DC’s new Young Adult graphic novel is not what you’d expect from a book called “Superman.” It’s also not what I wanted from a book called “Superman.”
Cover by Sina GraceWritten and Illustrated by Sina Grace
Colored by Chris Peter
Lettered by AndWorld’s DC HopkinsAs teenager Clark Kent and his friends grieve the death of a classmate, Smallville’s latest threat pushes Clark to grapple with life’s biggest questions in order to become the hero his town needs. A grounded and heartbreakingly human story about the legendary Superman as a teenager finding his place in a world filled with death and hate, without losing sight of his greatest power…hope.
Despite being a superpowered teenager, high school has been pretty normal for Clark Kent; but his idyllic life is wrenched away when the death of a classmate rocks all of Smallville. As he and his friends grieve, the challenges they face become darker, more complex, and deeply insidious. Clark feels completely out of his depth when Smallville’s latest threat proves that it takes more than fists and laser beams to save the day. For the first time in his life, Clark must grapple with life’s biggest questions, and confront his own mortality (or lack thereof) in order to become the hero his beloved town needs.
A grounded and heartbreaking human story about the legendary Superman as a teenager finding his place in a world filled with death and hate, without losing sight of his greatest power… hope.
The story opens with one of Clark’s classmates committing suicide. He befriends the boy’s grieving sister, and they begin to date while investigating the reason for the suicide. Their only clue is a cartoon face, but it leads them to discover that people can be hateful when they’re anonymous online. Meanwhile, Lex Luthor moves to Smallville because his dad recently built a robot factory there. Throughout the book, one of Clark’s closest friends, Gilbert, becomes angry that the girl he likes doesn’t like him in return, and he falls into the same realm of online hate as the earlier boy. Gilbert hijacks some of Luthor’s robots and attacks a town fair. Clark stops the robots, but his new girlfriend is the one who talks Gilbert down. Then Clark writes an article on the attack for the school newspaper which convinces everyone to blame LuthorCorp instead of Gilbert because it was a problem with the system, not Gilbert.
Sometimes, when I read a superhero comic, I can tell the writer really had an idea for a villain, or a theme, or whatever, and used it with whichever hero was available. That’s not always a bad thing – Jim Starlin crammed Thanos into any Marvel title he could touch, and that produced both diamonds and drivel. In this case, Clark’s superhuman abilities are barely used in the story, and even less relevant. If you trade the “flying very fast” scenes for “driving very fast” scenes, you eliminate pretty much half of his displays of power. The rest are just as mundane. I would argue this book would have been better served by shrugging off the cape and just being a straight drama, but I suppose that would make it less saleable (and wouldn’t get kids who want a slugfest to read about political issues).
The use of Superman is even more odd because of Grace’s decision to set the story in the present day. When I think of Superman as a boy, I don’t picture smart phones, masturbation jokes, or Ma Kent dying her hair pink.
There are plenty of political stances taken in the book. There’s a debate on eliminating affirmative action in college admissions. There’s a big evil corporation moving to town with negative impacts on everything in the local economy except food delivery. There’s Clark’s essay where Gilbert isn’t blamed for attacking people with killer robots, because he’s as much a victim as the people he attacked, and instead we’re told to be angry at LexCorp for building robots.
To Grace’s credit, the book isn’t preachy on any of these things. To his detriment, they’re all presented as de facto truths. We don’t hear Luthor’s argument against affirmative action. His word balloons are reduced to squiggles, covered by Clark’s thought captions saying that Luthor is calloused and easily rebutted. (Clark directly highlights the inappropriateness of two white people having the discussion for the reader’s sake. Later he uses x-ray vision to peer into the women’s restroom, but we know his intentions were pure so this passes without commentary.) When Pa Kent complains that LuthorCorp’s new factory relocated workers instead of hiring Smallville natives, no one mentions the benefits of a growing population. We’re told Clark’s essay was powerful and convincing, but don’t even get a snippet of it. Never mind that he argued Gilbert was a victim, which was how Gilbert justified his attack in the first place.
Continued belowThe promise of the book is that Clark will confront a threat he can’t beat with his fists. I suppose the book delivers on that in a literal sense. On the other hand, teen Clark in this story doesn’t seem to have been in any fights, ever, so it really comes off as business as usual when he continues not fighting.
Then there’s this sequence where Gilbert launches his attack:
He crashes through a fence, smashes into a pile of hay, and in the last panel the people who appear to be really close to where he stops… haven’t noticed? There are numerous other times throughout “Harvests of Youth” where the scenes feel disjointed. We smash cut from three boys pulling an active shooter practical joke at a school function to Pa Kent blaming LexCorp and out of towners for ruining Smallville. It almost reads like satire, but I don’t think it’s intentional. Those boys are never mentioned again, by the way. Overall, the script reads like a first draft. I’m curious what it looked like before editor Sara Miller got involved.
I expected to like this book, and I thought maybe I was just the wrong audience when I didn’t. It’s promoted as a Graphic Novel for Young Adults, and I’ve been out of that category for about 20 years. I have a ten year old daughter, so I asked her if she wanted to read it. She’s a comic reader, and has previously enjoyed “The Death of Superman”/”Reign of the Superman” and “Superman vs Aliens.” She was excited to try this one, but was also unimpressed with it. She said it didn’t have enough action, and would only recommend this to people who “enjoy boring drama, where people just talk a lot.”
