After The Crisis

After the Crisis on Infinite Earths, I was a Superman titles completist for several years. Briefly, some DC and Marvel Comics were appearing on British news stands. I bought Green Lantern 200 for nostalgia value, then got hooked on Green Lantern Corps and John Byrne's The Man Of Steel.
Fortunately, there was a comics stall in Lancaster and comics shops in nearby cities.

The Man Of Steel showed how good Superman could have been with a completely changed dynamic between Clark Kent, Lois Lane and Lex Luthor. Byrne simply and rightly reversed Kent's character which should never have been changed back again. I don't know what it is in current continuity.

After a few years of collecting Superman comics, there were too many monthly titles, annuals, specials, mini-series, prestige formats, cross-overs, Elseworlds (have I missed anything?). It was quantity again quality and would have led to massive storage problems if continued. I stopped buying cross-overs as an act of civil disobedience. A more restrained approach would have kept my attention for longer.

Myth

A mythical character is one that is universally recognised even by those who are unfamiliar with the original text. Usually, the character can be defined in a single phrase like the Great Detective or The Boy Who Never Grew Up. Many modern fictitious characters have become myths:

Tarzan
Sherlock Holmes
Frankenstein
Dracula
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Superman
the Batman
James Bond

Some mythical heroes have mythical villains:

Holmes Moriarty
Bond Blofeld
Superman Luthor
the Batman the Joker
Bulldog Drummond Carl Peterson (ok, maybe they are not universally known)

In an earlier post, I said that the trailer for the upcoming Superman film evokes or expresses that character's mythical status. Although I am way behind with the Smallville TV series, just catching up with Season One on DVD, I have just watched a clip from much later in the series in which Luthor defines the mythical status of himself and his adversary:

Luthor resents Clark's years of deception and dishonesty;
he resents Kryptonian superiority to humanity;
if he had had those powers, he would have gloried in them, not hidden them;
he had earlier suggested that, with his intelligence and Clark's powers, they could rule the world but now he accepts that they are adversaries;
he, Luthor, is great because his enemy is;
"Our story has not been written yet" (or similar words; sorry if the quotation is not exact).

This is a powerful statement of a story known to us all "but ne'er so well expressed", a modern myth.

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.

A Diversion

From the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog last month:

For months, I have been reading, mainly rereading, Poul Anderson's novels and posting about them while reading them. This means that I read the books more slowly than usual but also that I get more out of them. It also means that I read less other stuff. However, I must occasionally read something else.

Having received the Smallville TV series First Season DVD's as a present, I have been watching the early episodes and have also started to reread a Smallville novel, Dragon by Alan Grant.

Grant's description of a small spacecraft surrounded by a meteor swarm entering the Solar System and falling towards Earth while the Luthors and Kents go about their business in Smallville, Kansas, is worthy of Anderson. Many different authors have written Superman. Isobel Allende wrote a Zorro novel - called Zorro. Poul Anderson contributed to many other authors' sf series. (In fact, "Anderson in Asimov's, Niven's and others' universes" could be a topic in itself.)

What if Anderson had written a Superman novel, scientifically rationalising all the absurdities of a humanoid alien with impossible powers and presenting the character as interacting not with even greater absurdities but with the real world of economic crisis, climate change and US military interventions - Clark Kent reporting from Iraq and investigating Lexcorp? The twentieth century myth of Superman deserves such treatment in the three related media of prose fiction, graphic fiction and film. Graphic story-telling is intermediate between prose and film. Each of the three can do what the others can't. Poul Anderson would have been able to write a memorable novel.

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...