PSU Magazine Winter 2004

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Well, it certainly isn'L Super– man. The teenage Clark Kent in the hit se ries Smallvi!le doesn't know how to Oy yet, doesn'L wear tights-and maybe he never will. That may sound like an unlikely premise for a super– hero television series, but it's exactly what the shows writers, including Mark Verheiden '78, had in mind. And by all measure, the public loves it. Verheiden, with an ever-growing resume of Hollywood hits, is basking in the success of Smallville. As the show's co-executive producer and a script and comic book writer, the for– mer PSU student is a very busy man. Verheiden has been with Smallville since the beginning of season one in 2001. The Warner Brothers show stars teenage hunk Tom Welling as Clark Kent, and Annette O'Toole and John (Dukes of Hazzard) Schneider as his parents, Martha and Jonathan. Strangely, Verheiden insists it is this family unit and the reality it injects imo the Supennan fantasy--especially the universal struggle between the forces of right and wrong or parents vs. teenager-that makes the show fresh. "l think we portray a family thats a little more real than most TV families, " Verheiden says. "Their love for Clark transcends all the issues that come up from having an unusual son." But it is the unusual and the super– natural that are Verheiden's specialty As a writer he has created many screenplays-not all have made it to production-but he is responsible for bringing the fantasy story of The Mask, starring Jim Caney, and the futuristic plot of Timecop, with Jean-Claude Van Damme, to the silver screen. He has some preuy fantastic television credits, including writing two episodes of Foxs 12 PSU MAGAZINE WINTER 2004 Freaky Link; creating, writing, and pro– ducing the ABC/Universal Timecop tele– vision series; and writing an episode of HBOs Perversions of Science. Verheidens outlandish storytelling is a natural for the pulp comic trade, and his biggest breaks came from Dark Horse Comics in Milwaukie, the pro– ducers of The Mask and Timecop. For Verheiden it all started in the little Oregon town of Aloha, with his boyhood comic collection. Although his father taught him to read before kindergarten , what caught fire in the child was a passion for writing. A compulsive story scribbler from his grade-school years, at age 13 Ver– heiden started a group called APA-Five (Amateur Press Association). He and other like-minded comic book fans created their own magazines and had