Chapter Four: It's Superman!

I am not a Superman fan. Never have been - as a rule, I generally prefer Marvel comics, with Batman being my one exception. He's just so....boring. I have a hard time being invested in something when it's never a mystery as to whether he'll make it through this week's adventure (yes, I know the probability of Batman dying in any given week was very low, but hey, at least he was just a [millionaire playboy bodybuilder] guy. None of this alien stuff.). A superhero with no weaknesses is boring, and the comics as well as the old movies never made him seem interesting enough to get past that.



It's Superman! by Tom De Haven rectifies this problem. It's an origin story - Clark only gets to actually be Superman for about the last twenty pages or so. It follows him growing up in hickstown Smallville, and creates this bumbling, awkward, completely endearing character out of the vestiges of one of the greatest superheroes ever. This is where de Haven really gets it right: we get to know Clark as a teenage boy first. Sure, he's got all these powers, but wouldn't it suck to have to learn how to manage Herculean strength and figure girls out? De Haven makes Clark into a person we can recognize and sympathize with, who we really feel for as we follow him out of Smallville and into the wide, wide world.

The other two stories intertwined with Clark's are (of course) Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, both of whom are also treated to this humanizing reformat. Lois gets to let out her inner bitch feminist, and is entertaining to watch as she claws her way into the male-dominated journalism field. Lex is chilling as a politician-cum-criminal, and watching his development is the most interesting part of much of the story. He is never good - this is not a "fall from grace" story - but we do get to watch him accumulate lots of tiny, persistent cracks that (you just know) are going to keep building on each other. De Haven's cast of largely fabricated secondary characters, mainly lackies for Luthor but also a companion for Clark to play off and various boyfriends for Lois, work only for the best to sharpen and annunciate what we already know. WIlli Berg, who Clark meets, is especially effective at bringing Clark to a human level.

It's Superman! starts slow, but I think that it has to. In order to be new, to be refreshing, it needs to take the story we're all familiar with and show us why it's still interesting, why we're still so fascinated with the Man of Steel. I think that De Haven has certainly tapped into that hero-worshiping vein; we are allowed to gaze in awe at Superman saving Metropolis New York heroically, and also to wince when Clark can't quite manage to make a good impression with Lois. It's the perfect balance.

Not to say the book doesn't have its flaws - it is told in an omniscient third person perspective, present tense, which in my opinion makes the prose feel like it's whipping by you way too quickly. There are a couple of expository, background type scenes that drag the story down, not adding anything except pages. But I'm ready to forgive De Haven, because of just how much he made me like Clark Kent. Which was not an easy feat, let me tell you.