Comic Review: Superman Birthright

I've been meaning to read this story for years, and I finally got around to it last night.  In a nutshell Superman Birthright is a modern retelling of Superman's origin story, something that has since been done a lot.  At the time the mini series was meant to be a non-canon story, but was so well received it replaced the already established Superman origin story.  It was written by the Mark Waid, the man behind Kingdom Come and the current Daredevil series.  The art was done by Leinil Yu, who was also the artist of Mark Millar's incredible Superior series.

The Good

This mini-series did a lot of this well, one of the biggest highlights being that they explained the disguise, really well in fact.  Clark refused to use a mask, so his mother came up with the idea for him to wear layers to hide his muscles, bad posture and acting to seem mild mannered, keeping his hair well groomed because flying would mess it up, and very thick, strong prescription glasses to dull his otherworldly eye color.

The next strong point was Lex Luthor, everything about him was perfect.  In this story Lex is a genius in the field of...well everything really.  his origin is that he lived in Smallville, and was an outcast until an accident left him an orphan as well as bald.  After that he started his company in Metropolis, and created truly amazing technology by looking at planets and hypothesizing how something could survive on them.  His hatred of Superman is based on his obsession with alien life, and when he finally makes contact, he is treated as a lesser being.  So he decided to put together an elaborate plan to discredit Superman and eventually kill him as an alien invader.

Superman's power set was slightly altered for this mini-series as well, making him powered by multiple sources; the yellow sun charges him, but the powers themselves stem from the differences between Earth and Krypton's environment.  Basically everything about this mini-series is brilliantly written, well, almost everything.

The Bad

I have a few complaints about this series, interestingly enough it was basically everything I didn't like about Man of Steel.  The "S" shield, something that went from being a simple letter, to the El family crest, but in this series it was made into the Kryptonian symbol for hope, something I found kinda dumb, but not the biggest problem.

My biggest complaint with this series was how Pa Kent acted in the early issues.  Like the Man of Steel film, Pa Kent is responsible for for Clark hiding his powers.  And in the early issues he was very disproving of the idea of Superman, even to the point where he tried to destroy Clark's rocket to stop him.  He eventually turns into the Pa Kent we all recognize, but the whole point of Pa Kent is he helps Clark become Superman.  

The series was a bit slow in the early issues, but by part 4 the pacing got better and I ended up staying up until 3 AM because I couldn't stop reading.  But the early 3 issues were kinda disappointing, I felt like it was just an average storyline and didn't see why it was so well received.

The Verdict

The series was overall great, but it does suffer from the usual origin story problems, and this one in particular suffers a little more because it is such a well established character.  But the series proves itself thanks to the brilliant creative team of Waid and Yu.  Thus I give this mini-series an A-.