Smallville: Zero

This is a good episode because:

there is no mention of meteors or meteoric powers;
the dead guy apparently alive again is just a double, not a ghost, zombie or metamorph;
the young Lex remains a self-sacrificing but calculating guy in the midst of darkness, death and deception;
the Talon opens;
Central City and Bludhaven are mentioned;
Chloe looks good;
she stays in character, digging into Clark's past, wanting to keep his friendship but saving the evidence that there is a mystery around his adoption;
Jonathan Kent spurns Lex's offer of financial help and Lex is clearly unhappy about this;
Clark uses X-ray vision a couple of times and super speed once and that is it with the powers;
there is good scenery around the Kent farm;
the Zero Club looks a bit like a place some of us from Lancaster go to in Preston.

Can it get any better than this with a retelling of Superman's early life?

Reporting LuthorCorp Industrial Relations

On pp. 133-137 of the Smallville novel, Whodunnit by Dean Wesley Smith (Smallville Omnibus 2, London 2006), Chloe Sullivan works late in the Torch office at Smallville High School, reviewing recent events:

a group of LuthorCorp employees had talked to a union about improving working conditions at the Smallville plant;

Lex Luthor met this group and, although he did not want the plant to be unionised, did seem amenable to making changes that would benefit the work force;

two days later, every worker that had been connected with possible union activity was laid off;

however, the layoff notices came from the Metropolis office;

Lex, interviewed by Chloe, had promised to do the right things for the laid off employees, adding that it was illegal to fire anyone for union activity but that on this occasion he was obliged to act on his father's orders;

everyone said that this rang false but Lex had not rung false to Chloe.

Why do I value this passage? It is authentic real life stuff about journalism and industrial relations and is as far away from Superman as you can possibly get, the only discernible connection being the name of Superman's main adversary. These two major characters, Chloe and Lex, have taken centre stage.

I think we could have more fiction set in the DC Universe but focusing on citizens who do not fly or wear colourful costumes. Millions of people live in Metropolis and Gotham City reading the Daily Planet with Lexcorp or Wayne Tech ads in the background and with superhero activities reported in the news or discussed in Congress. Superheroes are an acknowledged mysterious powerful presence as the gods were to the Greeks, Romans or Vikings but the average person is as unlikely to meet Superman as they are to meet a politician or celebrity - but what would it be like to live in such a world?

Wow, Chloe Sullivan (And Allison Mack)!

What's not to like? -

a really cool character, specially created for the Smallville TV series;
also starring in The Chloe Chronicles on the web;
at one stage, accepts a job offer from Lionel Luthor (but I do not know the outcome of this);
has a thing for Clark but later marries Jimmy Olsen, then Oliver Queen!;
friendly with Pete Ross but never got together with him;
Allison Mack, who plays Chloe, had a big input into how the character developed;
continues into the Smallville comic where she becomes pregnant;
some fans thought that she would later change her name to Lois;
wow!

Imagine not only playing a part on TV but then seeing yourself drawn in the comic. I thought I was getting mixed signals about whether Chloe, while in Smallville, lived with both parents or only with her dad so I googled and got the impression that there is a mother but she is not always around (?) and that Allison Mack conferred with Editorial to work out this part of the character's background.

When Lois Lane had her own comic, it was all about her relationship with Supes but, in The Chloe Chronicles, a supporting character of the pre-Superman Clark Kent runs with her own series. In the Smallville novel, Whodunnit by Dean Wesley Smith, a ten and a half page chapter describes how the hero Lex faces down the FBI in his search for his kidnapped father and many chapter sections are narrated from Chloe's point of view. Here, we are at the furthest possible remove from the original Superman comics. First, we come forward many decades to an Internet Age version of the character, presented not in comic strips but on TV and in prose fiction. Then we go back ten years to before he was a superhero. Then we follow the separate exploits of these two major supporting characters, Lex and Chloe.

The Understated Clark And The Heroic Lex

In Whodunnit by Dean Wesley Smith (Smallville Omnibus 2, London, 2006), Chloe, Clark and Lana have found two bodies in a pond at the Franklin farm and alerted the police. Later, investigating a second pond hidden in a swamp at the back of the farm, they see from a distance flannel and human hair on a tree and again contact the police. Clark alone has discerned two human bodies among the weeds but must wait, like everyone else, for police divers to recover a body that can be identified as a third murdered Franklin.

This is a far cry from the Superman that Clark will become or even from the Superboy that he was in earlier versions of the story. Apart from his more acute vision, he is just one of the crew. There are a couple of less obvious differences. He does not sweat. Insects rarely bite him and do not like it when they do. As for his special vision, Chloe notices:

"Clark...looked past her, staring at the spot where the divers had gone down. She doubted that he was really looking there. He seemed to be seeing something beyond all of them." (p. 109)

In one of the comics, Lois Lane comments on Clark Kent zoning out yet again. Chloe calls him "Eagle Eyes" and quips that he has "X-ray vision" (pp. 87, 82). It would be difficult to conceal the use of such powers especially when sharing information with someone as observant and suspicious as Chloe.

In Metropolis, Lex, not yet a villain, is instead a veritable hero marshalling not only the resources of Luthorcorp but also his own shady Metropolitan contacts to track down his father's kidnappers. At his command, a team of hackers traces the blackmailers' email and fax. This Lex is simply a different character from the original comic book villain. Even when he does become evil, it cannot possibly be in the same way as the earlier version.

Meanwhile, it is ironic but also appropriate, that Superman was first published in 1938 yet this novel, which was published in 2003 and is about Clark Kent before he became Superman, is fully up to date with its references to the Internet, faxes and emails. Superman exists in the eternal present.

The Wall Of Weird

Chloe Sullivan and her Wall of Weird are good additions to Smallville and should be retained in some form in any future version. It is good that Smallville no longer has a Superboy but the town where Superman grew up does seem to deserve some kind of appropriate weirdness, though not a supervillain every week - something more restrained like:

the hypnotic green spring water in Alan Grant's Smallville novel, Dragon;
the "Smallville Angel" which, in some earlier versions, was Clark helping and rescuing from a distance or while moving too fast to be seen;
the "Superboy" - in a more recent version, there were unconfirmed reports of a boy in Smallville running impossibly fast, maybe glimpsed from a train?

Need Clark be extraterrestrial? Maybe it is just that Martha was pregnant when the meteors came? But, if the extraterrestrial origin is retained, then the meteors both conceal the spacecraft and cause the weirdness. But I think the story should start with the central character's experience of growing up in Smallville, not with his arrival.

Dragon II

In Alan Grant's Smallville novel, Dragon (IN Smallville Omnibus 1, New York, 2006):

"Hailing from the Big Met, Chloe was a relative newcomer to Smallville." (p. 284)

Of course she is! She did not exist in any previous version of the story. (Metafiction: a fictitious text acknowledging its fictitious status.)

In Superboy comics, the question, "Who is Superboy?", asked by Lana Lang, could have led to Clark Kent. In the Smallville TV series, the question, "Why do weird things go down in Smallville?", asked by Chloe, could lead to Clark Kent. Thus, we have recognisably the same story structure but in a vastly improved and updated format.

Many locals blame strange growths on contaminants from the Luthorcorp fertilizer plant so the main villain of the Superman series is already on-stage but, again, more plausibly.

Alan Grant, writing this novel set in Smallville, seamlessly fits his story into the established scenario. Thus, the police investigating whether a mutilated man was killed by an escaped tiger naturally ask:

" '...about private zoos. Like, does Lex Luthor have one out at that place of his?' " (p. 283)

Unfortunately, the horrific death results from meteoric radiation and thus is another possible clue to Clark's extraterrestrial origin.