Okay, Superman: Lost #1… so, like I said, I have mixed feelings about Priest. Like with my favorite creator Grant Morrison, I appreciate the risks Priest takes with his stories. However, unlike my favorite creator Grant Morrison, I’m not always convinced that those risks pay off. There was some of that here.
For example, Priest, in his current form, has become a bit obsessed with writing his dialogue in a way that models how people ACTUALLY talk. The problem with this is that reading a conversation isn’t the same as hearing it. Hearing/seeing a conversation irl gives you things like voice intonation, speech pace/pattern, and change in facial expression that add meaning to the words that are actually spoken. You don’t get that reading dialogue off a comic page. So, when Priest does this, his dialogue becomes a bit more dense to read through and you may have to slow down/ go back to get full meaning. Sometimes there is sufficient pay-off to this like when he did it in his Black Adam series with the character of Malik White. Malik’s speech pattern introduced readers to a dialect they may not have a chance to run into day-to-day and makes a statement about code switching when you compare how Malik speaks in some contexts than he does in others. I consider this a good use of realistic dialogue because it adds something to the story that wouldn’t have otherwise been there.
In contrast, Lost #1 contained a dialogue between Clark and Lois in their kitchen that felt needlessly realistic. What I mean was, it was complexly structured like a real, fast-paced conversation between spouses, but that made it dense and clunky to read off the page. This was a piece of exposition dialogue, so it being engineered in this way didn’t add much to the plot or the themes than it would have if it had been presented in a more straight-forward way. Therefore, it was kind of obnoxious in the same way that Bendis’ dialogue is, sometimes, kind of obnoxious. Anyway, I’m trying to point out that I see the art in what Priest does, but I’m not always sure it pays off more than it hurts his story flow. This felt like a good example.
Overall, though, I really liked this first issue. The theme that really made me enamored with this issue was the concept of, what I would call, “ego death.” Priest quotes Kierkegaard to explain that this is a concept of losing one’s sense of self, losing the image of who you think you are. This is exemplified by the reference to the Senator who is forced to resign in shame over a scandal. One day, he proudly sees himself as an important politician, the next he is a public pariah who will have a hard time showing his face. To some, including Kierkegaard, ego death is worse than physical death since losing your sense of self makes life less fulfilling while physical death merely end it. This is heavy, heady stuff and it’s not every week that a superhero comic references Soren Kierkegaard, so this is what sold me on the story. I’m hoping that this theme gets fully explored throughout the Lost series.
Another stray thought: The concept of a superhero getting sucked into a space warp and losing time is reminiscent of Priest’s Justice League: Task Force character Triumph. It’s not exactly the same but it does make me wonder if Triumph somehow inspired this story.
Anyway, so far, so good! I hope Priest keeps it up!
uper-fan. I shall indeed.
.
