- Hardcover: 96 pages
- Publisher: Titan Books Ltd (26 Nov 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1840239786
- ISBN-13: 978-1840239782
- Product Dimensions: 26.4 x 17.6 x 1.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,479,241 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
Western Daily Press December 2004: "A rollicking adventure with an eccentric English take on the Superman myth."
Product Description
Get ready for Superman as you've never seen him before, in an uproarious new graphic novel by The First 28 Years of Monty Python scribe Kim Howard Johnson with some help by Monty Python and Fawlty Towers legend John Cleese! In this hilarious twist on a familar tale, the infant Superman's rocket ship crash lands in an English town even smaller than Smallville. Adopted by the kindly Clarks, young Colin is taught to hide his powers, as nobody likes to stand out in a crowd. But when a grown-up Colin - now a mild-mannered reporter for The Daily Smear - uses his powers publicly, the question on everyone's lips is: what will the neighbours think? Featuring art by superstar John Byrne, this is a publishing event not to be missed!
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
'British' in an Austin Powers sort of way,
This review is from: Superman: True Brit (Hardcover)
First, the good points: It's got lovely artwork. 1980's fan favourite (and the man entrusted with the late 80's reboot of the Superman mythos) John Byrne inked over by long-time Alan Davis collaborator Mark Farmer, famed for his 'clean' style. It looks great.The story is good as well - an opportunity to parody the S** and the rest of the British tabloid press, with Colin (Superman) Clark's newspaper editor boss clearly modelled on a certain fictional Torquay hotelier. There are some lovely twists on the long-familiar Superman stories, including some lovely cartoony moments (how does a teenage Clark stop himself from looking in the girls' changing rooms with X Ray vision?; what if young Clark switched on heat vision whilst looking at a 'hot' girl? etc) Indeed, Clark's parents are more caricatures than 'real' people to keep in with the 'just for laughs' style. Where I have an issue is with the use of John Cleese as a co-author of the book. I suspect that he's had very little to do with this. True, there are numerous in-jokes hidden away for the fans covering both Python and Fawlty Towers, but would Cleese really have allowed a conversation between Clark and his earthly dad to have allowed the use of the term 'sidewalk' instead of 'pavement'? (Just how British is the writing team?) This has all the hallmarks of one of those Chris Claremont X-Men stories where Britain consists of the Houses of Parliament, Beefeaters, and little else. Austin Powers would feel at home here. Overall, disposable fun, but I'm glad I borrowed this from the library - it's written as much with one eye on pandering to the preconceptions of the US market as it is on giving us Brits 'our own' Superman story. For a quality alternative in a non-comedy vein, I'd recommend Batman: The Scottish Connection by the all-Scots team of Grant & Quitely. They'd even included Rosslyn Chapel years before the Da Vinci code got there...
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Proper faulty and no mistake Guv!,
By
This review is from: Superman: True Brit (Superman) (Paperback)
I can live with the cliché's, I can live with the patronising ex pat, 'ollywood cockernee type characterisation's, I can even forgive John Byrne (once a legend in this business), but what I cannot forgive is that this is very poor and worst of all NOT FUNNY! It is simply short of the mark and way off target and desperately tries to capture a long dead zeitgeist that probably only ever existed in the minds of Americans watching "The Avengers" re-runs on TV as kids and in the long since dried up comedy brain of John Cleese who clearly spends way to much time in La La Land and out of England to recognise this for the poor excuse of a parody that it fails to be...shame
2.0 out of 5 stars
Silly,
By Andrew Norris (West Midlands, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Superman: True Brit (Superman) (Paperback)
When it comes to British superheroes, I tend to be a little wary of DC Comics, as their stable of British heroes leaves something to be desired. With the exception of Shining Knight (who we hardly ever see), the British heroes of DC Comics tend to fall roughly into two categories: anti-heroes (The Beefeater, Manchester Black, V, the various heroes from the "Albion" miniseries) or clones of American heroes (Knight and Squire)."Superman: True Brit" falls into the clone camp, but as it is under the Elseworlds banner (DC's equivalent of Marvel's "What If?" range), it's probably better described as an alternate reality. At first, I liked it, because one or two jokes seemed funny to begin with, but when I re-read it later on, I began to wonder just why a story about a British Superman really needed jokes, and why John Cleese had added his name to the titles. It then occurred to me, as I'm sure it did to the writers when they began work on this, that a British Superman wouldn't be all that different from the American Superman, and so they made it a comedy to distance it from the American original. When I looked over the jokes again, I also began to wonder what had made me think them funny. I'm not saying they weren't, but jokes about tabloid newspapers and worrying about the neighbours have been done many times before. The subtle references to Michael Palin, The Rutles and The Giles Family were pretty good, but too brief to make an impression. The only good thing to be said about this book is that it marks the end of an era, for I have it on good authority that the mediocre reception to this book, coupled with the negative feedback to an episode of the "Teen Titans" animated series (for enquiring minds, the episode was called "Revolution", and received a great deal of negative feedback for its allegedly anti-British stance), DC are beginning to distance themselves from their earlier jibes at Great Britain and are beginning to show their British heroes in a fairer light - The Beefeater, as one example, has recently returned to DC's pages in both "52" and "Batman and Robin", but without the Basil Fawlty tones that previously went with the character. No doubt DC have learned their lesson after "Superman: True Brit", it's just a shame it can't recall all copies of this horrid book to be pulped so that we can all pretend it never happened.
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