Monday 1 March 2010

Smallville - Dawson's Creek for Comic Book Geeks

Smallville has long been an excuse for the lonely teenage geek to indulge in slushy awkward romance fantasies while avoiding the ridicule that an admission of watching Gossip Girl or The OC would bring them.

You see regardless of the Lana Lang/Clark Kent/Lex Luthor/Louis Lane love rectangle that the teenager so eagerly watches sometimes adding Chloe (?) to it for the sake of making a magic pentagram to cast on the people that mock them for watching it, the teenager can always argue that they watch Smallville because it's about Superman and therefore it's comic book based and somehow not fair to slag it off.

If you look properly at it though Smallville tries to cash in on all the cheesy romance crap it can, from Clark's switching between good Clark and bad Clark to the cheeseball lines lex says. One memorable occasion was Lex quoting John Donne to Lana to show her that Clark couldn't have written her some slushy poem because "Clark doesn't understand that poetry is all about seduction"

Fuck sake Lex, you're supposed to be a fucking baddie.

The biggest proof that comic book fans watch Smallville for it's slushy sentimentality is all the Lex and Clark friends that grow into deadly enemies hints that are thrown out all over the place to allow sappy geeks to shout "A-ha!" everytime they hear one.

Here's one, the worst one, and please try to remember that Lex is supposed to be a baddie and not some character thrown in at the last minute because he was too bald for a Mills and Boon novel:



I mean if someone you knew said this to you, even if they were pished out of their face and you'd just done them the biggest favour of their lives, you probably wouldn't speak to them again, just incase they said it in front of someone that knew you.

Maybe it was moments like this that made Clark and Lex enemies in the end, not because Lex turned to crime but because Clark grew fed up with his ballbag, cheeseball lines.

Smallville fans would see this coming but since most comic book geeks have no friends, they have no basis for comparison and rely on me to provide them with the knowledge.