DC Comics has announced that it will take readers back to the first days of the Man of Tomorrow with Superman: The Stranger, a new six-issue DC Black Label comic book series launching in September, written and illustrated by Wes Craig.
Set in an Art Deco-inspired 1938 Metropolis, the series reimagines Superman's earliest adventures through a modern storytelling lens while drawing heavily from the visual language of DC's Golden Age of comic books and the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons.
In Superman: The Stranger, we'll follow Superman at the very beginning of his journey. During the day, Clark Kent does what he can to make ends meet in the bustling city of Metropolis, but when the sun goes down, he leaps into action to keep the city streets safe.
As Superman, Clark fights for a better tomorrow, but he feels like he's not affecting change. The rich keep getting richer, and the poor struggle to survive. Can Superman truly save the downtrodden?
"Superman is my favorite hero. Always has been," Craig said today. "I grew up on Christopher Reeve and John Byrne’s interpretation, then his animated adventures and All-Star Superman as I grew older. His mythology always changing with the times. But the version I love the most and the one that I think, strangely, reflects our modern world best, is the original."
"You strip away the extra powers, you strip away Ma and Pa Kent, and Smallville and Krypton, you boil it down to that explosive first issue of Action Comics, and you have this vital, powerful myth of a brash young man with incredible powers fighting against a corrupt city. That's the story I want to tell," the writer/artist added.
In recent years, DC Comics has taken a unique approach to telling stories, worrying less about trying to make sense of the DC Universe's often complicated continuity to prioritise quality storytelling.
That makes it easier to revisit the Golden Age with a series like Superman: The Stranger, without fretting too much about where it might fit into this world's complex tapestry. Fleischer Studios cartoons serving as a source of inspiration is also an exciting development for longtime fans of Superman.
Superman: The Stranger, a six-issue DC Black Label comic book series written and illustrated by Wes Craig with colors by Jason Wordie and lettering by Tom Napolitano, will feature variant covers by Dave Johnson, Goran Parlov, and Ethan Young on the debut issue.