Saturday Series Spotlight: New Super-Man
Written by Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese, Superman Smashes the Klan) and with art by Victor Bogdanovic (Batman: Arkham Knight), Billy Tan (X-23) and others, New Super-Man follows Kong Kenan - an arrogant and troubled Chinese teenager who is offered by Ministry of Self-Reliance to participate in an experiment that grants him powers like those of Superman. Kenan joins the Ministry’s Justice League of China, which also includes their own counterparts to Batman and Wonder Woman and over the course of the story they also pick their counterparts to Flash and Aquaman.
The series is bravely dealing with political issues, be it relegated to the portrayal of Chinese characters in comics or China’s government. For example, the book draws a contrast with a preexisting Chinese superhero team the Great Ten and questions which way of doing diverse heroes is right. Are JLC just shameful copies of American ideas or an attempt at beating them at their own game? Are Great Ten heroes proud of their heritage or just a bunch of offensive stereotypes? Of course, the book actually picks up some characters seen as stereotypical, like blind martial arts master I-Ching, and tries to flesh them out and give new depth. In one of its arcs, it even goes to challenge the story from very first book DC ever published, Detective Comics #1 and tear apart racist stereotypes in it. Meanwhile antagonists like Freedom Fighters of China or Alpaca, Chinese counterpart of the Joker, constantly force the team to question whenever they should actually be loyal to the Chinese government. In the final arc, after the series changes titles to new Super-Man and the Justice League of China, the team almost comes apart due to dilemma whenever they should save a North Korean refugee at risk of straining a relationship between a nuclearly-armed dictatorship and the only country it sometimes listens to.
Despite this description, the book is far from being all serious and gloom. In fact, it has pretty good humor that often comes from great characters - they really come off as good-natured teenagers that want to do the right thing and learn how complicated that can actually be sometimes.
Also, if you’re gonna pick it in floppies I recommend variant covers by Bernard Chang, most of them are freaking hilarious.
