Chapter By Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
Brief history reminder. DC Comics in the 1990s had finally gotten Lois Lane together with Clark Kent, not Superman, and thus he revealed his identity to her. The romance continued and now the Superman title writers, we’ll call them the Super-Writers whether or not you find that description correct, decided it was time for them to get hitched. Clark & Lois Kent. Then the pecking order ruined everything. Around the same time ABC was airing Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman, which focused on their relationship more than Superman superheroics. It was fine in the early seasons but it kind of lost the plot, and that was after strange adaptation decisions like having Perry White being obsessed with Elvis Presley and being from the South. I lost interest in it, but the showrunners decided THEY were the more important Superman portrayal and Warner Brothers of course sided with the “preferred” media format, television, over the source material, comics.
The showrunners hated the idea that those dirty paper products would have the most important event in the characters’ history first, and demanded they wait until the show was ready. They then made a bunch of false starts thanks to a character called the “Wedding Destroyer”, whose sole interest was ruining weddings and really had it in for the future Kents. But please, convince me that the Prankster was the dumbest Superman villain over the Wedding Destroyer. Go ahead, waste both our times on a fool’s errand. When they finally got Clark to marry the real Lois and not a clone they didn’t tell the comics, who had to rush out a wedding special just to even with the upstarts who looked down on the reason they have a show to ruin. Dean Cain, you were a good Superman but you were part of a lame show. Teri Hatcher also deserved better, as did Delta Burke frankly.
This left the Super-Writers in a pickle and I swear I’m going somewhere with this. With their big event ruined they needed something to draw in Summer readership, and were forced to use a meeting running gag as their only option…let’s kill Superman. What followed was the “Death & Life Of Superman” event, which made lemons into lemonade by using the concept to explore the effect Superman has on Metropolis specifically and the DC Universe in general. The end result was Superman restored with +3 superheroes, one a reformed antagonist, and the rare example of death in comics done right. However, I’ve already done a review of that novelization in a previous Chapter By Chapter series.
So Warner Brothers or DC Comics in their continued lack of understanding said “can we do the same thing with Batman and make the same amount of money?” and forced the Bat-Writers to find out. They didn’t kill Bruce Wayne…until decades later and that’s for another topic…but they did decide to break him, to show what makes Bruce the Batman he is, and why that’s a good thing, a similar batch of lemonade but something at least different enough to be a fresh take. Then they made a novel and long intro short it’s our next novelisation review here at BW Media Spotlight for Chapter By Chapter…
BW Media Spotlight 