writers: Greg Pak, Kyle Higgins, Tony Bedard
artists: Lee Weeks, Doug Mahnke, Paulo Siqueira
Some fans get tired of seeing secret origins regurgitated repeatedly. Me, I love the stuff. I love it as a creative exercise, to see how it'll be approached. Even if the elements don't change (which is seldom the case), the best writers will make their presence known.
So, four years in, DC has revived the Secret Origins series in order to catch fans up on the backstories that've emerged behind familiar faces in the New 52. Two Septembers ago, sure, a certain amount of that was already done in the zero issues, and many of the initial launches in 2011 incorporated the idea from the start. Still, as far as I'm concerned, this is a good idea, and I think this first issue proves why.
The first of three stories in the issue features DC's first and arguably still most iconic superhero, Superman. It's written by Greg Pak, who's recently joined the Man of Steel's writing stable, taking over Action Comics. Previously, Pak was a Marvel guy (best known for his Hulk and Incredible Hercules, the latter of which he wrote entertainingly with Fred Van Lente for years), which certainly makes the whole proposition all the more intriguing. If this effort is any indication, Superman is in very good hands.
Intriguingly, Pak approaches Superman's Kryptonian and human origins from the perspectives of his two mothers. This is incredibly rare. You're no doubt as familiar as I am with the idea of presenting Jor-El and Jonathan Kent ahead of Lara and Martha Kent, the heavier emphasis on the fathers over the years. In the movies, Lara had her biggest moment in Superman II when she replaced Marlon Brando's Jor-El in discussions at the Fortress of Solitude (that is, until the Richard Donner cut from 2006 brought Brando back). Pa Kent had periodically been depicted as dying relatively early in Clark Kent's life, but he's often credited with instilling Superman with the values that would define his heroic career. There's a lot I'm glossing over, but you get the point.
So that's perhaps reason enough to read that one. And Pak nails the idea, with both mothers.
Next comes Dick Grayson's story via Kyle Higgins. Higgins, of course, defined Dick for the New 52 set with his multi-year run on Nightwing. In a way, this is the effort I was waiting for all along, what he danced around for much of the first year of that series. Since Dick Grayson is a character uniquely defined by his past, not burdened by it but certainly informed by it, a concept Higgins nails in the piece, it's always profitable to look backward with him, which writers like Higgins and Marv Wolfman had tended to do over the years.
It helps to have Doug Mahnke doing the art for this segment. Mahnke is awesome. For a hiccup, after seeing his work in this issue, I feared that DC had finally let him slip through the cracks. That's not really the case, though. He's an excellent utility player when he needs to be (although it certainly looked like he was doing exactly that role at the end of Final Crisis, there was also the tie-in with his having already drawn the Superman two-issue mini-series for that event). And he always delivers.
Supergirl rounds out the issue via Tony Bedard, and this segment reads like one of those young adult book series that've been turning into profitable film franchises like The Hunger Games and Divergent. I have no idea if that's how Supergirl entered the New 52, but this is canny all the same, and deserves to be identified as such. Sometimes jumping on a bandwagon is a good thing. It's recognizing a good thing. And as far as I can tell, this new interpretation of Supergirl has been a good thing. In the past I've absolutely loved Bedard's work, but recently I've lost track of him. So it's good to see that he's definitely still got it.
It's an interesting mix for the first issue. Superman was certainly obvious. Including someone from the Batman family I suppose was equally obvious. And as I've suggested, it's probably a good thing to put Supergirl out in front of something like this, too, so she'll have a better chance of getting noticed. Higgins may have departed Dick Grayson's adventures, but the character has recently been repositioned, so in hindsight this was like a part of that relaunch, too.
An excellent debut issue.
