Clark Kent from Picketsville, Kansas isn’t faster than a speeding bullet nor is he more powerful than a locomotive. In fact, outside of the name, he’s just your average kid. Until, one day, he realises he has the same powers as his namesake.
In “Superman: Secret Identity,” Kurt Busiek, Stuart Immonen and Todd Klein created a unique take on the Superman mythos that, 13 years later, is still just as fresh and essential to the character as it was at the time.
Written by Kurt BusiekCover by Stuart Immonen
Illustrated by Stuart Immonen
Lettered by Todd Klein
In this critically acclaimed work from writer Kurt Busiek (ASTRO CITY) and artist Stuart Immonen (Ultimate X-Men), an alternate “Clark Kent” encounters complications the real Superman never had to handle: a career, a wife, children-a real life.Despite his iconic name, Clark Kent from Picketsville, Kansas, is just a normal kid whose parents thought they were being clever. He can’t fly, or see through walls, or shrug off speeding bullets-that is, until the day he can. And it’s all much harder than it looks in the comics.
Follow Clark across the decades as this man with powers tries to prove he can make the world a safer place without sacrificing everything.
Superman is often seen as the quintessential, archetypal superhero. From the cape and the boots to the proud posture and calm, hopeful expression to the primary colours and the cheesy catchphrases, Superman is a character who has embraced the bombast of superhero comics over the decades. However, there’s been a trend in recent years (and by recent, I mean dating back to the late ’80s and early ’90s) to strip the character of this bombast and try to present him as more realistic. He’s gone from the champion of the downtrodden and the underclass to America’s father figure to an isolated alien struggling with the responsibilities of his power and whether it’s even worth using them in the face of peoples’s fear of him.
For my money, there’s no comic that’s managed to nail the stripped down, natrualistic storytelling approach to the character of Superman quite like Kurt Busiek, Stuart Immonen and Todd Klein’s “Superman: Secret Identity.” Presenting a world where Clark Kent is just a normal kid living in a small town in Kansas whose parents thought naming him after Superman’s alter ego would be a good joke. Until Clark realises he really does have Superman’s powers. And where Busiek and Immomen take that story is a heartwarming examination of what Superman means to us in a modern context, why we should even care about the character and what it’s like to be burdened with the responsibility of a Superman.
The benefits of “Superman: Secret Identity” being an Elseworlds story, a story taking place in an alternate reality outside of the general DC continuity, is that is gives Busiek and Immonen not just a chance to experiment with form, but with style. Sure, one of the great pleasures of “Secret Idenity” is how the two of them twist the formula of the Superman character in subtle ways to present a unique take, but another is just on how the book feels to read. A lot of that comes from Immonen’s artwork. The style is sketchy and loose, with low contrast shadows and focus on a more naturalistic style of linework. This isn’t the carefully crafted lines of a superhero comic you might be used to, but something more emotional and freeform which brings with it a sense of life.
The colours, too, bring a much more rustic feel. Tones are muted with a focus on blues, browns and greens. With a few exceptions, the colourwork evokes a more naturalistic setting than the vibrant, four colour Metropolis that Superman is known for. I can’t just praise the book for aiming to be realistic, though, for it seems like so many different takes on the Superman story have aimed for the same thing. Why it works here is that this isn’t Superman, not as we know him. Busiek and Immonen present a world where the reader knows that this Clark Kent will never meet Batman or Wonder Woman, will never join the Justice League and will never face off against his deadliest foes.
Continued belowInstead, Busiek and Immonen present the adult life of Clark Kent across four dense issues that explore his life from high school to maturity and into old age. From his days being bullied for supposedly not living up to his famous name to his first forays as a writer and meeting his own Lois to starting a family and having to contend with a sinister plot to dissect and study him, “Secret Identity” trades the bombast of traditional superheroics for the exploration of one character’s life. There’s drama, there’s romance, there’s moments of horror and comedy. It reads like an autobiography, with Busiek exploring Clark’s career as an author through narration captions presented like memoir entires.
Superman is one of the more versatile superhero characters that’s still around. From decade to decade, he changes wildly with the time and with the people behind his stories. In recent years, so many attempts to make Superman feel realistic or, for a lack of a better word, gritty have resulted in a neutering of what he stands for. In those stories, the focus is on how Superman struggles with the weight of the world and forgets to explore the hope he brings to humanity and the love he has for his adopted homeworld.
In “Superman: Secret Identity,” Busiek and Immonen present the ideal of Superman in our world, facing the same problems each and every one of us face. Disconnected from a wider DC universe, this take on Superman feels more genuine and more life-affirming than most that have come out since. Genuinely, this is a must read story and one that, more than any other, embraces what is to love about Superman.
