Dragon By Alan Grant

Although this is a Comics Appreciation Blog, I am now appreciating a novel based on a TV series based on a comic book series. But all is one.

Even a novel about Clark Kent can reflect our common experience of life. Lana Lang thinks:

"Funny how the past has a habit of slipping through your fingers. And the harder you try to hold onto it, the faster it slips away." (1)

That connects this book with any other novel whose characters reflect on their experience.

Seventy year old Miss Mayfern tells Lana that the man she loved was killed in Germany in 1945 when she was fourteen. We remember that an earlier version of Superman was alive then but, appropriately, the story of Superman is continually updated. Clark's and Lana's philosophy teacher fought in Vietnam nearly three decades ago.

We are in a different age but Clark is still growing up, as ever.

(1) Smallville Omnibus 1 (New York, 2006), p. 260.