Smallville Season 11 Off to a Solid Start

Only about six months after Smallville, the long-running 'Before Superman' series on the CW [...]

By Russ Burlingame

Only about six months after Smallville, the long-running "Before Superman" series on the CW Network, finally concluded its tenth and final season, longtime series writer Bryan Q. Miller has teamed with artist Pere Perez to continue the story. With Superman stories that are set in the world of Smallville and feature a Superman who looks a lot like actor Tom Welling, there's one notable difference: The show's rule of "no tights, no flights" is flaunted in favor of telling more traditional Superman stories. Arguably, more traditional than we've seen in a while, at least as far as characterization and plot are concerned. We get quick views of a number of characters here, including an exasperated Lex Luthor and his henchman Otis (who, I believe, was created for the 1978 movie and hasn't been seen outside of film); a starstruck Oliver Queen and Chloe Sullivan; and Superman himself, saving a group of cosmonauts on a space station and declining a request for an autograph on the grounds that "you're the real heroes." In a short, 99-cent issue, there are more great character moments than most comics have in the first six issues of their run. The story is the first Superman story I've ever read that's formatted for digital, with the aspect ratio and page size being set up to display best on a tablet rather than in a reader's hands. It's a digital-first book, not digital only, so it's still got a pretty simple panel layout which will allow for an easy transition to the printed page, but it seems likely that it will be clear it wasn't meant for that format. It feels more like Mark Waid's Luther than Dan Jurgens' Superman, that's for sure, although it's still more married to a traditional sense of page-flips than is the latter. Maybe DC's digital-only material, coming soon, will begin to really change the way they approach the digital page.

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