Saturday 14 February 2015

Smallville: Strange Visitors

Smallville: Strange Visitors by Roger Stern, the first Smallville novel, is set between two episodes of Season One, long before Clark could fly. It does open with him flying to the Moon but that is a dream but he has somehow traveled from his bedroom to the barn in his sleep.

This is a novel based on a TV series based on comic books. Superman began publication in 1938 but the Clark Kent of Smallville came to Earth in 1989. In his Acknowledgments, Stern writes that "...the story of Clark Kent as a young man...is never-ending and forever young. (Not at all surprising, when you stop to consider that he was created by a couple of guys in their teens.)"
-Smallville Omnibus 1 (London, 2006), p. 3.

What they originally created was the adult Clark Kent with a very brief introduction about his childhood. Elements added later were:

the teenage Clark Kent as Superboy in Smallville;
a later version in which Clark grew up in Smallville but without a costumed identity there;
this TV version in which a meteor shower hid Kal-El's ship from radar and meteor radiation bestows powers on Terrestrials.

Thus, the story is "...never-ending and forever young..." because it is continually changed and adapted. It is good that it has continued but it has rarely been done justice as yet.

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