Originally Posted by
Ascended
The problem with Action 775......man, I have written huge, essay-like posts about this......but I'll try to keep it really brief.
Clark fails to prove his point. On every single level, in every single case, Clark loses the debate. The one example from the issue that clearly comes to mind (it's been years since I read it) is the argument about the prison system while the Elite and Superman fight a few aliens and their MiB-esque handlers. The Elite explain that the criminals Clark puts in jail often get recruited into worse gangs and, in this case, end up selling weaponized aliens on the black market that are used as WMD's not just on earth, but other worlds. Those crooks Clark imprisons get sucked into deeper, more evil forms of criminal activity and it results in even more death and destruction. And in this example, as with all the others in the issue, Clark has no rebuttal.
Clark even seems to lose the fight for public approval, as we see two women discussing the topic and deciding that it'd be better if someone just melted the Joker (or whoever) rather than try to imprison him. So it seems that even the people of Metropolis aren't on Clark's side.
And at the end of the issue, Clark just beats the hell out of the Elite and then preens as if he won the moral high ground, when all he did was win a fist fight. He didn't prove them wrong. He didn't once offer a viable counter-argument. All he did was punch them harder than they punched him.
Clark's hypocrisy is clear as well. In that continuity he hadn't yet taken a lot of lives, but he had indeed already killed people and worked closely with other heroes who had also killed, like Arthur and Diana.
And then there's all the other stuff that Clark never mentions. The Elite destroy huge chunks of cities in their fights, resulting in the deaths of countless people and millions in property damage. Clark says nothing about that, and only takes issue with them killing villains.
Clark lets the whole thing become personal and acts recklessly. He knows the Elite are powerful, he knows they'll kill him if they can, and instead of calling in the League for support he decides to endanger his life by taking them on alone, as if that'll prove that he's right. And because the entire world often rests on his shoulders, he's not only endangering his own life, but the fate of the entire world in a selfish attempt to prove his point. He's trying to make himself look like the responsible person in the argument, but his hot-headed actions show that he's no more mature than the Elite.
The Elite force a sentient creature into slave labor as their ship/HQ, and Clark says nothing about it and makes no attempt to save it when he's on board. He does, eventually, rescue the thing, but only as a way to hurt the Elite and only after letting the creature suffer for a few more days, which strikes me as being a very un-Superman like thing to do. He didn't save it because it was a living thing and deserved freedom, he saved it because it would piss off Manchester Black.
And all of that is just off the top of my head. There's other issues in 775, and Clark shows his hypocrisy in other ways as well, but I did say I would try to keep this brief, so.......