SMALLVILLE

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Saturday, October 26, 2002

If you haven't succumbed to the charms of the WB's popular series SMALLVILLE, then the 64-page one shot out this week from DC might be enough to pull you in. At first glance, the book looks like little more than a glossy, high-priced fanzine with a couple of comics thrown in - a fanzine with more than a little outdated information. But as an intro to the hit series, it works tolerably well.

Most of those who pick up this book will be doing so for the comics, especially as this is the first comic book interpretation of the show. On that score, getting series writer and former Dark Horse Comics scribe Mark Verheiden to script "Raptor" is one of the best decisions editors Eddie Berganza and Tom Palmer, Jr. make. The story of a Smallville High student who becomes infected by the "meteor rocks" and transforms into a velociraptor may sound silly on paper, but it's exactly the sort of scenario that has played so well in various episodes of the series, and it plays even better here. Part of this stems from Verheiden's decision to have Clark's newspaper writer friend Chloe Sullivan narrate the action from the perspective of someone aware of the strange goings-on in Smallville but who remains unaware of Clark's role in those events. Fans of the show may be annoyed by how Verheiden is forced to tick off every single element in the series one by one, even down to the occasional animosity between Jonathan Kent and his adopted son, but they'll be pleasantly surprised at how little it interferes with a story that makes more logical sense on paper than most of the "Freak of the Week" stories generally do on the screen. Both fans and non-fans alike may find artist Roy Allan Martinez's work wanting, however - he tries for a realistic style in the story, which backfires, resulting in a curious flatness in most of the character's faces and a view of Lana's coffee shop that has almost no background details whatsoever. In his defense, Martinez pulls out all the stops in rendering the Raptor mutant, and he even makes the Kryptonite - sorry, meteor rocks - look like the traditional Kryptonite we've come to know and dread all these years. Bless him for that at least.

By contrast, "Exile and The Kingdom" works better artistically than script-wise. Don't get me wrong: Michael Green's exploration of the motivations and thoughts of the young Lex Luthor is interesting enough, and Green manages to hit all the other elements from the series that Verheiden manages to miss, such as Lex's scientific "partner in crime" portrayed on-screen by the woefully underused Joe Morton. But the resolution is necessarily abrupt - we have to get to the featured interviews, after all - and it makes the story less satisfying. John Paul Leon's almost impressionist artistic style steals the show here. The same lack of detail that derails Martinez's work is a positive boon in this story, especially as the detail doesn't work as well the few times we do see it.

The features are entertaining enough, though most of the info in the Season 2 Preview has already been revealed on-screen or in CINESCAPE's own Fall Preview issue. Some may also be slightly offended at series producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar's surprising statement that they were "never huge comic book fans, not comic gurus or geeks" (emphasis mine), citing this as a good thing. The other interviews with series stars Tom Welling, Michael Rosenbaum, and Kristen Kreuk are much more entertaining (and slightly more respectful), with Kreuk in particular stating that she's with the comics fans who complain that Lana should have red hair. Overall, they're the kinds of articles one would expect to see in a magazine fully devoted to one series (an American magazine of the type, I should say, since the writing here is nowhere near the level of a British magazine like, say, DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE), and as such they're somewhere between information and advertising - as indeed is the entire book. For fans, the SMALLVILLE one-shot may be little more than a nicely produced collectable, but for non-fans it may be an entry point into a pretty damn good television series.

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