyone credit the editor? Well, anyone since Stan Lee, since you know he always credited the editor. I give credit to those whose mark I feel when reading the comic. In this book, I can tell that Mr Quitely never inked the book, and that his pencils have been "inked" by Mr Grant with the help of his computer.

Grant Morrison is a smart writer. Certainly smart enough to play to the strengths of his co-creators, and I sense that Mr Quitely is getting the hang of it as well. He knows when his pencils have to be very detailed, and he knows when they can be finished in post=production. Mr Morrison's strengths are in the ideas, Mr Quitely's strength is in making the big ideas look big. His panels always have weight. The superheros are always super, and the cosmic ideas always seem to fill the cosmos.


You already know if you want to read this title, and if you want to, you probably already have. The best thing for me about this book is that it doesn't fall anywhere in the continuity that I'm familiar with. This is not pre-Crisis or post-Crisis or pre-Infinite or post-Identity. This is Superman. One we all recognize, which makes it all the more satisfying to realize that I don't have to think twice about a character doing something I think is uncharacteristic, as long as it fits the world that Mr Morrison is creating. And once I quit staring down the canon, I enjoyed the book a hell of a lot.