I’m going to do something a little different here. Not all comic book storylines are nice and linear. Sometimes, there aren’t even really continuous stories! Often, a bunch of issues of different ongoing series are packaged together in a collection merely because the stories are very loosely connected, or, perhaps they were all released at around the same time. This seems to be common with comic books up until the 2010s, from my meager experience.
Superman: No Limits is my first of many, many, many, many, many future forays into the world of loosely-bound trade paperback collections. I expect nine issues of individual Superman stories with different writers, cartoonists, plots, and even characterizations of Superman himself! And if it’s an overall good experience, I’ll try to knock out a few more collections from this era in the near future.
Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151 [December, 1999]
Written by: Jeph Loeb
“We’re Back!”
FASTER. THAN. A. SPEEDING. BULLET. I don’t know, man, it looks like those bullets are whizzing past him to me.
“Perry told me once, it’s not over until ‘The Bulldog’ is put to bed.” This is the very first sentence of a Lois Lane soliloquy. I’m bored already!
“The Bulldog” is the newspaper’s last edition for the day. “Putting to bed” means sending it to the printer. Of course, that’s just that day. There’s always going to be tomorrow. And there’s always going to be future days for a long time. That is, until the sun becomes a red giant, envelops the Earth, and puts everyone out of their misery! That’ll be in *checks watch* about five billion years from now.
I can’t tell for sure at the moment, but it appears that Superman is sifting through Daily Planet building wreckage. We see him hoist the giant globe that crowns the top of the building (or used to) and fly off into the Metropolis downtown area with it. Like Atlas bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders! Or something equally, or infinitely more, profound.
“The Daily Planet has gone through some tough times lately,” narrates Lois, catching us all up, especially me, “Lex Luthor bought it for the sole purpose of shutting it down. He almost put everybody out of work.”
That’s in the past already, though. I can assume that this was all covered extensively in Superman Vol. 2, Issue #1 through Issue #150! I don’t have to read all that right now until I get fired and divorced and have infinite time on my hands! Ha!
But, Perry White had good news for everyone. He just needed some “heavy lifting” and, suspiciously, Clark Kent slipped out of the office. Lois doesn’t know why. Maybe he was getting too horny and had to go jerk off in the men’s bathroom. Again.
Superman places the globe atop the not-destroyed Daily Planet building, from whence it came. Perry is on the roof already, and he gives Superman a hearty “Thanks.”
Gee whiz, Archie Andrews doesn’t want to make his boss all cross!
The next morning, Lois strides down the street toward the newly-reopened Daily Planet office building. “Feels like the first day of school,” she says with nervous energy. I don’t know how long the newspaper building has been closed, but my best estimate is seventeen decades.
Poopypants Jimmy Olsen races up and gets in the elevator before it closes on his freckled, pimply face. “So, why do you think Luthor sold the Planet back?” Jimmy asks Lois with his best crooked Joe Biden smile.
Lois doesn’t answer. She must’ve slept with him.
The elevator doors open and the hallways are filled with giant, framed print-outs of front pages with headlines like “METROPOLIS ON FIRE” and “DOUBLE TROUBLE” and “WHICH ONE?”. I wonder if something big happened recently!
Lois stares at one that reads “IT FLIES”, one of her own legendary front pages exclusives, and starts reminiscing about that day when Superman hoisted a rocket ship. Must’ve tilted on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral and made a trajectory straight for the heart of Metropolis! That’s unlucky.
“What was it Clark said when he first got hired…? ‘Guess I’m not in Kansas anymore.’ I thought he was talking about Dorothy, but he wasn’t kidding.”
Hey Lois, where are you going with all this, huh? Are you dying of cancer? Are you quitting your dead-end job to become a hot dog saleswoman? Maybe a little bit of both?
The office is full of people NOT working, but rather gossiping about the recent events and making hypotheses of their own as to why Lex Luthor sold back the Daily Planet. Maybe he missed the Sunday funnies BADLY?
Clark the Nerd is already typing away at his Window 98 with the Pentium II processor and the 14 GB hard drive. “When did you get in?” Lois asks him while making a total Hilary Swank face. Why, only SECONDS before you did, my good chum. He came in through the window in the custodian closet, which Lois doesn’t find suspicious whatsoever. I mean, everyone in the whole building has entered through the janitor closet window on the 70th floor at one point or another! Certainly!
Clark is working on yet another Superman story. Lois is about to berate him for having a big boner for Superman when Perry White interrupts both these hatefuck birds and yells for them to come into his office for some boot-in-ass treatment! And he’s wearing his favorite cowboy boots today, the ones with the specially-fitted toe spurs! Jimmy has to go too for some reason.
Clark Kent’s been hitting the Taco Bell XXL Grilled Stuft Burritos a little too hard during the furlough.
“I called you all in here so I could talk and you could shut up,” Perry White growls. Ahh, how he missed this. He’ll tell the rest of the staff soon enough, but White considers these his closest allies who have stuck with him through thick and thin. Jimmy too for some reason.
Perry’s looking to quash any rumors about him running the place. Not gonna happen! He’s had seven heart attacks in the last three years and he doesn’t want another one tomorrow, got that?! So let’s all welcome the actual new publisher: Ben Shapiro!
Ew, no! That’s a discussion for another time. Jimmy gets offered his old job back as a photographer if he wants it. It makes me wonder what else he was considered for. Janitor closet window sealer?
Lois is distracted by another framed front page hanging in Perry’s own office. THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN. Hey, that’s a pretty iconic story, ain’t it? I’ll have to hit it one of these days. In 2035. “Of course, Perry would want this one in his office. The hardest story we ever worked on.”
Clark gets offered a position as a foreign correspondent. You know, because he’s always ducking out of the office anyway. Might as well leave the fucking country and get decapitated by the Taliban. “It’s a whale of an opportunity, but it could be hell on a marriage,” says a concerned Perry, but Clark says that he and Lois can handle it.
So Lois and Clark are married? Am I supposed to know that? Is that what the TV show Lois & Clark was all about? That explains why entering the building through the janitor closet didn’t seem so weird to her, right? Well, that’s no fucking fun!
The one-man Trenchcoat Mafia has arrived!
Anyway, Lois is all like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What about ME? But she doesn’t get to know yet, because Lex Luthor pops into the office like he owns the place! Which he doesn’t! Not anymore! So he’s trespassing and should be thrown in an abandoned jail.
Jimmy asks Luthor straight up why he sold the newspaper. “Ah yes, tongues are wagging, aren’t they? I could hear them all the way over at Lexcorp.” Lex pivots to Perry. “You know why, don’t you, White?”
Perry wants Luthor to say it. All kinds of “YEAH I know, but, uhhhh, I want you to say it first. So, I can, like, confirm it, heh heh.”
Lex stares Perry down for a panel. “Simple economics. Sometimes unloading a bad investment is the smart thing to do,” he responds smugly. Perry doesn’t buy that. Obviously not. Because Perry knows why, right??
“I run Metropolis,” Luthor says coldly, getting right up to Perry White’s face close enough to smell his mouthwash and Vicodin breath, “I think it’s good to have a voice out there that opposes me. It makes it look more like a fair fight…even if it’s with a mouse.”
Tee hee. Luthor laughs at Perry White’s pathetic insistence to stand up for the Daily Planet. “You’re as much of this newspaper as the ink on the page. You’ll do anything to keep it running…” then Lex Luthor grins rather fatly in an evil red glow, “…even if it kills you.”
Evil fat Lex Luthor thinking about pie right now.
Time for Lex to go. Good seeing you guys! He’s gonna go wax his head or something. Bye!
“He never answered the question, did he?” says Clark, brow furrowed in consternation.
“There are times I wonder if Clark’s disdain for Luthor – and he’s got plenty of reason for it – doesn’t have a little something to do with my past with him…” Lois thinks.
Let me get this straight. I just got through all of Superman: Birthright where Clark has a boner for Lois, and Lois has a boner for Superman, and Lois doesn’t have a boner for Clark, and Clark is sad that Lex Luthor is mean and not friends with him anymore, and Lois hates Lex Luthor… and now Lois has a boner for Clark, and she knows he’s Superman, and also they’re married, AND she had a sordid, lusty past with Lex Luthor? What the fuck and why?
Perry White’s as impatient as I am with all this. He tells these three cretins, his best friends in the whole wide world, to get out of his dang office. They’ve got a paper to write! It’s not gonna write itself! All the news that’s fit to print and all that jazz. Move it!
I’m not entirely convinced that these two don’t have a sordid, lusty past as well.
And move it they do. Lois returns to her desk. Everything’s back to normal, huh? So why does it feel new and weird? Like some shoes you gotta break in for a while? Or, like, I dunno. A marriage with some guy you work with?
Speaking of which, thicc-ass Clark Kent needs to duck out to go visit his mommy in Kansas. He’ll be back in an hour. Don’t wait up! *smooch*
Lois muses on the biggest story of her career. One that no one can know about. She pores over a tiny little newspaper clipping with the headline “LOIS LANE MARRIES CLARK KENT”. It’s the day she married Superman himself. We get a full-page spread of their tongue-rasslin’ in a church. Looks like a sham marriage to me. There’s no way they consummated that. Kryptonians produce spores, right?
Superman is already back on his farm. Lois is kind of jealous of Clark’s closeness with his parents, mostly because Lois’ parents are dead or estranged or QAnon or a combination of all three or maybe just really, really stoned these days?
Old Jon and Martha Kent are hanging out on their large swinging porch chair when Superman fucking crashes into their house like a heat-seeking missile. “Thought I heard you, son,” Jon says passively. Clark’s parents look rather cornfed. They look like they write in to the Pluggers newspaper strip on a weekly basis. “Is everything all right, Clark?” Martha asks all motherly. Motherly love is just the thing for you, you know your mother’s gonna love ya till you don’t know what to do.
“Martha, dear, I think our hapless, dimwit son may have been body-snatched. Get the hose.”
“Whatever makes you happy, Clark,” his mom says, hugging him, the universal phrase from others that means “that sounds like garbage to me, but hey it’s your life”.
“Sometimes you’ve got to plant the same field a dozen times before you find out what you had there in the first place was just right,” wheezes old-man Jon Kent, dishing out some of that sheep-fuckin’ rural wisom.
Wow, wasn’t that nice? *fart* So, in no time at all, Clark is back at the Daily Planet. He probably came in through the laundry chute this time. Lois wastes no time making fun his mama’s boy bullshit, but Clark is distracted by a streaking fireball making a beeline right for the building. The sound of the streaking fireball hitting the street in front of the building sounds like this: “WHAROOM”. Again, I must state that I wish I could make a living making up comic book onomatopoeia. I’d be all like “BIZZZORT” and “CRUUKAAA-MCBOOOOOOOMSPLUT”.
“GREAT CAESAR’S GHOST!” yells Perry, who is drawn with his eyeballs a millimeter apart from one another, “Don’t just stand there, Lois, find out what in heaven’s name just hit us!”
That would be funny if it caused the Daily Planet to shut down again on the very same day it reopened. lmao
Lois takes this as the approval for her old job position. She tells Jimmy to grab a fucking camera and start hoofing it. Glasses already off, Clark is full speed ahead. Well, not full speed, I guess. That guy is faster than guns, if I’m not mistaken!
Use your eyes, dummy! No wonder I’m always looking for your keys.
Superman is Superman before Lois and Jimmy even make it to the ground. Superman’s all “what seems to be the problem, officer?” while a giant crater smolders in the middle of the street, disrupting traffic.
It’s not a thing that hit the ground, though. It’s a…uh, guy.
“MONGUL!” Superman cries in big red block letters. Mongul is a large, purple, Frankenstein of a meaty man. “I…hear the disgust in your voice, Superman. And while I bear my dead father’s name, you are speaking to his son.”
YAWN! I don’t care about this! Where’s Lex Luthor and his leather jacket? I don’t want to see the follies of MONGUL’S LARGE ADULT SON.
Well, things aren’t going well for Mongul The Son. He crash-landed on Earth face first because he’s desperate for Superman’s help. “You are the last, best hope for us all…”
I will remind the reading audience that this all has happened in about eight panels. Things move fast in Metropolis. Not like Smallville, where things…move…slowly…
We end with a flashback. Lois is in Lex Luthor’s ugly, furniture-free office working out a deal. Lex Luthor will sell the Daily Planet back in exchange for Lois Lane killing one story of his choosing in the future. It doesn’t matter what it is or when it happens. If Lex says don’t write about it, then don’t fucking write about it. She is not to quit, retire, or get fired before this happens. If you so much as make a sneery face at Perry White, so help him Lex Luthor will make you eat so much feces for breakfast you won’t even know where you asshole actually is anymore! Everyone she cares about will eat shit. The Daily Planet will eat shit.
“Despite whatever feelings I may have once had for you,” he concludes.
“Yes. We have a deal…” Lois responds with forlorn puss.
Final Thoughts
Saucy! Spicy! Whoa mama! This ain’t your dad’s Superman! Meow!
This Son-of-Mongul guys seems uninteresting. I hope I’m proven wrong.
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