Ah
For Tomorrow, a story that reaches for the stars and almost makes it. It’s a story that has its fair share of fans, including DCEU Superman Henry Cavill. It is not a traditional story in many respects and yet it
is a story that may seem very familiar to some. In some regards this story personified both the virtues and the vices of the Post-Crisis Superman incarnation. So if you’re up for a trip back to a time when Supergirl was an angel and Jeph Loeb was the hottest writer in comics let’s strap in for Azzarello and Lee’s wild ride.
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The story has two main protagonists, Superman (obviously) and his confessor Father Leone. Leone is undergoing a crisis of faith brought about by the real world sexual abuse scandals rocking the Catholic Church being reflected here as well as a cancer diagnosis. Superman is undergoing his own crisis brought about by the disappearance of millions of people while he was off saving Kyle Raynor in space. One of the disappeared is Superman’s wife Lois Lane, and Supes has to cope with almost an entire year of believing his wife and everyone else who disappeared is dead (remember when Lois dying didn’t make Superman cuckoo? I ‘member).
Leone and Kal act as foils for one another, with each taking turns playing the confessor to one another. Kal vents about the cost being Superman has taken on his personal life, the limits of his ability to enact meaningful change, and his growing cynicism about humanity. Leone tries to guide Kal back to humanity while also harboring some desperate hope that Superman can cure cancer the same way he pulls off all kinds of other miracles. Meanwhile shadowy forces gather in the background seeking the source of the disappearance of people for their own purposes. This brings us to the first major misfire of the story: The main antagonists.
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Here’s the generic Jim Lee antagonists you ordered bro
The White Spikey not!Doomsday knockoff is Equus and he’s really boring. He’s also the main antagonist for something like 2/3rd’s of the story. As far as I can tell this guy has no depth to him whatsoever than to be someone for Superman to punch. Honestly I can’t help but feel that Metallo would have fitted so much better into the role Equus plays in this story. Equus is basically a merc freak who gets rented out by the not!Illuminati to help some revolutionaries topple a petty dictator in exchange for the device that was responsible for the disappearances.
Superman takes the device back to his Fortress and faces the heat from the public and JLA. Leone gets approached by Mr. Orr, a character who first showed up in Azz’s
Luthor storyline as a mercenary. Now he’s working for the Illuminati and has been dicking around in the background using pawns to get what his bosses want. Cavill likes this guy so much he’s the reason Cavill grew a mustache for his Mission Impossible role. I like him to. He’s your typical Azzarello morally unscrupulous mercenary but he’s written well and he’s a far more interesting character than Equus is. He offers to cure Leone’s cancer if Leone helps him get the device from Supes.
The final boss of the story is General Zod. I think this is the first time Zod shows up in Post Crisis canon as the main universe’s Kryptonian Zod who was exiled to the Phantom Zone. He’s your typical blustering egomaniac Zod, although he doesn’t scream “KNEEL” every five seconds which is nice. He hates Kal for being Jor’s Son and otherwise there’s not really much to say.
It turns out the device responsible for the “Vanishing” was built by Kal himself. Lois asked him what he would do if Earth went the way of Krypton, and in a twist I wholeheartedly approve of, Kal doesn’t just dismiss her concerns and tell her to “hope harder” but actually decides to DO something. So he carves out a piece of the PZ with the aid of Kryptonian tech and builds a virtual paradise with robot servants to take care of it, so that if the worst ever comes to pass humanity can avoided dying like Krypton did. I like this development. I like Kal being proactive. I like Superman actually trying to do a little prep time of his own. I like that he’s smart enough to do this and that it actually works until Zod shows up and ruins it.
The second major misfire is the ending. I really don’t like how Leone’s story ends. He betrays Superman to Orr for the cancer cure, gets turned into a freak like Equus called “Pilate” (notice all the subtle Jesus imagery in this story?) and is last seen punching Equus around in the PZ. That’s how his story ends and Superman doesn’t even really seem to care. In fact Superman is pretty damn cold throughout this entire story which is not surprising given who is writing and drawing it. Supes doesn’t seem to care that his PZ safety measure for Earth gets destroyed. Is he going to build another one? I guess not but we’re not really given another reason why. I like that he builds a base in the Amazon rainforest (and so does Morrison I guess given he calls back to this in his Action run). Superman does say that he realizes he’s been kind of a prick for the past year and he wants to do better and that’s nice. Hopefully Batman and WW don’t have any hard feelings about him being a dick to them.
So why did this book kinda flop in the long term while
Hush has kind of been viewed as a modern classic? Because while the two are very different, Lee was clearly trying to replicate his Batman success with Superman, and both this and his second attempt, Unchained with Snyder fell short. Well for one I think it had to do with the types of stories each one aimed to be. Hush was just Loeb riffing the Long Halloween with an in continuity at his prime Batman. It eases newcomers into Batman’s world by introducing all the major characters both heroes and villains, pays homage to iconic moments in Batman lore like his DKR fight with Superman, and manages to introduce some new components like Hush himself and letting Catwoman know his secret ID which are carried forward by other writers.
In contrast For Tomorrow seems to want to be a character piece about Superman but it doesn’t actually really have anything to say. It’s crammed full of Jesus references like Man of Steel and like Man of Steel all I’m left feeling is “so what?” Ok he’s Space Jesus, so what? He doesn’t save Leone or Zod, something that would maybe make the Jesus iconography work. He saves Lois and the faceless victims of the Vanishing but Lois was never in any real danger and we don’t really care about the faceless masses. Superman is a dick for a while until he decides to stop. The enemies aren’t traditional Superman Rogues and except for Mr. Orr aren’t very interesting or fleshed out. The shadowy bad guys behind Orr and Equus are to my knowledge NEVER revealed or even named. So why should I care about them? Why did they even want the device anyway? Who knows? They never show up after Azzarello leaves. Lee’s art basically carried this whole story and it’s really is prime Jim Lee. It’s full of beautiful shots of Supes tearing stuff up although I think Unchained manages to surpass it.
Ultimately I wish some aspects of the story had carried forward, like Superman building a safety net for Earth in the PZ. I wish Azz had done a better job fleshing out the villains or using more traditional Rogues. I think this story does have merits as an examination of an off his game Supes who is clearly bitter about how crappy things have gotten, but it doesn’t really do enough with any of the ideas it puts forward to really be effective.