This week’s comics presented a stark juxtaposition between old and new, tradition and innovation, and as much as I tend to hate the new and the innovative when it comes to superhero comics, my reactions this time around were tempered by quality, which is always a nice way to have your reactions tempered.

The ‘tradition’ side of the coin came in the form of the second issue of Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale’s mini-series “Captain America: White” (they have a color fixation, these two – thank Rao they didn’t use it with classic “Superman For All Seasons”), which is, as far as I can tell, a completely straightforward four-square adventure featuring Captain America and his sidekick Bucky during World War II, fighting alongside Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos. I read the first issue with a strange kind of wariness – a wariness born of the fact that Marvel Comics is currently in the midst of a veritable lumbar-spasm of pointless, frantic, lunging, caterwauling “innovation” that’s giving rise to new series after imbecile new series and laying waste to virtually every old or established title they’ve ever done. There’s virtually no solid ground to stand on anymore in the once-rich Marvel Universe, so when I saw that first issue of “Captain America: White” at my beloved Comicopia here in Boston, I cringed a little, reflexively wondering if some writer’s new take on Cap was going to be that he’s a coke head, or a white supremacist.

It turns out I needn’t have worried – this Loeb & Sale schtick is so commercially and artistically successful that they’re obviously allowed to do it in all weathers, regardless of the lunacy prevailing in the rest of the company. The story they’re telling is just a fairly simple paean to the friendship that’s taken root between Captain America and his sidekick – with a healthy dose of rapid-fire exchanges between superhumanly idealistic Cap and gruffer, more pragmatic Nick Fury, who in this second issue quips that he’s fighting Hitler alongside Little Orphan Annie.

Our heroes were shot out of the sky over a stretch of ocean at the end of the previous issue, and as this issue opens, Bucky must make a tough choice to lug the drowning Cap to the surface: he has to cut loose Cap’s famous shield and let it float to the bottom. He expects Cap to be furious at losing his one-of-a-kind weapon (in the series’ only nod to the all-powerful Marvel movie franchise, Bucky comments on how Howard Stark invented it), but Jeph Loeb’s pitch-perfect characterization of Captain America makes such a reaction unthinkable: this Cap is every inch what he’s been for Marvel Comics for so many decades: their paragon of right. When he later gets his shield returned to him in a nifty splash page featuring Tim Sale’s rendition of the Sub-Mariner, all is set aright (although the Sub-Mariner then apparently disappears, neither helping his comrade up the side of an enormous mountain nor sticking around to help fight what’s at the top of it – it’s literally Atlantean-ex-machina).

Despite their very different power-levels and background-stories, the Captain America equivalent over at DC Comics – in terms of being a paragon of right – has always been Superman. That characterization has taken some serious dings in the last few years during the company’s “New 52” continuity reboot (the “New 52” Superman could never in a million years be suspected of standing for truth, justice, and the American way – more like arrogance, popped collars, and dating Wonder Woman), and those dings have only increased lately, since DC’s entire run of superhero comics is every bit as much of a flailing, screeching, foaming, raving pancreas-discharge of “innovation” as Marvel is, with virtually no characters or titles escaping radical and disastrously misconceived changes.

No one has been more affected by this than Superman, the company’s flagship character. At some editorial meeting somewhere, several writers who really should have known better obviously got together and said, “Let’s strip away everything that makes Superman Superman” – and the ongoing “Truth” plot line unfolding across all of the character’s monthly titles is the result: gone are the bulk of the superpowers; gone is the big red cape; gone is the ability to fly; gone is the secret identity of Clark Kent – Superman is outed to the world and is therefore forced, in this latest issue of Superman (with a variant cover by Kevin Nowlan in honor of the 75^th anniversary of Green Lantern, showing the pre-reboot incarnations of both characters, to the melancholy pang of readers like me), to make an online video telling all his enemies that if they attack his friends and family, he’ll retaliate a thousandfold (the specific thing prompting the warning is that Perry White gets shot by a man in retaliation for a crime he believes Superman committed, and this in turn prompts the issue’s best moment, when an angry, convalescing Perry White slaps the glasses off Clark Kent’s face – the John Romita Jr. artwork is typically brilliant)(although it competes throughout the issue with full-page ad after full-page ad for DC’s live-action TV series about Green Arrow, once again the all-powerful cinematic franchise wagging the dog of the comics that made it possible in the first place). When Lois Lane desperately reminds him that “an eye for an eye isn’t how Superman is supposed to work,” this former paragon of right tells her, “Maybe not before.”

Which is sacrilege, of course, but while I was reading this issue, I was struck by just how well-done a version of sacrilege it is. Writer Gene Luen Yang in this issue – and the writers of Superman’s other titles – are busily telling a story that should never be told … the Clark Kent secret identity, the cape, the powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, these things aren’t obstacles to telling Superman stories, if you’re creative enough … but as I was reading this issue and thinking back to all the earlier issues of “Truth” I’ve read this summer, I couldn’t miss how good it all is. As a tale of Superman’s world tearing apart, it’s intelligently and dramatically done.

And it’s not like this version of the character is my version anyway. We saw the last of that version earlier this year – except for this quick issue-cover glimpse.