Superman Adventures

After watching a couple of discs worth of the Superman animated series I decided to hit the ol' bookshelf and drag out the first trade collection of the comic book based on the series.

I originally bought the book for my son (having already purchased all the individual issues and finding it for a steal in a bargain bin somewhere) only to rescue it several days later, stashing it with my books until he gets a little older. I like to give him comics buy he mostly just looks at the pictures and tears pages out or covers off and then throws them in a corner when he's done with them. Yeah, I'm hoping that changes as he gets older.

But anyway, I digress.

I dragged out the trade because I remembered really enjoying the stories the first few times around. The first issue was written by Paul Dini and was a direct follow-up to the pilot movie, 'Last Son of Krypton'. It kind of featured the aftermath of Superman's batle with Metallo and Luthor's desire to measure the abilities of his newfound nemesis. It syncs up beautifully with the show and is a great introduction to the the next 5 issues which were penned by none other than Scott McCloud.

McCloud may have been an uncharacteristic choice in the minds of some, but if you think of what he was doing before Understanding Comics and becoming the poster boy for the comic book intelligentsia (mainly his Zot! series which was great fun) it's really not that much of a stretch. In fact, the first year of Superman Adventures was probably better than the first year of Batman Adventures (apologies to Kelly Puckett) and definitely the best Superman stories being published at the time. I didn't follow it very closely after McCloud left, but for thirteen glorious issues I had the Superman that I had always wanted to read.

I should also mention the artwork by Rick Burchett which, if you're familiar with his work, is one of the go-to guys when you have one of these animated books to do. His ability to work in the animated style as well as his storytelling skills are top-notch. Actually, his regular comics are pretty fantastic, too. If you've never tried a book by Burchett, go do it now.

Another neat aspect of the monthly was the use of actual series backgrounds on the covers. Burchett would do characters and any objects that were important to the overall 'story' of the cover image, and that would be put over top of one of the Metropolis backgrounds painted for the television show. It was a neat effect and a nice tip of the hat from one medium to the other, kind of saying, you're not the red-headed stepchild of the family, you know?

You can click on and enlarge the images if you wanna get a peek at what I'm talking about.

Anyway, I'm just about to start the fourth issue (a cool Superman's mass is getting out of control story) and thought I should post about the fact that I've dusted them off, maybe turn someone else onto them. Spread the fun, if you will.

Later!

mike