Not many people understand the appeal of Superman. At least not most writers; and those that do are stymied by people above them and by profit, forcing Crisis after Crisis upon The Man of Tomorrow, each requiring more strenuous use of his super-abilities to super-combat his super-foes. Unfortunately, this line of ‘Superman is great when he’s superpowerful’ is all too often applied in Superman’s titles outside of multi-hero collaborations, where larger foes require larger shows of strength, cleverer use of powers, and so on. In short, people just want to see Superman be awesome and wreck some giant robots. Be awesome like Batman can be awesome, maybe even with a few one-liners thrown in. It’s fan-food as much as Batman’s ‘prep-time’ is.
Inevitably, with the main continuity absorbed within this bubble of power, it falls to the Elseworlds and one-off AU serials to try and carry the base messages of what makes Superman a great hero. And luckily for us, Superman: Secret Identity more than delivers.
What chiefly concerns Superman: Secret Identity is not the powers of Superman, but the life of Superman. Clark Kent. In this story, Superman is just somebody who Clark Kent is, in the same sense that Tiger Woods is a golfer, or...well, Tiger Woods is black. It’s not a persona separate from himself, and by making this apparent it helps remind us that this is true of most iterations of Superman, including the main version; anyone can have the powers of Superman, it’s only the honest and good person that has them that matters. The acts of superheroism, too, are reeled in and toned down into their most basic, most personal format. He has no supervillains or no alien menaces to battle here; only accidents to rescue people from and robberies to thwart. This close, at times direct interaction he has with the people he is helping really makes plain what it is that Superman is about when it comes to the bare-bones; a really strong, really fast Good Samaritan. A guy who comes along just to help you out, regardless of what kind of person you are.
What really stitches these parts together though is the sombre, thoughtful narration of Clark Kent, channelled through to us by Kurt Busiek. Busiek’s writing style in this is expansive, slow and contemplative; a voice that one imagines a person to have when describing something from a distance. This works well with Busiek’s excellent use and knowledge of panel-space, knowing when to reel back his narrative in order to let the pictures do the talking; most apparent in the large two-page spreads that dot the comic. It all combines to create a wide, confident style of prose that one can easily believe belongs to a man who can pick bullets out of the air.
Stuart Immonen’s artwork is similarly grounded and perfectly complementary; solid, muted pastels shaping the work into something just as vivid as traditional comic colouring but not quite as crisp, the end effect muddying the linework into something more akin to a painting, which slows the action down to match the text; creating humble yet powerful images. Again, the spreads and expanses painted out within the book showcase this excellently; the large aerial views not shrinking the world but revealing it, the beauty, the way it fits together, the scope and scale of the cities mankind has made and the charm of the lands we have never touched. You can really feel that the world through superman’s eyes is something he holds in awe, the same kind of awe a man stood atop a mountain feels when he looks around after having scaled its peak.
The narrative also echoes the triumph of such a feeling. The story pushes its way through events in such a way as that you actively, desperately desire that happy ending you feel the characters deserve. And by doing that, Busiek and Immonen have managed to capture the essence of what Superman should represent to people, something that you see in all the best Superman stories; the feeling that everything is going to be okay, and that this, in itself, is enough. It’s a reassurance in the better qualities of humanity and that any life properly applied can be a fulfilling one.
Towards the end of the book, Superman says ‘Maybe I had a “secret identity,” but when you think about it, don’t we all?’ It’s an easy parallel to make, akin to saying ‘you can have a good life too’, and it’s a message you see in a lot of media. In the grim darkness of the 21st millennium of comics, however, such an uplifting message is, if not unique to Superman (Captain America also springs to mind), still a sentiment that you simply do not and will not find in the vast majority of superheroes and superheroic adventures. It’s probably Superman’s greatest power; to be wholesome and good without it coming off as cheesy (and it sure as hell ain’t something you can expect Batman to pull off even WITH prep-time).
With this in mind and with Brightest Day rolling happily along, DC would do well to look back at comics like Superman: Secret Identity and remember exactly what an honest, superb and above all heroic story actually looks like. Otherwise I’m afraid this new optimistic silver-age revamp will be both a sad affair and a wasted opportunity.
Summary: A slow, rambling story that, page by panel, builds into exactly what a Man of Steel should be made of.
