Comic Review: Superman Year One #1

Superman: Year One #1

DC Comics

Writer: Frank Miller

Art: John Romita Jr

God, I hate modern Frank Miller. I really, really hate modern Frank Miller. Everything he’s done since the early 2000s has been bad at best, abysmally offensive at worst. I was hoping Superman: Year One would be different, I really really was. I was hoping that finally, I’d read a modern Miller book that I’d like, after all this time. I was sorely mistaken to ever have any faith in him to output anything remotely approaching good content.

The story of Superman: Year One #1 can basically be told by reading any other Superman origin and slapping on Miller’s trademark edgy themes and the necessary military propaganda that comes with him. But, this is a review, so I’ll talk about it anyway. Krypton is destroyed, Superman is shot down to Earth, Ma and Pa Kent take him in, raise him, he meets friends and lives basically as normal a childhood as he can until, and this is the third major difference with Miller’s Superman, he decides to enlist in the Navy SEAL’s (which is where the issue ends). It’s basic, awful, and as I’ll get onto later, needlessly edgy.

While the plot may be bad. the characters are even worse. Do you know that age-old tale that Superman was taken in by kindly old Ma and Pa Kent from the kindness of their heart? Yeah, Miller said forget about that, Superman brainwashed them. This is just the start of the aforementioned needless edginess that Miller has decided would somehow make Superman interesting, despite years and years of fan complaints to the contrary. And, here’s the real kicker, it’s not the stupidest and most needlessly “grim-dark and cool!” thing that Miller does in this issue alone. No, that honour has to go to the fact he chooses to have Lana Lang, mild-mannered girl in the wonderful town of Smallville (a town that, I would like to point out to you, is incredibly kind and has a tight-knitted community) be the victim of an attempted sexual assault, because Miller thinks that sexual assault is a substitute for character development.

John Romita Jnr’s art is just… well, awful. It’s so insanely ugly that it almost crosses the boundary into being unintentionally funny. His faces just feel wrong, with massive bulging eyes and funko-esque heads that simply do not suit the characters he’s drawing for, nor would they really suit any character he could be drawing for. The background art looks, for want of a better word, rough. They look like Romita Jnr has submitted his early art tests as the actual art for the book without realising his mistake. I’m still shocked at quite how bad this art is. I wasn’t expecting to be good from the previews, but it’s just a joke. It’s one of the few times I’ve actively hated the art in a comic book. The colouring (by Alex Sinclair) also just plainly feels off, the characters look almost ill in certain panels and never quite look right.

That’s the bigger issues facing this travesty of a comic, but there’s a series of smaller ones too. For example, it’s simply far too long. 63 pages are hard for any one issue to maintain interest over, but when you’ve got a writer famed for his clichés, it becomes even more agonizing. Speaking of clichés, the book is full of them, with far too many to even begin to list.

Overall, Superman: Year One #1 is an often irritating, often agonising retelling of Superman’s origin through the lens of an out of touch, questionable writer and an artist who is mediocre at best. Avoid it at any and all costs.