Some thoughts about Superman: Year One #2

Is the world ready for Superman?

Clark believes he wants to be a SEAL but this life might not be what he was looking for after all and surprisingly he might find what he wants under the sea.

The Frank Miller take on Superman continues and it follows all the classic tropes that you can expect from the writer and this comes with both its bad and good aspects.

The plot is mostly centered around Clark's life in the Marines and how he starts to excel in every test they throw to him which is something you might expect and one point you might be fearing that Miller wants to make Superman into the mindless soldier from his Dark Knight universe but fortunately this gets an interesting twist halfway where Clark realizes that he doesn't really like how a soldier behaves, particularly the part where he's forced to kill somebody which is something pretty appropriate for Superman and I'm glad that the characterization for him seems on-point at the very least.

There's also the classic melodramatic Miller dialogue and at times it does take you out of the story because of a few off lines but at the same time, it also helps to give events a bigger scope and an intense sense of escalation, especially once that Clark explores the undersea, developes new powers and meets an obscure member of the Superman mythos like Lori Lemaris. The scenes underwater when he's forced to fight a Kraken are especially interesting because of Miller's unrealistic yet engaging narration.

Then comes the bad parts though. Miller has a "particular" way of writing women and this is especially obvious during Lori's dialogue where she expresses how much she wants to sleep with Clark, make him hers and so on. It seems really old-fashioned and kinda sexist I guess which is something rather predictable from Miller sadly. Plus, there's also the appearance of terrorists and if you know something about Miller's politics is that he has a pretty distinctive way to portray terrorists so yeah, this can also be considered a bit racist and worst of all, expected.

John Romita Jr. never disappoints in art duties though and this is probably one of his strongest works in years with a much more polished result than in his previous monthly works and a really clear storytelling that gets the best from the script.

I would say that I like this but I'm not going to deny that there are certain problematic parts. Let's see if Miller can make things better in the next one.