There was a time when every kid with access to syndicated television knew who Ultraman was.

Although never on the level of Superman, Batman, Snoopy, and Doctor Who in terms of worldwide popularity, with Astro Boy and Speed Racer he was one of the worldwide icons of pop culture that briefly found an audience not only in the USA, but in every country with syndicated television. Ultraman took the superhero formula and updated it for television by giving the hero a support squad and not mere supervillains, but an ongoing mission to destroy persistent alien invaders. Sounds like the new CBS show, Supergirl, you say? Well, great minds continue to think alike. What was a little different and unique about Ultraman was that his origin was in causing the death of his alter ego, Shin Hayata, at which point the alien Ultraman resurrected Hayata so that the two could share a coexistence as host and hero. This unique superhero origin is a mash-up of the two quintessential transformation superheroes:  the whimsy and optimism of Captain Marvel (you young ones may know him as Shazam) and the grimness of the Spectre.

As time went on, international fandom for the character has peetered out, despite numerous sequel TV series, due to a persistent legal dispute concerning international distribution that kept new Ultra series out of the hands of kids outside of Japan. This may explain why if you’re less than 35 in the USA your mind draws a blank when someone mentions Ultraman. The rights battle is well documented on Wikipedia if you’ve a mind to read it.

Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi’s new Ultraman manga, serialized since 2011 in the Japanese anthology Monthly Heroes, perhaps wisely ignores the last 40-50 years of Ultra lore. The cover says it “is the beginning of a new age,” and readers will discover that it is a sequel to the 1966 Ultraman television series continuing the story of Shin Hayata as an older man, and his son, Shinjiro, who has inherited super powers due to his father having been host to the “giant of light,” Ultraman. So American fans—as well as other fans of the original TV series—can enjoy this series without any knowledge of the greater Ultra continuity.

What has transpired between the end of the TV show and the first pages of the new manga is that while Ultraman has gone, Shin Hayata not only retained some of the strength and power of the being he hosted, but passed them on to his son, Shinjiro. When Shin and Shinjiro discover their latent powers, they learn that the Science Special Search Party was never disbanded and that it continued to keep watch on them over the years. Then Bemular, the first alien in 20 years, arrives to battle Shinyata, and then Shin, telling them “that power does not belong on Earth.”

The storytelling hews to the standards of the family superhero genre, with the father and son each trying to sacrifice themselves for the other in the vein of The Incredibles, and each learning that the other conceals a splendor in their ordinariness. While it is formulaic, the creative team eke out a little poetry from the prosaic script, with understated lines like “Don’t underestimate a father’s strength…” that linger in the narrartive, or a juxtaposition of a cliched phrase like “you’ve grown so much” matched with a panel in which super-strong Shin lifts his grown son up like a child, bringing new life to the cliche. The story seems like one that you’ve heard before, but the presentation of it seems relatively fresh.

The art uses the visual language of the shonen manga, with aggressively diagonal panels that slant into one another, and the artists use these with great effect to manipulate the perception of time in the narrative. When there are a handful of panels that smack down to sliver up the page, the succession of actions move the reader very quickly even though there is more going on. When there is only one or two panels on a page, those pages seem to take longer, as the reader’s perspective has usually widened to process an important event. Objectively, of course, the reverse is true, with the busier pages taking longer for the eye to traverse, and the splash pages and two page spreads being able to be taken in an instant, but the reader is invited not to be objective in their reading by the artful arrangement of panels. It is almost as if the artists are mimicking the functions of the eye, with the widening of the focus point timed to “wide eyed surprise,” and the contracting of the focus point timed to pages that display a succession of physical exertion.

Overall, the Ultraman manga is an entertaining and rapid read that you will easily commit to memory, as the form of it is already embedded in your knowledge of the superhero genre. As such, it probably has little re-reading value, and will probably be best loved by fans of the Ultraman franchise. However, what it lacks in originality it makes up for in the execution, not of its story, but of its art. This may turn out to be the important groundwork from which these two creators spring into their own concept someday, or perhaps the foundation of better Ultraman stories that rise above competence into excellence.