First thoughts on Superman Family Adventures

Art Baltazar and Franco, the pair responsible for bringing us 50 issues of Tiny Titans, have launched their latest project: Superman Family Adventures. It’s a monthly all-ages comic book featuring Superman in and out of his Clark Kent persona. Tiny Titans favorites Superboy and Supergirl join the fray, and so does Krypto the Superdog, who was featured in the Super Pets series illustrated by Baltazar.

I’ll come right out and admit that I’m a huge fan of Tiny Titans. I’ve mentioned it before — I really think that Tiny Titans is the perfect comic book for young children. It introduces scads of superheroes and gives you all of the things small children love about them: costumes, super powers, and secret identities. I was extremely sorry to see it end. However, the glimpse of Superman in the final issue of Tiny Titans, plus some great talk with writers Art Baltazar and Franco at C2E2, plus the Free Comic Book Day preview had me all kinds of anxious to read this book. And my kids were plenty excited, too. In fact, seeing Superman’s face was my daughter’s favorite part of Tiny Titans issue #50.

Superman Family Adventures #1 met our anticipation head-on. The first page blooms with a meteor speeding toward earth, and contains the all-important lines… “Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!” Page two delivers the payoff “It’s Superman!” and with a flash of heat vision, it’s clear that that this comic book is going to bring us all of the elements we know and love about Superman. Chaos at the Daily Planet, Lois Lane, and a ridiculously cute underaged Jimmy Olsen. There’s a perfect Christopher Reeve moment as Clark Kent breaks the 4th wall to wink at us while Lois snarks away. Then, with a giant BOOM! We have robots.

It’s definitely a big and exciting comic book for kids who love superheroes. It weaves in the universally known elements of the iconic Superman story, introduces Lex Luthor as Superman’s nemesis, gives us plenty of the Clark Kent secret identity business, and Baltazar’s art is, as always, brightly colored, exuberant, and adorable. The story made me laugh out loud, and I think the reality spun in this issue built a good foundation for the series. My nine year old daughter really liked learning more specific details about the inner lives of the Super Pets, and seeing the secret identity device translated to work with animals. Since a lot of the Superman legend is new to her, she was deeply interested in learning about his two-fold existence.

I recognize that this is an entirely different project, not a revamped Tiny Titans 2.0. And I’m not interested in comparing the two series simply because they involve the same creative team. I’m sure that if Baltazar and Franco wanted to make more Tiny Titans, they’s simply make more Tiny Titans. However, Tiny Titans was important, and I’d like to see the important function it served continue. And I was hoping that Superman Family Adventures would be the book to do it. But maybe it’s not.

Unlike Tiny Titans, which I would wholeheartedly recommend to any child, regardless of age or interest, Superman Family Adventures isn’t for everyone. Each page packs in a lot of story, which is fulfilling for the kid who is completely engaged in the saga. But the pages might seem a bit busy for younger children, and anyone who has trouble focusing attention may find it hard to know where to look to follow along. The visually simpler Daily Planet scenes were the pages my son found least overwhelming, and therefore most engaging. At five years old, he’s an early reader, and Tiny Titans was within his reading level, but Superman Family Adventures is not. The context and cramped pages don’t allow him to decode the slightly more complicated language. My daughter is emphatically anti-violence and therefore checked out a little during the fight scenes, but as a third grader, the storyline was well within her grasp.

Though it’s called Superman Family Adventures, this is really a comic book about Superman. It’s his life we follow. And as Clark Kent, he has Lois Lane, and as Cousin Kal, there’s Supergirl, but the rest of the characters are all male. Even the dude selling coffee. That’s sort of a shame. For though there’s a  glimpse of Lois using her investigative abilities to work with Superman and help save the day, ultimately — it’s a comic about a bunch of guys.

The ensemble cast of  Tiny Titans allowed for characters of both genders to have equal time occupying center stage. And Franco and Balthazar used that feature very well. Some issues were more girl-centered, some more boy-centered, there was no real exclusion of either gender. Superman Family Adventures, with a male protagonist, by its nature relegates female characters to supporting cast. That might still be ok, if the female personas were well-defined enough — and if there were more than two of them. I loved Tiny Titans not only for allowing my daughter to see herself all over the pages, but for allowing my son to see that girls are every bit as as interesting and smart and strong as boys are.

Superheroes are awesome. Kids love superheroes. And kids really love kid superheroes. The kid-centered world of Tiny Titans gave children something they really seek out – stories they can imagine themselves in now- not when they grow up. Tiny Titans was remarkable for being a superhero comic filled with children. My kids were very excited  to see the slightly older Superboy and Supergirl in Superman Family Adventures, and there was a lot of discussion about their new costumes. However, aside from a single frame wherein Jimmy Olsen swoons over Supergirl, she and Superboy don’t really figure into the story much. Together they help to beat up a few robots, but Krypto the dog is really the one who saves the day.

What Superman Family Adventures isn’t — a gender-balanced, kid-centered book for even the youngest readers — is something we still sorely need. But what Superman Family Adventures is — an action-packed Superman comic targeting school-aged children —  brings the classic elements of the Superman legend to a new generation of readers. The addition of Superboy, Supergirl, and Jimmy Olsen give children characters they can identify with, and the incorporation of a couple of female secondary characters means that female readers aren’t entirely left out. Whether or not it’s the perfect all-ages comic, it’s pretty much the perfect Superman comic.