Smallville (2001 to 2011) and the comics

[TMC]

http://www.batman-online.com/forum/i...p?topic=2238.0

I have noticed that Smallville takes a lot of heat from a lot of people for inventing it's own continuity. And while it is true that there are instances aplenty where the show did it's own thing, my contention is that it did so no more often (and, God knows, to no worse an outcome) than other Superman media. Even some of the show's more outlandish ideas draw more from the comics than one might expect.

Now, I am not arguing that the showrunners took every single one of their inspirations from every single one of the comics mentioned herein. Except for one thing, which is so clear that I continue to be shocked that I'm apparently the only one who's talking about it.

But even if all or most of this stuff wasn't intentional, it still works to the showrunners' benefit. If their inspiration came from the source material... well, who among us will criticize them for that? But if we suppose that the majority of these examples can be chalked up to coincidence, it still says a lot that the writers, producers and other creators were dialed in to the characters enough that their stories have so much in common with these comic books. There's no down side to this for them.

As a corollary, there also isn't any way to argue that Superman comics haven't done a lot of what Smallville did. Perhaps the context is different, perhaps the comic book idea is superior to the TV show (or vice versa) but, intentional or not, the similarities are real, many and varied.

As much as anything, this blabfest is intended to get a lot of stuff off my chest about the whining about the show I've heard from a certain segment of the fanbase I won't mention... but if you consider yourself part of Superman fandom, odds are very good that you've at least heard of the personalities I'm reacting to and the web pages where they can be found. There seems to be a strange double standard where Richard Donner, Bryan Singer, Paul Dini and other creators are given license to do basically anything they want, wholesale reinvent entire concepts and characters from the Superman mythos but Smallville gets burned in effigy if it so much as pokes a toe out of line with what the comics are perceived to be. I don't mind someone not liking Smallville. That's hardly a crime. But if this is to be a comparison about which adaptations are most like the comics (and thus which are most "valid"), let's apply the same standard to all adaptations. I'm not asking to be the guy who picks the criteria; I simply want the same criteria applied equally. We'll sort the "winners" and "losers" out after that.