'Superman: Earth One' disappoints

DC Comics has added another chapter to a long and entertaining tradition of reinvention with a graphic novel called "Superman: Earth One" ($20). Maybe because of my high expectations, I'm terribly disappointed.

DC has rebooted its major characters every 20 years or so. It has done it again, by inventing a new world -- Earth One -- inhabited by new, younger, 21st-century versions of Superman, Batman and friends. This work is the first in a series, all penned by superstar writer J. Michael Straczynski ("Babylon Five").

It's an epic failure. There's not much new about this new version of Superman, and what is new is a bunch of bad storytelling decisions.

I can accept, for example, that Clark Kent lies to his editor and his reading public about his secret identity. The lie prevents a greater evil -- the murder of all of Kent's family members, friends and associates.

But what I can't accept is Kent using this facade for professional gain. He's depicted scooping Lois Lane with the first interview with Superman, which lands him his job at the Daily Planet. That isn't a white lie necessary to save lives; it's fraudulent self-promotion.

Kent and Lane's first stories about Superman are included in the back of the book. But they are so embarrassingly juvenile and unreadable that they wouldn't pass as decent blog posts, much less professional news stories. Worse, Kent writes an exchange between himself and Superman, one that is not only unethical (he's making it up!) but is so cringingly adolescent and amateurish that no newspaper on any Earth would run it.

Too arcane? Then let's look at two clumsy changes "Earth One" makes to the Superman mythos:

Second, we discover Krypton didn't blow up by chance, but was deliberately destroyed by other aliens.

Bad plan. The arbitrary nature of Superman's central tragedy, and how he transforms it into altruism instead of self-pity, is central to his heroism -- as it is with Batman and Spider-Man (who also have suffered this sort of revisionism occasionally). If aliens murdered his planet, then Superman has a moral obligation as the last Kryptonian to leave Earth and devote his life to bringing those aliens to justice. Since he won't (or there's no series), he looks like a coward from the get-go.