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.

Lex And Lionel

Point of view is perfectly controlled in the Smallville novel, Whodunnit by Dean Wesley Smith (IN Smallville Omnibus 2, London, 2006).

As yet, I have reread eight of the twenty two chapters. So far, the point of view characters have been Clark, Chloe, Lionel and Lex. Thus, we have seen Lana, Pete, Jonathan and Martha only externally.

Lionel and Lex are strong viewpoint characters. There has been a complete reversal here. If a comic strip has a viewpoint character, then it must be the hero, thus Superman in Superman. Lex Luthor was created to be a villain in Superman comics but now we can read prose fiction in which Lex and even his father are viewpoint characters. This may be the only time when we get Lionel's pov? He is kidnapped so the only other way to narrate it would have been to give us the perspective of one of his kidnappers. Instead of that, what we read is Lionel's deductions about where he is being taken, plans to escape and/or negotiate with his captors etc and we must learn about them as he does.

These Luthors are complete reversals of the ones in the prestige format comic book Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography by James D. Hudnall. There, Luthor Senior is a drunken Metropolitan slum-dweller murdered for insurance money by his High School-attending son who, in this version, is self-seeking and even spiteful from the start and had been a class mate of Perry White, not an older friend of Clark Kent.

In Whodunnit, the Lex of the Smallville series pauses when it occurs to him that Lionel might already be dead at his kidnappers' hands.

"How often had he wished for that?" (p. 39)

But Lex energetically takes charge of the attempt to rescue his father. I have as yet seen little of the TV series but do remember that one Season ends with Lionel, life endangered, appealing to Lex whose dark side might be about to emerge...