Smallville #7

March 13, 2004

Quick Rating: Good
Title: Chronicle & Parenthood

Chloe Sullivan gets a visitor that dredges up a case from the past.

Writer: Clint Carpenter
Pencils: Tom Derenick & Tom Grummett
Inks: Adam DeKraker & Kevin Conrad
Colors: Guy Major & Trish Mulvihill
Letters: Rob Leigh
Editor: Tom Palmer Jr.
Cover Art: John Van Fleet
Publisher: DC Comics

DC comics and the WB network begin a multimedia assault with a story that picks up a thread from a season one episode of Smallville, continues on the show’s website and will wrap up two months from now in the next issue of the comic book. If you’re going to do a story like that, this is the way to do it – “Chronicle” is a story that has a fairly satisfying ending to it, even if you don’t decide to log on to the website and check out how it continues, but the option to keep reading is there if you want it.

A man arrives on Chloe’s doorstep with new information about the mysterious “Level Three” that Luthorcorp moved out of Smallville under mysterious circumstances. Chloe and Clark go out to investigate. In a back-up story, Jonathan and Martha Kent get stranded on the side of the road due to a series of Clark-related mishaps. The backup is a quick funny story with a predictably sappy ending, but in the context of the television show it works fairly well.

It’s always a challenge, when adapting a TV show or movie, to draw characters that resemble the real actors without completely surrendering the storytelling needs of a comic book. Tom Derenick does a great job with this – his characters look enough like Allison Mack and Tom Welling to remind us that there is a TV show but he never sacrifices the conventions of comic storytelling. Tom Grummett isn’t quite as successful at this – his faces, especially John Schneider as Jonathan Kent, tend to be a bit over-detailed, but overall, the story looks all right.

This issue also includes a few text pieces – an article about visual effects on the program, the beginning of the season two episode guide and a weird “Voices From the Future” report that uses that annoying internet technique of substituting numbers for letters. You’re welcome to try to decipher it if you want – I got frustrated in two sentences.

This is a decent comic book, but I don’t think it gets used to its fullest potential. I’ve never seen an issue outside of comic book stores. This should be out there on magazine racks where kids and teenagers who watch the TV show can find it, read it and hopefully make the transition to other comic books. It’s time DC learned how better to market the best tool for grabbing new readers they currently have.

Rating: 7/10

Superboy (2010 Series) #1

November 18, 2010

Title: Smallville Attacks Part One

Writer: Jeff Lemire
Art: Pier Gallo
Colorist: Jamie Grant
Letterer: John J. Hill
Cover: Rafael Albuquerque
Editor: Matt Idelson
Publisher: DC Comics

Superboy celebrates the return of his own ongoing the way characters have done for years – with the Phantom Stranger showing up and warning him about the future in very cryptic terms that may have huge repercussions for Conner Kent and for Smallville itself. Jeff Lemire has, until now, been content to work on low-key books like his indy work and his Vertigo title, Sweet Tooth, but this is his first time helming a superhero title from one of the big two. Well, unless you count his Atom second feature from Adventure Comics. But I digress, this issue takes us into what he does best – portraying small town life gone awry.

As Superboy tries to keep up with ordinary smalltown life again, things are tossed into chaos when the Parasite attacks. His real goal, of course, is a feast of Superman, but he’ll gobble up Superboy’s power as an appetizer if he has a chance. The battle sequence is pretty good, although it’s a little unclear just how the final attack of the battle works, considering the power sets of the two characters. To be fair, though, the action isn’t nearly as important to this story as the character stuff, and that’s where Lemire shines. He’s got a take on Superboy that works very well – the big city boy trying to get along in the small town, an odd supporting cast including a potential love interest that happens to be Lex Luthor’s niece (although now that I think about it, doesn’t that kinda make her Conner’s first cousin?) and plenty of fun with Krypto. Lemire’s work with these characters is impeccable.

We also get nice interior artwork by Pier Gallo, who manages to capture the rustic feel of Smallville and inject it with the superhero action that gets the asses in the seats. Rafael Albuquerque tops things off with a wonderful cover, one of the best we’ve ever had of Conner (and, to be frank, a far superior cover to the variant by John Cassaday).

I really enjoyed this book – a nice step towards expanding the Superman corner of the DC Universe.

Rating: 8/10

Superman Secret Files 2004

June 29, 2004

Quick Rating: Necessary
Title: Suicide Watch & BiPolar Disorder

How to piece together the Superman universe.

Writers: Geoff Johns, Jeremy Johns, Greg Rucka & Mike McAvennie
Pencils: Jim Fern & Jon Bogdanove (plus several others on profile pages)
Inks: Lary Stucker & Jon Bogdanove (plus several others on profile pages)
Colors: Sno-Cone, Dave McCaig (plus others on profile pages)
Letters: K.L. Fletcher & Jared Fletcher
Editors: Eddie Berganza & Ivan Cohen
Cover Art: Ed McGuinness, Dexter Vines & Dave Stewart
Publisher: DC Comics

The best installments of DC’s “Secret Files” series are those books that fill in the blanks of a title, giving you greater understanding and appreciation of the book as a whole. The worst are completely superfluous and give you absolutely nothing to sink your teeth into. This is a first, though, this is the first time I’ve read a “Secret Files” that feels absolutely essential to understand the goings-on of the four regular Superman titles (Superman, Adventures of Superman, Action Comics and Superman/Batman).

The bulk of the work is done by Geoff Johns and Jeremy Johns in a story that wraps up the loose ends of the Lex Luthor presidency and includes a nice little throwdown with the Suicide Squad, now targeting their former boss, Amanda Waller. We are finally given an explanation as to why Pete Ross agreed to be Luthor’s vice-president in the first place in a very nice sequence that ties into the new version of Superman’s origins as detailed in Superman: Birthright (which, in turn, feels more and more like it’s trying to be a bridge to Smallville every day, especially with stories like this). The artwork, by Fern and Stucker, isn’t quite as strong. The best sequence is the flashback scene, where they’re trying so hard to make the characters look like the actors from the TV show that it’s almost painful. They do a good Tom Welling in Clark, but the rendition of Lana Lang looks terribly forced. Credit where credit is due – their Superman does look like a grown-up version of Welling in tights, but he’s almost too youthful, too blocky.

Rucka and Bogdanove serve up the second story in this book, “BiPolar Disorder,” a wonderfully silly tale that tries to reconcile the various incarnations of Mr. Mxyzptlk. I really don’t understand the venom Mxyzptlk gets in some circles of fandom – I’ve always found him to be a delightfully silly character that brings some much-needed comic relief once in a while, and I always love seeing Bogdanove’s pencils – if ever there was an underrated Superman artist, it was him. This issue doesn’t illuminate the regular titles that much, but does serve as something of a “secret files” for Mxyzptlk himself.

Then there are the profile pages – Gog, The Shack, Replikon, Lt. Lupe Teresa Leocadio-Escudero, Father Daniel Leone, Eradicator, Preus, Mr. Majestic and Supergirl (drawn by Michael Turner, for you completists out there). In short, every character that’s been introduced or revamped since the “Godfall” storyline earlier this year. These, along with the Johns story, make the book a necessity – it fills you in on everything, gives a more logical angle to Clark Kent’s demotion at the Daily Planet and even puts to rest the burning question of whether or not Superman should actually remember having fought Gog before over in Action Comics (he should, damn it).

Typically, I wouldn’t recommend a “Secret Files” unless I found it particularly enjoyable or enlightening. This is the first time I would say you need a “Secret Files” issue just to keep up, and that says a lot more about the current state of the Superman titles than it does about this issue itself.

Rating: 8/10

Superman: Birthright #5

November 2, 2003

Quick Rating: Great

A new-to-Metropolis Superman is re-introduced to Lex Luthor.

Writer: Mark Waid
Pencils: Leinil Francis Yu
Inks: Gerry Alanguilan
Colors: Dave McCaig
Letters: Comicraft
Editor: Eddie Berganza
Cover Art: Leinil Yu & Gerry Alanguilan
Publisher: DC Comics

This issue serves very well to serve my theory that Superman: Birthright is Mark Waid’s attempt to create a bridge between current DC continuity and the wildly popular Smallville television series. And you know what? I’m fine with that.

Superman, on his first day of working as Clark Kent at the Daily Planet, thwarts an invasion of Metropolis by a squadron of black ops-style helicopters that leads him to an old acquaintance. The confrontation between Superman and Luthor does not fit in the post-Crisis continuity, but it would be perfectly in-character between Tom Welling’s Clark and Michael Rosenbaum’s Lex ten years in the future.

Yu continues to impress with pencils that, at times, seem reminiscent of Walter Simonson, especially with the impressive ways he visually displays some of Superman’s non-visual powers, such as a sequence where we “see” him isolate a radio signal that he’s actually picking up with his super-hearing. Despite such similarities, though, Yu’s style is all his own and he is deservedly on his way to becoming the next comic book superstar.

If you know someone who watches Smallville but has never read a Superman comic book, here’s your chance to hook them. Hand them the first five issues of Superman: Birthright and say, “here’s what’s going to happen to them.” They will not be disappointed.

Rating: 9/10

(2010 Note: Of course, in the years since this review was written, Superman’s history has been re-written yet again, and Smallville has gone in totally different directions. Still, for the time, I think my comments were valid.)