I don't generally pay much attention to the Superman books.  I've always found him a thoroughly dull character, or at least one with very limited potential.

Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen's Superman: Secret Identity is a bit of an oddball project, however.  The high concept is rather strange.  Young Clark Kent has grown up in Kansas - the real Kansas - having been named after Superman by his parents.  Clark doesn't share their sense of humour and finds the whole thing intensely annoying.  Demonstrating excellent taste, he doesn't even much like Superman.  But then it turns out that not only does he have the name and appearance, he has the powers as well.

In other words, it seems Clark actually is Superman, despite the fact that Superman's supposed to be a fictional character in his world.  So not only does he find himself the only superhuman in an otherwise normal world, he's an internationally recognised iconic character.

Now, on any view, that's a bizarre premise.  You could, of course, play it for outright metafiction, since the story is built on multiple levels of fiction.  Certainly it echoes Earth-Prime, the DC Universe's supposed "real world" - which, naturally, ceased being the real world the moment it appeared on panel.  However, Kurt Busiek avoids getting into these murky areas directly.  In the first issue, at least, the focus is more on Clark's desire to maintain a normal life, and the need to disguise his powers.  Because if the public find out that Superman actually exists, then there will be problems.

The first issue is titled Smallville (though that's not the name of the town used in the story), and issue #2 is scheduled to be Metropolis.  So it appears that we're going to follow Clark through a career of Not Being Superman.  Whereas most of us can Not Be Superman with a modicum of effort, Clark naturally has to try much harder.  And for the purposes of this set-up, it really does have to be Superman, the most iconic superhero of all.  It just wouldn't be the same to have a character discover that he's really Element Lad, after all.

One of Kurt Busiek's great skills is the ability to make characters rounded and believable in the midst of the strangeness of the superhero genre.  As Astro City regularly shows, he's able to give the superhero universe a sufficiently grounded quality to make it feel like the real world, while still maintaining the proverbial sense of wonder.  This is something of an inversion, since it involves bringing superhero elements into an otherwise normal universe, but similar principles apply.  I'm a little uncertain about the journalist who serves as the antagonist, by contriving a disaster to draw Clark out - that strikes me as behaviour which is a little too outlandish for a character who isn't meant to be from a genre universe.  Maybe this will become clearer as time goes on, and we see to what extent the genre is going to bleed over into Clark's "real" world.

Other than that, though, Busiek sells the concept very well.  He manages to sell Clark's disbelief with the whole set-up, without making the reader reject it as overly implausible.  The key to suspension of disbelief, of course, is that the reader will accept one outlandish premise as long as everything else flows naturally from that.  This is a particularly good example of that.

Busiek and artist Stuart Immonen worked together before on the shortlived Shockrockets.  I've always liked Immonen's work, which has a charming ability to make it the storytelling look effortless, and looks gorgeous without ever drawing attention to the fact.  This is no exception, and it goes without saying Immonen is well cast on the book.  Like Busiek, his style straddles the real world and the superhero genre, and makes them both feel like they belong together.

An interesting if weird premise, and beautifully done.  Of course, it's such an audaciously bizarre set-up that it could still collapse under its own weight as the series progresses.  But a good first issue, certainly.

Rating: A-

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