I grew up pretty uninterested in Superman (a dumb invincible jock? Who cares?), but lately I've put my bias aside and done some research into the Superman mythos. For starters, I watched all the Superman movies, and even Supergirl (my recaps can be found here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094074/b...)So when I heard about this book, I thought it would be a good introduction to the origin of Superman. I was wrong.Who is the audience for this book? Is there some percentage of the Superman-loving public that really demanded a post-modern, anti-majestic, neo-realistic, cynical black-humor retelling of the Man of Steel's origins, with Clark Kent almost a minor character, morally ambiguous and agnostic, even atheistic?The author had so little to do to please me and he screwed it up: Clark Kent leaves Smallville, goes to Metropolis (annoyingly renamed New York City here), meet Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen (replaced here by a Jewish cameraman on the lam with Kent) and battle Lex Luthor, and maybe even a Nazi or robot or two. Such a story would be entertaining, uplifting, even if it probably wouldn't pass as Big Thinkin' Literature.But De Haven here flucks it up. Kent leaves Smallville, sure, but then he goes hoboing around and off to Hollywood to become a stuntman. Which could be interesting, sure, but, well, it's not. I know Superman has a long history of being a dick (see superdickery if you don't believe me), and in the movies sometimes he's handled as an adult baby having a temper tantrum, but De Haven doesn't bother to portray him as anything but a shiftless, drifting ripoff of Spider-Man. Clark Kent is a drip, and he's boring.Which could be fine, too, if the action picked up and he was actually doing something. But De Haven apparently thinks it's too cliché to make action scenes, you know, exciting, so he sort of thumbs over them with the barest of detail. And what's worse is that Clark Kent is nothing more than wallpaper for half the novel, swallowed up in the minutia of a thousand cast of characters whose heads we enter for NO REASON WHATSOEVER. At worst, to me, entering a thousand pointless heads instead of two or three protagonists is a sign of bad writing; at best, it's an attempt to make their often grisly deaths as jarring and meaningful as a snuff film. Which brings up another point: there was far too much death and black comedy in this book for it to ever seem like the story of Superman.Another bad habit this author has is wearing his homework on his sleeve: “They met on a rainy weekday afternoon. Lex deliberately arrived early and sat at the bar with his briefcase on the floor leaning against his right leg. As he waited for Colluzo to appear he sipped a whiskey and watched in the back bar mirror as the fat English movie director Alfred Hitchcock entertained a table full of reporters. Hitchcock was waving an ice cream cone, his wife and small daughter sitting there with him at the table with tight smiles on their faces. With orotund delivery he was singing the praises of American ice cream, which he wouldn't trade for a steak-and-kidney pie, he said, or a broiled silversmith with carrots and dumplings, or even Kentish chicken pudding. It sounded rehearsed to Lex. Hitchcock was doing publicity for his new picture. The review that Led had read in the Times made it sound good- but he just hadn't gotten around to seeing it. He hadn't gotten around to a lot of things.” (203)Not only is that passage an obnoxious show-off piece, it is fluff and illustrates nothing. What's the payoff to that paragraph? We learn Lex Luthor is wishywashy about Hitchcock films. Great. Now imagine 400 pages of in-your-face 1930's references, and everybody from the hot dog guy to a doorman in Los Angeles' opinion on jazz music.On the plus side, It's Superman! was a quick read: 400 pages in three days is crazy for me, so I must have liked reading it at least 25% of the time. But I wouldn't even give De Haven that much credit: this book has an inherent hook, the origin of Superman, and half the time I was probably wondering when Superman was actually going to appear. But it only takes about 350 pages before De Haven starts to get the ball rolling.Maybe only a genius like Dostoevsky can write a story about a genuinely and fundamentally good person, an optimist and an idiot who believes in truth, justice, and the American way, and has the power to force this cheerful will on everybody. But to me at least I wish this author would have tried and failed to write a story like that, instead of handing in this first-draft mush of drab, cheerless shit.
It's Superman is the latest retelling of the origin of the Man of Steel, and this latest retelling takes the character back to where he began -- the 1930s and the Great Depression.Superman (quick crash course) was created in the 1930s by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and, after a few years of shopping the property around, made his debut as a comic book character in Action Comics #1 in 1938. While the comics that are published these days are set firmly in the modern-day, with Superman perpetually at an ambiguous age in his 30s, the character’s roots are in the Great Depression, and that’s where DeHaven returns for this novel.Opening up with Clark Kent as a teenager in 1935, the story show him as his mother dies, he gets mixed up with a photographer from New York who has been framed for a murder he didn't commit and slowly begins to decide to use his mysterious powers for the benefit of others. Other members of the usual cast show up as well, such as Lois Lane as a child prodigy with an early college graduation and the same ambitious streak that has characterized nearly every version of the character. Lex Luthor, of course, is our villain – in this version of the story he’s a New York City Alderman with ties to organized crime and dreams of conquest. He’s the one who framed Lois’s boyfriend, photographer Willi Berg, for the murder of a pawnshop owner, forcing Willi to go on the lamb until he meets young Clark in Smallville, Kansas. Although our three main characters are separate for much of the novel, the actions of each impact upon the other until Clark finally comes to New York (rather than a phantom Metropolis) for the final third of the book, where all plot threads finally come together.DeHaven does a really strong job of recreating the character in his original Golden Age context, although the book is filled with more modern sensebilities -- commentary on race relations, for example, which fit the character very well. At times he fills young Clark with a bit more angst and self-doubt than longtime fans (myself included) may be comfortable with, but you can imagine this boy growing into the Superman we all know. Lois Lane and Lex Luthor are both spot on, the former refusing to take a back seat in a time when women often had to settle for less, the latter being the same ruthless manipulator that makes him one of the greatest villains in comics.Overall, It’s Superman! is a really strong read and a really original contribution to the Superman legend. Definitely recommended. I'll be looking for DeHaven's Dugan novels after this.
Do You like book It's Superman! (2006)?
I enjoyed this book. It was not riveting, but it was a reasonable idea of how Clark Kent may have grown up to be Superman. I am not a Superman fan, so I did not come to the book with any preconcieved notion of how the story should go. I knew the barest outline. This book may annoy readers who have another background story already in their heads, but I thought the author made a successful attempt of creating a storyline that fit with the culture of the time. The WPA, the Mob, the politics and the others reflections of that culture made the whole idea of a boy from outer space who grew up on a farm and became a superhero seem reasonable.
—Pam
Why does everyone feel compelled to start Superman somewhere in the 1930s? Oh sure, that's when the original comic came out, but still....Anyway, that was just one of the nagging little thoughts that kept going through my mind as I read this book. Overall, it's a good read - we begin with the Kents in 1935, raising a strange and unusual son that they found in a cornfield. Meanwhile, young Lois Lane is trying to make her way as a feisty reporter in New York City - an interesting change. There was no pretense of living in a New York-esque city caled "Metropolis," and DeHaven did a very nice job of making New York of the 1930s very real and ready for the Superman mythos. Lex Luthor, an ambitious alderman, has grand schemes for power and money.In short, nothing new.As much as I enjoyed the book - it's well written, the characters are mostly well defined (except for Clark, but we'll get to that) and there's a lot of good dialogue - there's nothing new to be said. Clark is conflicted about being Superman? Done it. Lois is only interested in the one man she can never have? Seen it. Lex Luthor is an evil genius who will do anything for power? Bought the T-shirt, and it was made by a LexCorp subsidiary in Southeast Asia. The book was good, but not new, at least not to me. Maybe to a new fan of the character it'll be a refreshing retelling of Superman's early years, but it all seemed pretty familiar on this end.About Clark. I said that most of the characters were well fleshed-out and knowable, with Clark as an asterisk. To my mind, we didn't really get to know him as well as even most of the minor characters. I felt I knew Soda Wauters (it's her jazz-club name) better, and she didn't show up until the last quarter of the book. Perhaps intentionally, Clark was very difficult to know. The theme of his story, of course, was "Who am I?" a natural question any young person might be asking himself after the first time a bullet ricochets off his forehead. But I have very little patience for soul-searching superheroes. A little is okay, but to grind on and on about it, to deny the reality of who you are and what you can do gets under my skin after a while. That's why I didn't enjoy Ang Lee's version of The Hulk - too much Banner teeth-gnashing and not enough Hulk SMASH.But that just probably says something terrible about my own psychological issues, so we'll let that go. In any case, it's a fine piece of work and a good read. Just not something that I will go back to if I really want to know more about who Superman is. For that, I recommend reading Kingdom Come, either the original comic or the novelization by Eliot S. Maggin. Good book. It might show up here later....
—Chris
DeHaven has written many fine novels illustrating the history of everything from early newspaper strips to the beginnings of underground comix, but the story of Superman's early years may be his finest moment. The period details are wonderful, but the real strength of the writing is that it is actually drawn from much of the literature of the period. We are treated not only to an homage to the crime novels of Runyon and the bleak depression era poetry of Steinbeck, but a tale that is true to the origins of the character and every piece of humanist literature from the decade. The story focuses on Clark, Lois and Lex, with a character that is certainly intended to evoke Jimmy Olsen (one felt all along that Clark would help the fugitive character of Willi develop a new identity, but he was far too preoccupied with discovering his own), while leaving the peripheral characters of Lana Lang, Perry White and even the Kents behind for the most part. The result is a masterwork that richly expands our notions of the characters and this time in American life.
—Ron
