[Ed. Note: This started out as a response to frequent question-asker Scott Williams that, once again, got away from me.]

I had a problematic relationship with Smallville. I also stopped watching regularly after the second or third season - around the time Lana Lang was turned into a vampire for an episode because hey, that’s college! Present James has read Bryan Q. Miller’s Batgirl #14 and now thinks the idea is pretty incredible, but back then, well, I was young and made some bad decisions in life.

Regardless, I checked in occasionally almost every season to see how it was doing. I really wanted to like Smallville, because the idea of a teen Superman without having to deal with the Legion of Superheroes was and still is a pretty great idea. I could never latch on enough, and my interest waxed and waned with different seasons, but no matter what, it was always on my radar as something to take note of. As derided as the show was by some people, I never failed to want to like it, and that was long after the time I took a picture of Tom Welling as Clark Kent to a hairdresser a friend recommended and then regretted it for a few months.

In that limited regard, it’s impressive that the series lasted for 10 years. That’s a whole decade! That’s longer than most shows run. It’s longer than any other show like it ran, and it maintained a fairly sizable audience for the entire period. That, right out of the starting gate, deserves some respect.

Of course, it’s notable how they made it last that long: by making Clark Superman in all but name for several seasons. He was a superhero who actually wore the Superman logo. He helped found the Justice League. He met iconic superheroes and supervillains. He was a reporter in Metropolis who was in love with Lois Lane! The big things in the finale were that he finally wore the iconic costume and flew for the first time, except for the episode in the fourth season where he flew and then they tried to forget it for another six seasons afterward. I’m paraphrasing the producers, but early on in the show’s life, they said that the day they showed Clark flying, they’d run out of ideas and the show should end. Clearly, they were able to stretch it.

And that’s a good thing! Smallville was on television for a DECADE. That’s huge! It’s notably longer than any other superhero show on television, and a big part of that, I think, were the ideas I talked about earlier: they didn’t make it dark. Don’t get me wrong; it was full of melodrama, but hey, it was the WB/CW and it’s not like the comics aren’t a place where melodrama happens on a weekly basis. There was certainly darkness, but it wasn’t suffocating or even representative of the overall tone of the series; instead, it was by and large a series about fighting against that kind of darkness and making the world a better place. They captured the SPIRIT of the character of Superman, even if they had to go to increasing lengths not to call him by the name, and it wasn’t indebted to any of the other iconic incarnations of the character. This wasn’t Donner’s Superman, or Lester’s, or even too similar to any of the previous actors’ portrayals. It was a unique look at the character through a lens that was even different from Lois & Clark a decade earlier, and it found a sizable audience as a result.

The audience is a big part of it, too - it’s important to note that even by the time the series ended and the ratings had dipped from their heights in the earlier seasons, it was still pulling over two and a half million viewers per week. That’s not just exponentially more than a Superman family comic sells in a given month; it’s exponentially more than all the Superman family of comic books sell every month, combined. I don’t think it’s out of line to say that not only is the defining version of Superman no longer the comics, but it’s not any of the normally geek-identified versions either, from the DC Animated Universe to any of the films. It’s Smallville. It’s arguable that the TV show is the “voice” of Superman for a new generation.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, this is often a source of complaint from very visible proportions of both the comic book and geek communities, who deride the series as being not just bad, but actively harmful to the image and culture of Superman. While this isn’t exactly an unexpected position from a group that routinely claims that The Phantom Menace raped their childhoods, it’s a troubling one. Not only is it a hilarious bit of overstatement that highlights the hyperbolic handwringing nature of many geek complaints, but it brings up the uncomfortable spectre of the part of fandom that is constantly trying to define what a “real fan” or a “real geek” is.

It’s problematic for the same reason that it’s problematic that people badmouth those younger than them for liking the Star Wars prequels. It’s basically saying, “Oh hey, you’re wrong because you’re young,” and not only is that an abhorrent idea now, it was an abhorrent idea over a decade ago when my peers and I were on the receiving end of it. It doesn’t become about whether it’s “bad;” it becomes about whether people who like it are wrong and shaming them into either agreeing with you or shutting the hell up. It makes me uncomfortable. I only tell people when I think they’re wrong to not like something - because I think there’s a way they could like it and ultimately be happier - which is an admittedly sketchy distinction to make, but one I think is worthwhile.

The interesting part of the show’s lifespan is that I - and I presume many of us as well - have relatives who are younger than the show. Or, if they weren’t younger, they might have been at an age where it captured something they were interested in. Very importantly, it might have captured their interest in a way that other versions of the characters didn’t. When I told my friend Josh I was writing about the show, he said, “Smallville is the only version of Superman I am remotely interested in.” My cousin Allene, who likes and makes comics but generally stays away from superhero ones for a lot of reasons I can only call “100% valid,” has been watching the show with friends for years despite the fact that now they live on opposite sides of a continent and can only see each other a few times every year. People like Josh and Allene are interested in Smallville in a way that they’re simply not in any of the other versions of the character, and the fact that it might let them engage in the story of Superman, one of the most iconic creations of the twentieth century, is something to be celebrated.

But then a funny thing happened: DC announced that they were going to make a comic out of Smallville, style it as “Season 11” and make it part of their new “digital first” initiative, and I started seeing a lot of frantic comments about how stupid it was. When I mentioned that I thought it was a cool idea, I got a few people asking why I didn’t think it was stupid. I was told that there are a bunch of Superman comics already - with an emphasis that they were “real” versions of the character, something both simultaneously hypocritical and condescending - and people should just read those. I still think the Smallville Season 11 comics are a fantastic idea, beyond the simple fact that they are put together by the amazing team of writer Bryan Q. Miller and a first arc of art by Pere Perez, who did a great job on Batgirl. But that’s a way to get existing comic book readers to give it a shot. The idea itself is great because it offers a great possibility:

Expanding the comics audience.

Smallville has a dedicated audience that stuck with it for a decade. As I’ve pointed out, it’s an audience of a large enough size that DC would be silly not to try to court it. It’s also an audience of a demographic that’s not normally associated with reading superhero comics, one that’s got a lot of young women in it, and these are exactly the kind of people that the companies should be trying to court if they don’t want to have to rely on a shrinking market of existing customers. Not only that, but, like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics, these are an easy way in. The fans know the characters. They want more story. They want to see the Clark they know be Superman, and that’s why saying they should just read one of the other series is so shortsighted. It’s a Clark, but he’s not theirs. You might have spent a long time caring about that version, but they haven’t. The version they’ve invested years in was on The WB and The CW and sharing the same name and costume isn’t the same thing. Giving them a comic featuring someone they already care about is huge and it could be a great gateway into the medium if the medium’s fans would just get out of their way.

I believe this could work because it worked for me. I loved superheroes as a kid, but the comics that were coming out put me off and they didn’t star the versions I already knew and followed. From what I gathered about the continuity, I knew it sounded like a hassle to get involved. But then Firefly comics started coming out and I went to a comic book shop and seven years later, I co-run a site about comics and go to a store weekly. And that was after having to deal with a very unfriendly comic book store culture, too. The Smallville comics? People can buy them online, on a device they already own. They can get them weekly, on the same schedule they’re used to getting the story already. When they launch the app to buy the next installment, they’re surrounded by a storefront that never runs out of stock and with no one who will mistreat them. This is a golden opportunity to create a lot of new comic fans.

Whether it’s your cup of tea or not, Smallville has been a defining voice of an iconic character for a generation. It gets the core of the character right. It’s got a line of comics that could inject a lot of fresh eyes into the comics medium and superhero genre. And yet, it’s often derided, for reasons both illogical and frequently hypocritical, by what amounts to a clubhouse. God, how I hate that clubhouse. Don’t be a part of it. Keep an open mind and open doors. Welcome other people however they arrive. If not because welcoming an audience that size is a good thing, do it because it’s right. Do it because a long time ago, someone made fun of you for something you liked and it made you feel kind of crummy.

Dang, now I kind of really want to watch all of Smallville. Can anybody lend me the DVDs?