On last week’s post about ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #424, Dave Thomer asked:
“You said you think this issue takes too long to get Superman in the cape. So in your opinion: what’s the proper mix of Superman-in-action and Clark-as-civilian for a Superman series, and do you think the early Byrne/Wolfman issues generally hit the mark? (Clark with people who know the secret, in or out of costume, is a different category altogether, so feel free to include or ignore that aspect as you see fit.)”
Ooooh… good question.
I think this is an answer with some room for variance, but the north star is always that the reader is buying a superhero comic with Superman in the title, so that’s always the first master to be served. If you’re doing a story that’s front-loaded with a lot of Clark, there should be a reason for it. It might be necessary for him to go into the Daily Planet and get an assignment from Perry that puts him on the main story thread.
I’m working quite a bit ahead of the posts – so far ahead that if I stepped into the street tomorrow and was struck dead, you’d have an entire year of scheduled posts appearing posthumously. And there are plenty of upcoming Byrne stories that kick off with Clark arriving in the office. Most of this first year gets the balance just right. There’s enough Clark to remind us he’s the “real guy,” but since Byrne is a writer/artist who goes for spectacle, there’s very quickly no shortage of superhero action.
However, in the case of AOS #424 specifically, it’s the team’s grand debut on Superman. I would have opened with something big. Give us the eye candy of that red and blue sooner. Make a good impression.
In a broader sense, I think that over the course of a run, you have to have enough Clark Kent that it remains plausible that Clark keeps his job. There have been a couple runs, or parts of runs, where Clark is all but forgotten as the book commits to major superhero action. With some stories that can’t be helped, but it can be addressed. One of the savvier moves in the EXILE storyline is that it addressed the issue of Clark’s absence in a way that added to the story’s complications.
“Clark with people who know the secret” is a pretty necessary component of “my” Superman. Those are the scenes that give Clark someone to confide in, or seek advice from, or just really be himself with. During Byrne’s run, this is most often accomplished with his parents. It’s a great way to use characters who hadn’t been depicted as being around in his adulthood and it helps distinguish this reboot from everything that came before.
It’s also probably not a coincidence that the frequency of those scenes seems to go down once Clark and Lois get engaged and his secret is out of the bag. She’s now available to fill that role, and usually those scenes give her a strong point of view on whatever Clark is struggling with, which helps define Lois as well.
So I guess it goes without saying that in a continuity where Lois knows the secret, you probably need more “Clark” to properly take advantage of everything Lois offers. The overall balance of those kinds of scenes is probably going to vary depending on the medium you’re writing in.
Comics exist for the big spectacle. Maybe as a change of pace, you can do an issue that’s 90% Clark, with nary a cape in sight… but that’s not something your audience is going to stand for on a regular basis. With a movie, the same issue rears its head pretty fast. A SUPERMAN movie isn’t going to be mostly the adventures of Clark Kent. People came to see big hero stuff with big action. The broader audience is probably less concerned about seeing Clark do his job…. which is a shame and I’ve definitely felt that absence in a lot of the recent Superman movies.
Interestingly, if you look at SUPERMAN III and IV, some of the strongest scenes in both are Clark-centric. III is a tonal mess in places, and yes, the highlight is Christopher Reeve playing a Drunk Superman who feels so distinct from his usual self. But once you get past that, it’s the Clark/Lana scenes that REALLY work and give the story some emotion. Perhaps not coincidentally, Reeve has dialed back the broadest aspects of his Clark’s nerdiness so that Clark can carry a scene that isn’t just played for laughs. This continues in IV, where Clark really shines in standing up to the new owner of the Daily Planet, fending off the advances of Lacy Warfield, and having settled into a brother/sister dynamic with Lois while she’s still got eyes for Superman.
You can’t take Clark Kent out of ANY of the Reeve films without causing major holes, but entire subplots in III and IV couldn’t exist without an investment in Clark Kent and his life. But if you took Clark Kent entirely out of James Gunn’s SUPERMAN, most of the movie would still hang together. He barely has any scenes with people who don’t know the secret. At least for me, it meant that Clark felt underdeveloped to me.
TV’s a different beast because the weekly installments and need to keep the budget down lead to more character development. LOIS & CLARK, SMALLVILLE and SUPERMAN & LOIS all prioritized the “Clark” side of his personality. On S&L, Day 1 in the writer’s room, Todd Helbing set the tone by saying he saw it as 70% family drama and 30% superhero show. Those weren’t firm percentages every episode, and certainly as the story would get closer to a big season finale, the percentage of cape action was higher, but I bet if you charted it across an entire season, that would more or less be accurate.
Superman doesn’t yet exist in SMALLVILLE, but there are definitely more scenes of Clark presenting as farmboy Clark Kent than as “The Blur.” LOIS & CLARK sort of yo-yos around. I remember interviews with the actors and writers during season one where they said they really wanted to emphasize the Lois and Clark will they/won’t they, or Sam & Diane, David & Maddie, etc romantic tension. I clearly remember them boasting that there was an episode where Superman appeared for less than five minutes.
And generally, when you talk to people who were fans of the show, they prefer that first season to what came after. In season 2, there were new producers in charge and they beefed up the superhero side of the show. At the same time, the show got a lot campier, so that makes it hard to say if fan dissatisfaction was that there was less Clark, or if the tonal shift would have been the real problem even if Superman had stayed in the background.
But at the end of the day, I think your audience is better equipped to identify emotionally with Clark than Superman – his boss is always on his back, he’s got a woman he’s into who might not be into him OR who might be his better half, depending on where in the timeline you’re writing. Clark has problems that can’t easily be solved by Superman… which is how the writers deal with the oft-discussed challenge of how anything can be a threat to a superhero with massive powers and invulnerability. Clark is often the emotional stake-holder in storylines.
All of this is why I think Clark Kent is the most important superhero secret identity. Clark has a life and an entire supporting cast that has relationships with Clark and not just Superman. Even when Clark doesn’t have an official superhero identity – as in SMALLVILLE – the most important relationship that exist among the cast all flow through “Clark Kent, Farmboy” not “The Blur, Nascent Superhero.”
Between Byrne and Wolfman, I have to say that Wolfman is the one who seems more invested in the interaction between Superman’s life and Clark’s life. There are a couple issues that hinge on Clark realizing why he needs to keep the two parts of his life separate, and also some issues where through no fault of his own, being Superman leads him to let down people in Clark’s life.
I think that addresses the question. I feel like I wrote a lot and still managed to avoid a concrete answer. Discuss below!
And if you have a question for a future “Mailbag,” hit me with it in the comments or email me at zuulthereader at gmail.
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