The Superman Files...
Now that it's officially up for pre-order on Amazon, I can finally talk about the project I've been hammering away at for the last few months. The Superman Files is a scrapbook of sorts on the life and times of the Man of Steel. Just as I did with its predecessor, The Batman Files, I'll be handling the writing portion of the book, while Lionheart Books will be tackling the design, pulling (and in some cases altering) hundreds of illustrations from the comics, as well as commissioning plenty of new artwork and hand crafted "artifacts" from Superman's past.
Coming in at over 300 pages, this massive hardcover aims to be the most comprehensive life story of Clark Kent ever attempted. Told through the use of Superman's own journal entries, faux newspaper articles, Justice League crime files, schematics, and hundreds of "photographs" of the Last Son of Krypton in action, The Superman Files is going to really dig into the life of Superman in ways we've never seen before.
I'll be sure to post a few sample pages as soon as I get the okay, so keep checking back. From what I've seen so far, though, this book is going to look amazing...
Comments
The computer pages of The Batman Files were indeed meant to appear as if they were several pages long. Batman's quite meticulous about his files, and if we tried to replicate an entire file on, say, the Joker, that would have taken up all of our book. So we included just enough information to tell the story we wanted to tell, and used the "Continued" conceit as a way to end the file and still stay as true as possible to Batman's world.
The Superman Files will include similar files, but they'll be from the Justice League headquarters computer and will have links at the bottom of each entry instead of being continued.
There will be some New 52 near the end of the book, but mostly we're sticking with the modern version of the character established by John Byrne. We're layering the Johns and Waid origins in there a bit, too.
That's why Brainiac 5 is telling the story. Brainiac 5 lives in the 31st Century where records of our era are spotty at best. He's compiling the life and times of Superman using all the information he has available to him, and smoothing out all the rough edges to tell one, streamlined story.