"It's Superman!" by Tom De Haven

I'm in the midst of reading it right now and thoroughly enjoying it (and half-wishing they'd make a graphic novel of it). Anyone ever read it? Your thoughts?

[QUOTE=UltraWoman;326811]I'm in the midst of reading it right now and thoroughly enjoying it (and half-wishing they'd make a graphic novel of it). Anyone ever read it? Your thoughts?[/QUOTE]

I read it several years ago and loved it. There were a few things, a couple nitpicks, that I didnt care for (Clark isnt written as being as intelligent as I'd like, and a few others I wont spoil for you) but overall I found it very well thought out, well executed, and it brought a different sensibility to the character rather than just re-tooling his story a little bit and calling it "new".

By and large, the best Superman novel I have read outside of Maggin. Not that there's a lot of Superman novels out there at all, but still.

I thought it didn't quite find a balance between the period piece thriller elements and its nature as an off-kilter Superman origin, but really great when it was on nonetheless. Certainly a worthwhile read. Now the only major Superman book I have left to read is 1942's [I]The Adventures of Superman[/I]--saw it at a used bookstore once, but it was insanely expensive.

It is a fantastic read. Easily, the best novel about a superhero (or supervillain) after [I]The Fortress of Solitude[/I] by Jonathon Lethem and [I]Soon I Will Be Invincible[/I] by Austin Grossman.

[QUOTE='Dax;329811]It is a fantastic read. Easily, the best novel about a superhero (or supervillain) after [I]The Fortress of Solitude[/I] by Jonathon Lethem and [I]Soon I Will Be Invincible[/I] by Austin Grossman.[/QUOTE]

Read Invincible, it was pretty good. Have you read the Maggin Superman novels, or Robert Mayer's Superfolks?

I only read [I]Last Son of Krypton[/I] by Maggin. Unfortunately, I did not think much of it. I found it largely forgettable, but I thoroughly enjoyed his take on Luthor.

I did not like [I]Superfolks [/I]very much either, but I can appreciate its significance to superhero comics.

I've finished reading it, it was a good read. I think this book shows that Superman isn't that hard or boring to write as other people make him out to be.

Just finished it. Enjoyed it as a set piece and less a "superhero" story. Luckily that's just fine by me. I had the "Grapes of Wrath" in the back of my mind while reading it and some of those scenes felt reminiscent at times. Interestingly, I got bored recently and decided to look up reviews after reading it. It seems that it was a split opinion (no surprise to me). Some didn't like the "less smart" version of Clark (something that didn't completely bother me) nor the seeming hyper-focus on the supporting protagonists (and the antagonist) or the lack of superheroics-which were all there, just not at post-debut levels as I'd expect it to be if there had been a second book (something I didn't at all expect from reading this). In many ways i reads as a love letter to the S&S and Fleischer Superman, more so than any other versions (which it looks like was intentional). I could definitely see Hatcher's, and Joan Anderson's influences in Lois with her brassy attitudes and her belief that she was romantic even if "popular culture" dictated she wasn't (I've often had the same issue with women-focused magazines and their constant quizzes showing me to be "less romantic" than the "average" whatever that was).

One of my favorite videos is this one that uses a quote from [I]It's Superman![/I] to narrate a multiverse tribute:

[video=youtube_share;EcW2aQqP7Co]http://youtu.be/EcW2aQqP7Co[/video]

[QUOTE=misslane;337982]One of my favorite videos is this one that uses a quote from [I]It's Superman![/I] to narrate a multiverse tribute:

[video=youtube_share;EcW2aQqP7Co]http://youtu.be/EcW2aQqP7Co[/video][/QUOTE]

I enjoyed the ending monologue but I never quite picked up on it's impact and significance on the Superman fandom, and indeed, the Clois-specific segment of this fandom, before. I think this monologue needs to be held up as a strong example of why so many of us were put off by the changes of the new52.

I was thinking about this book and I think it might have worked just as well as a short story with (mostly) the final part being the entirety of the story. You might have lost some understanding of why Lois equated Superman with Willi Berg(I still don't quite understand that one) and Ben Jaeger with Clark in her mind but the core and most of the outliers would have been understood even without a good majority of the novel. As it was written by a creative writing professor as a (general public) novel and not one catering to JUST the Superman/superhero fandom I'm not at all surprised it had so much other stuff going on.

I've always felt that novels were a fantastic medium to explore Superman's character. Comics often fail when it comes to highlighting the complexity of his character since its very hard to so when you've limited pages, but books like Miracle Monday really introduced me to whole new aspects of the character.

[I]It's Superman[/I] was a good read. It had a lot of heart and while I wasn't a fan of how Clark's intelligence was portrayed (like the exact opposite of what Maggin did), it didn't bother me as much as in the comics maybe because it wasn't used to put the character down or to prop another character up. And I thoroughly enjoyed the Lois and Clark parts.