Towards the latter half of Batman: the Animated Series, Paul Dini ascended the threshold of outrageous comic escapades, trading in his dramatist pen for one that freely, joyously crafted bubbly screwballs, sitcoms, or broader pastiches, all lightly grounded in the dingy schematic of Gotham City and the most notable of which starred Harley Quinn, the loosest screw in an already unhinged world. Throughout Superman, he would stretch the boundaries of his comic creativity to assimilate the fictional extremes of a universe inhabited by aliens and magical imps into the familiar iconography of popular culture.
Lobo is the first of the bizarre characters that Dini plays with, and here he takes a morally abhorrent monster and makes him a grungy biker punk with a tough guy dialect that amusingly substitutes presumed alien slang for English vulgarities. His forceful sexual appetites and allusion to his eradication of his own species are mitigated by his bloated machismo and interchangeability with any alpha male ruffian in a leather vest. His stark white skin and red eyes do little to remove him from the all-too recognizable pop stereotype he so aptly occupies.
Often in science fiction, strange alien worlds are unconvincingly familiarized. Dini’s method of molding his strange alien specimens into clichéd roles renders the vast cosmology that Superman has at his fingertips less a stretch of fertile, anthropological soil and more a melting plot of clashing stereotypes humorously assigned to the least physically likely candidates. Perhaps he knows that no fictitious extra-terrestrial will ever be as strange or as wondrous as can be imagined, so instead it is best to fuse together qualities both recognizable and unrecognizable in the interest of comedy. If what makes Lobo so funny is his biker persona, then the story derives humor from pairing him with Superman so that they are whisked along in an intergalactic buddy picture.
Part one calls attention to Dini’s debasement of potentially brilliant life forms, by cutting from Dr. Hamilton’s query about the undiscovered intelligent life in the universe to a close-up of Lobo’s garish face, belching before he sparks a rambunctious barroom brawl. Another fun transition: before being subjected to the role of straight man, Clark Kent dabbles in some wry fun at Lois' expense. Calling to mind that Superman is himself an alien creature made familiar—he is physiologically and ideologically anthropomorphic—he and Lobo represent two ends of a spectrum of human behavior, and the only non-human attributes shared between them are their superhuman powers. Their confrontation is one of the most geographically expansive of all fight scenes, traversing the Metropolis police station, LexCorp and Hobb’s Bay, with quite a few stops in-between.
If part one is primarily a fun affair, then part two is more remarkable in lending augmented gravitas to the notion that the series progresses in a fastidiously planned sequence. Soon after Brainiac arrives to destroy the Earth and is thwarted by the Last Son of Krypton, whose uniqueness as the last of an extinguished race is an object of great attention, Superman is then abducted by a creature called The Preserver, who has set out to collect the last survivors of every extinct species. Both episodes are thematically linked, and each ends with a shot detailing the progress of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, which can be said to be a converse of each collector’s respective trophy chambers.
The Main Man is the more successful of the two, reluctant to dwell on dramatically bloated mythologizing and more content to be an escapist adventure. Even if part two is a never ending series of encounters with alien combatants each more grotesque than the last, Dini keeps the sparks flying between Lobo and Superman, milking every skirmish for maximum comedic effect. And even in the midst of all the comic chaos, there are a few surprisingly lovely moments, some of ephemeral beauty—as when Superman is reinvigorated by the rays of an artificial sun—and some that wink to comic book fans (one of these off-the-cuff references reemerges a series later for a breathtaking display of the creators’ imaginative tying together of seemingly loose continuity strands).
From beginning to end, The Main Man feels a lot like Dini, after having been suppressed from writing such a delirious romp for so long, vigorously letting loose and volcanically erupting out of a much-too-long hiatus from exercising his screwball muscle. Again in the secure realm of his forte, he shows no sign of running out of steam.
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