Monday 20 January 2014

Smallville: Greed

Greed (New York, 2003) is a Smallville novel by Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld:

it is summer;
Clark is sixteen;
he arrived in Smallville thirteen years previously;
Lex is twenty two;
LexCorp has split from LuthorCorp;
Lex and Lionel are now enemies;
Pete Ross has learned Clark's secret;
Clark thinks that he will grow up to inherit the Kent farm;
Chloe is on a Daily Planet internship.

I do not think that this is the best way to introduce Clark to the reader:

"...Clark was no ordinary farm boy from a small town called Smallville, Kansas, but a visitor from another planet. His spaceship crash-landed in a local cornfield, where he had been found by local farmers Jonathan and Martha Kent, and raised as their child." (p. 7)

Most of us already know this, of course, but, even if we didn't, such background information, or as much of it as is necessary for the particular story, should be revealed during the narrative, not merely stated.

Having watched an episode of the TV series earlier in the evening, it is good to stay with the characters in a different medium. Drama, narrative and sequential art are the three story-telling media. Superman, having originated in sequential art has, in Smallville, successfully transferred to both drama and prose.

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