There have been a number of "what if" Elseworlds Superman comic book stories imagining what would have happened had Superman been born in the Soviet Union or under the dread hand of Darkseid instead of on the Kent farm in Smallville, Kansas but when Monty Python's John Cleese and Monty Python writer Kim "Howard" Johnson got together to imagine what would have happened if Kal-El had wound up encountering the Clarks, a nice well-meaning if stodgy British couple, the results were inevitably going to be comic gold.

In True Brit, Colin Clark's greatest challenges are not so much world girdling, as the British tabloid press, under the control of Whyte-Badger, a sort of Rupert Murdoch stand-in, with a cultural attention span of roughly five seconds and whose interest is limited to Page 3 girls and celebrity scandals and lawyers who are happy to sue anyone for any absurd reason. Colin Clark maintains a secret identity as Superman rather than as Colin Clark because his adoptive parents, the Clarks, are simply too embarrassed of what the neighbors would think of his freakish powers and thus caution him to always remember WWTNT, What Would The Neighbors Think as the guiding rule of his life.

The basic elements of Superman reappear in True Brit but in comically altered form. The Fortress of Solitude comes about when the Clarks do their best to leave him behind by moving away without letting him know where they are going until they finally wind up on the North Pole. Bat Man becomes Superman's greatest nemesis but not the familiar caped crusader, but rather a student he accidentally impaled with a cricket bat at university who now has a cricket bat thrust through his body and wears black. Clark's uncontrollable heat vision or rather what his adoptive parents believe is uncontrollable heat vision necessitates the adoption of his glasses. All in all, True Brit is fundamentally a satire of British culture.

In True Brit, whether as Colin Clark or as Superman, Kal El is constantly under the stressful pressure of a cold and suspicious system obsessed with trivialities and petty issues from the Queen down to his adoptive parents. Versions of the familiar Metropolis characters recur but aside from Jimmy, their British contemporaries are cold and manipulative figures, from Lois Lane's scheming cousin reporter who really is the ruthless and amoral figure that Lois Lane only occasionally pretends to be to Whyte-Badger who combines the worst aspects of Spiderman's J. Jonah Jamieson with Rupert Murdoch for a cynical, ruthless and borderline psychotic tabloid boss who finally winds up buying the Daily Planet too.

The Britain, into which Kal El arrives has no real use or need for a superhero, only for a celebrity. Working at Whyte-Badger's Daily Smear, Colin Clark soon stoops to using his superpowers to peek through the walls to catch actresses in compromising positions for his employers and as Superman has to choose between pandering or standing up to Whyte Badger and being stomped into the ground for it. Given impossible tasks such as making the trains run on time or paying off the national debt or advancing the pace of hip surgeries, Superman tries to solve social and economic problems that no amount of superpowers can solve.

If Kurt Busiek's Astro City gives us an idealistic look at superheroes from the ground up, True Brit is a Superman origin story for a world where sensationalism matters most of all and people don't want a superhero so much as another celebrity scandal. And into this world Colin Clark emerges, superhuman in powers but lacking the wisdom of the comic book Superman to use them properly or to cope with a society in which everyone wants a piece of him for a minute or two but no one actually wants him.

The classic Superman represented an American ideal but the British Superman is born into an age where the ideals are suppressed. From the small town prejudices and fears of his adoptive parents to the big city jaded contempt he encounters, Colin Clark hangs on to an idealism that has no source but from inside himself and which every encounter with human society from his arrival on the planet does it best to shrivel, smother and suppress. The result is a dual personality more insecure than ever, an insecure Colin Clark as Daily Smear reporter penning hateful pieces slandering his own alter ego with his desire to do good quashed by his bosses and his lack of certainty in the rightness of his own beliefs and as Superman, an insecure superhero as celebrity, capable of doing anything but directed instead to entertain the masses rather than to genuinely help them. As both Superman and Colin Clark, Kal El becomes a cog in the wheel of a system of entertainment that sees him as nothing more than another disposable 90 second broadcast or headline to be used and abused and finally spit out when there is no more use for him.

As the American Superman possessed a clarity of belief that like many Superheroes saw him through the toughest times, the British Superman's beliefs have been deprived of nourishment and he is unable to properly stand up to either Whyte-Badger or the culture he struggles with until the very end when he delivers a public speech renouncing the culture of tabloid journalism but even so, he finds himself having no choice but to leave Britain and get a job at the Daily Planet, where Whyte-Badger follows him too by buying the Daily Planet, much as Rupert Murdoch picked up the New York Post.

If Superman represents more than superhuman abilities but a moral certainty, True Brit is the story of what happens to Superman stranded in a culture robbed of moral certainty and the ability to prioritize what matters from what does not. True Brit's Superman is finally defeated by Britain and only regains his confidence by coming to America and in doing so shed his insecurities and inability to find a place for either of his dual identities, as crusading reporter or crusading superhero, becoming yet another immigrant in a nation of immigrants.