Smallville the TV series, now in its second year, has, as was not unexpected, generated a series of paperback novels based on the TV program. Actually, there are two series; they appear to be from two different companies (Little Brown and Warner), but in fact the two turn out to be the same company with two different logos. The Little Brown books are primarily short novels, almost like episodes, aimed at younger readers; the Warner works are around twice as long, and seem to have a more adult audience in mind.

Of the five books, only one (Arrival by Michael Teitelbaum) is based on an actual episode, the pilot; the other two (See No Evil and Flight), while they could be episodes in themselves, are actually independent works, apparently imitating potential first-season episodes. The two longer works (Strange Visitors and Dragon) are also set in the first season, but are IMHO too long and complex to be episodes in themselves.

Besides Arrival, about which I shall say a few words shortly, and whose plot I’ve talked about before, See No Evil has Clark dragooned (by Lana Lang, natch) into a one-line part in a school presentation of Cyrano de Bergerac — a part which expands to that of Cyrano when the leading boy is severely injured by the leading girl, who has discovered how to use meteor rock to make herself invisible and who is using the ability to get even with everybody she thinks has slighted her. In Flight he gets his first job — in a pizza shop — and makes friends with a girl who turns out to have functional wings. In the longer Strange Visitors, Smallville is visited by a New Age genetic scientist cum faith healer. And in Dragon a recently released prisoner with a rather lively tatoo returns to Smallville.

By and large, the stories are at least readable, though they contribute very little to the Superman back story. The exception is Michael Teitelbaum’s Arrival. With all due respect, Teitelbaum turns in a manuscript that suggests he couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag. He can’t be faulted for presenting some material that wasn’t in the original presentation — perhaps he had a different, earlier and uncut manuscript from which to work. Nor will I blame him for consistently referring to Whitney Fordman as “Whitney Ellsworth”; Alan Grant in Dragon makes the same error once (though not elsewhere), and I suspect that Fordman underwent a name change somewhere in the later stages of creating the series. But what I do fault here are basic writing problems such as his inability to decide on a viewpoint character in any scope greater than a paragraph and his overuse of auctorial omniscience. The other authors pretty much reserve this for effects such as foreshadowing (“Clark shuddered. Not even for Lana would I appear in public in tights. — See No Evil, p. 33), a legitimate device also heavily used in the TV series (“I don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up, but it won’t involve putting on a suit and doing a lot of flying”). Teitelbaum also deviates from the series story in at least one place, Clark’s return of Lana’s necklace at the end of the book — a return which didn’t occur until the end of the second episode in the series.

One major item missing in the books is the feeling, prevalent in the series (at least to me), that what we are involved in is a genuine tragedy, and that the tragic hero of the series is not Clark Kent, someday to be Superman, but young Lex Luthor, who means well but because of a character fault that he can’t escape is doomed to do evil in the end. The TV story is so much Lex’s that I find episodes where his role is minor actually rather boring. And if I had to assign a villain to the piece, I wouldn’t name Lex’s ruthless and amoral father Lionel, but Clark’s foster father Jonathan Kent — an upstanding, honest, hard-working man with a solid understanding of boys and a lot of love in him, who will nevertheless not give Lex, who admires him immensely, a single chance to demonstrate that he is capable of even the least level of honesty and loyalty. Little if any of this penetrates into the books, which are primarily about events in which Clark is the main actor, and in which Lex plays little or no role (see, however, p. 49 of Strange Visitors and the sequel for an interesting side of Lex Luthor). ⁽¹⁾

I doubt whether anybody who’s not an aficionado of the series would find these books particularly interesting, but four of them should be read by those who are fans.

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⁽¹⁾ Lex Luthor, as far as I can remember, started out as just another criminal mastermind in the comic series; eventually he graduated to membership in a league or brotherhood of super-villains, along with such other ne’er-do-wells as Brainiac and Solomon Grundy. There was, as far as I can remember, one quick look at a slightly different Lex Luthor back in the late fifties or early sixties, when he became the autocratic ruler of a planet under a red star, where Superman had no super-powers; Luthor was a dictator, but a genuinely benevolent one, and even fell in love with one of his subjects. Eventually, of course, he was carried away to his just deserts by Superman. Richard Donner’s Lex Luthor, in the movie series a quarter of a century ago, was a thorough-going buffoon. Lex Luthor as captain of industry may have appeared in later comics, which I did not read, but I first remember it from the TV series Lois and Clark about half a decade ago. The current series is the first place I’ve run across his father Lionel; it’s also the first time I remember seeing any explicit reference to “Lex” as a nickname for “Alexander”.