Review by King Krypton.........
I’ve been a Superman fan my entire life. I was born a month before Richard Donner’s brilliant film version of the Man of Steel hit the big screen, and by the time I was a toddler I was reading the comic books. I basically grew up with Chris Reeve and the Super Friends series, and as time went on I eventually discovered the Max Fleischer cartoons, the George Reeves TV series, the Filmation cartoons, and the Kirk Alyn serials, in that order. It would be completely fair and accurate to claim that Superman has been a big part of my life, and I will be the first to admit that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s character means a lot to me.
However, when it was announced that Mark Waid was embarking on an Ultimate Spider-Man-style retelling of Superman’s formative years called Birthright, I was less than impressed. I had been seriously fed up with the comics since 1993 because they were (and still are) stuck in a repetitive rut, recycling the exact same story beats for the past 10 years and not even trying to attempt anything of substance. Also, comic book-hating producer Jon Peters has spent the last 10 years trying to make a movie that would "re-imagine" Superman so as to make him unrecognizable as the character we know and love. As you can guess, I haven’t exactly been a happy camper vis-à-vis the way Superman’s been handled. Finally, my annoyance with the comics grew to the point where I decided "Oh, hell with it. Might as well give Birthright a try. Can’t be any worse that the stuff in the regular books." I bought the first issue of Birthright along with the first issue of Matt Wagner’s Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman team-up Trinity, and after reading the both of them, I was amazed by how both Waid and Wagner had, in their own ways, chosen the same goal: An integrated Superman who is as much a son of Krypton as he is a son of Earth.
The first issue of Superman: Birthright (by Waid and artists Leinil Francis Yu, Gerry Alanguilan, and Dave McCaig) begins as all proper Superman origins do—the destruction of Krypton (which Jon Peters and JJ Abrams don’t seem to understand). However, Waid’s handling of this event is far truer to the spirit of the Superman mythos than John Byrne’s 1986 treatment of Krypton as a cold, sterile world of unemotional hermits. In Byrne’s Man of Steel, the entire point of Krypton was that (a) it deserved to explode and was the best thing that ever happened to Superman and (b) nobody—not even Superman himself—was supposed to care about it or want to remember it. It was designed to be ignored and forgotten, and as such erased the fundamental tragedy of the Superman mythos. Not so with Birthright. Instead of a sterile, post-apocalyptic wasteland with a bunch of dystopic, unemotional people, Krypton is restored to what it was supposed to be all along. A bustling, lively world of scientific wonder populated by a passionate, lively people. The cityscapes drawn by Yu and Alanguilan are at once wild and alien but cozy and homey…it’s more or less the Krypton we know and love.
It was heartwarming to see the loving, impassioned Jor-El and Lara of old return (welcome back, guys!), and it was a treat to see Lara as an active participant in Kal-El’s survival. In most of the renditions of Superman, she’s usually relegated to a side character who just bawls a lot when they stick the kid in the escape pod. In Byrne’s Man of Steel, not only is she just a clueless observer of Jor-El’s actions, but she’s also a self-righteous ice queen who thinks Kal-El should conquer Earth and turn it into a cold and sterile Krypton clone. Under Waid, Lara not only encourages a disheartened Jor-El to continue trying to find a safe passage for Kal-El, but she also provides the computer records of Krypton’s history for Kal-El to study. I found this refreshing, and a nice way to show Lara’s importance to the saga. And of course, I was delighted to see the classic, wrenching scene of the parents placing their baby into the pod and launching him off into the void restored, with the tragic realization that they’ll never know what became of him. It’s certainly more powerful than just shooting the egg out into space, as Byrne did.
After a two-page spread briefly covering Clark’s arrival in Smallville and some images of his childhood (which I assume we’ll see more of later on), the story shifts to Africa, where a 25-year old Clark is on assignment covering the assassination attempts on a civil rights leader named Kobe Asuru…and twice protecting the man from a hail of bullets. I liked how Yu juxtaposed the escape pod’s crash-landing with Clark trying to stop a bullet, and the super-speed effect used on page 24 is gloriously classic Superman. (I remember Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons doing a similar gag in "For The Man Who Has Everything," and it’s tremendous fun to see it brought into the 21st century.) And it was G-R-E-A-T to see Clark behaving like…well, like Superman again instead of being the dopey crybaby of the current comics. The current Superman would have been blubbering his eyes out and running around like a chicken with its head cut off when an elderly woman in Kobe’s camp took a near-fatal bullet hit. Waid’s Clark, by contrast, sees the problem and just solves it (cauterizing her wound with heat-vision). In fact, Clark handles the whole assassination attempt with courage, quick thinking, and no fuss…a FAR cry from the current post-Crisis Superman. (Obviously Waid’s Clark read Alan Moore’s Supreme, watched the George Reeves Superman TV series, and picked up some valuable pointers.) Bear in mind, Waid’s Clark still hasn’t become Superman yet. If he’s already behaving as Superman should, I can’t wait to see what he’s like when he dons the red and blue.
But what strikes me the most about Birthright is not only does it present a Superman whose attitude and bearing are diametrically opposed to the current post-Crisis conception and is far closer in spirit to the pre-Crisis Man of Steel, but it’s also daring to present a fully integrated Superman, one who’s influenced equally by Krypton and Earth. So for that matter is Wagner’s Trinity. For example, Wagner’s Superman not only openly mourns the loss of Krypton and the deaths of Jor-El and Lara, but he wears Kryptonian clothing while he’s visiting the Fortress of Solitude. This COMPLETELY goes against the grain of the post-Crisis Superman, who has no use for his Kryptonian heritage and asserts that only his humanity is important. But I think Wagner’s take is the more valid one, because it rings truer to the core of Superman. Waid’s Superman in Birthright is clearly headed down a similar path, as indicated by the speech on page 24 where Kobe’s associate Abena tells Clark that he has to embrace his birth legacy if he’s to find his place in the world. Also, Waid and Wagner both go out of their ways to set up Superman’s costume as a link to his heritage. In Trinity, Superman’s cape is actually a Kryptonian ceremonial robe, and it’s revealed that cloaks were a standard part of Kryptonian fashion. In Birthright, not only is the S-shield the House of El crest, but red, blue, and gold are Krypton’s signature colors, represented on their flags (and, of course, in Jor-El’s own garb). Further, Kobe talks on page 25 about how tribal clothing and colors are a way for a people to symbolize and get back in touch with their heritage…meaning that the Superman costume as a whole will be a connection between Clark and Krypton. Again, integration. A Superman who’s as much a child of Krypton as he is a child of Earth. The kind of Superman we should have gotten in 1986, not the dimwitted farm boy in tights we’re still stuck with.
While this integration is clearly what Superman needs and has been lacking for the past 17 years, a number of extremely zealous adherents of the John Byrne/Dan Jurgens vision of the character have savaged both Trinity and Birthright as are "disrespecting" Byrne and Jurgens and "destroying the fictional reality" of their work by daring to present contradictory views of Superman. Birthright has taken the brunt of the abuse, with the Byrne/Jurgens adherents claiming that to contradict Byrne’s version of Superman is to insult the entire mythos and its fanbase. (The best way to sum up their mindset is this: "Everything must conform to Byrne through Jurgens, and nothing that came before 1986 or after 1999 has any value.") What these zealots ignore is that Superman’s origin has never really been static. With the sole exception of the planned Peters/Abrams movie "re-imagining," the basics have always stayed intact (Krypton blows up, Kal-El is sent to Earth and raised by the Kents), but the presentations of those basics have been in constant flux. Pre-1986, Superman’s origin was changed numerous times before Byrne did his reboot. What Waid is doing is no different in practice than what Byrne himself did in 1986, or from what the creators and editors before Byrne did with the mythos. Deep down, I think those who oppose any kind of deviation or change from the Byrne/Jurgens vision are actually of the opinion that Superman belongs to them and them alone, and that they shouldn’t have to share him with anyone else (and some of them have actually come out and admitted it during debates on the subject). Expecting Superman to stay permanently wedged between 1986-1999 with no deviation or change whatsoever only promotes stagnation and slow suicide…both of which have been occurring in the comics since the mid-‘90s, at least. (Also, since when did Byrne’s version become holy writ? What the hell makes HIS version of Superman so untouchable when everyone else’s version has been retconned several times over?) But for me to go into further detail on this point would be getting too far off-topic.
As for the art…well, Leinil Francis Yu and Gerry Alanguilan’s illustrations take some getting used to at first (imagine Doug Mahnke crossed with Kevin Nowlan and you’ll get their art style), but it’s actually pretty good. Their depictions of Krypton’s bustling cityscapes are marvels to behold, and their art has a tremendous dynamism and expressiveness to it. (The wavy white heat-vision lasers and the bullet-time effects during the assassination scenes are a nice touch, too.) Credit must also go to Dave McCaig’s bold, brassy colors for fleshing out Yu and Alanguilan’s visuals and making them come alive. Add in some of Comicraft’s always-excellent lettering, and the whole adds up quite nicely. All in all, Birthright gets things off to a good start, with a Krypton that’s actually worth missing and a Superman who actually acts like his old self, even without the costume. Here’s hoping the subsequent issues keep up the streak.
Rating: ****½ out of *****
--------------------
King Krypton, author of Superman—The Grease Version (
http://www.otherearths.com/dcfanatics/FictionDirectory.asp ), has spoken! But of course, nobody's listening.
"I am become Death, shatterer of worlds." - J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Upanishad upon an early test of the atomic bomb
"[Insert name of comic you most dislike] is in the realm of the ice cream flavor 'Low-Fat, No-Sugar-Added Liver Ripple With Real Metal Shavings'". — Iron Sun
