You are currently browsing the superman category
So last time I was wrapping up my responses to that long-ago call for reader questions, and I ended with a more recent question asked by a certain Mr. Hal Shipman. His question was regarding the recent news of the return of Superman’s red trunks, which had been discarded during the New 52 reboot a few years back. He wondered if that was actually going to be the official costume here on out, or if that was just hype for some covers and pin-ups that would have the red trunks and that was it.
Going by what I’d read about the re-trunkening thus far, it seemed like, yes, Superman’s duds would no longer lack the shorts. If I’d waited just a tad longer, however, I would have had access to an even more complete and official answer to the question via one of the comic news sites:
“…There will be an in-story explanation for why Superman has decided to go back to displaying his red trunks outside of his costume again.”
…which appears to be occurring in new regular Superman writer Brian Michael Bendis’s story in Action Comics #1000. Of course, I can’t wait to hear what that explanation will be…”Oh, they’ve been in the wash.” “These aren’t shorts…on my world they stand for Hope.” “Gah, Batman bought these for me for Christmas, I have to wear ’em or I’ll hurt his feelings.” “Um, the local parents groups have been complaining about me being too, uh, revealing.”
Or, of course, there’s always the scenario I laid out here, which would make Action #1000 a Doomsday Clock tie-in, something we’d all want, I’m sure.
The other thing in that quote is the specific mention of “displaying his red trunks outside of his costume again,” which could imply he’s been wearing them this whole time, just under that blue armor or whatever. Could just be reading too much in the statement, which, honestly, I almost never do on this site.
Anyway, Hal, there’s as complete an answer as I can give you about the current status of Superman’s red trunks, without having the actual issue in front of me so I can describe the event in excruciating panel-by-panel detail: “OKAY, ONE LEG’S IN THE HOLE…what happens in panel TWO, I wonder?”
As a follow-up to a comment I made near the end of the last post, where I said I didn’t see exactly what was “new” about the costume, which I’ll picture here again:
…’twas David G what solved the mystery, as I missed Superman’s new sleeve cuffs. Those little angular things that I suppose are evoking the look of the tops of the boots, but for all the world just remind me of Wonder Woman‘s logo. …I guess I can give ’em that, so long as we never see that terrible collar again, but I give ’em like a year before artists just forget or straight-up stop on purpose drawing those cuffs into every panel that “needs” ’em.
Next step, of course, is getting Henry Cavill into those trunks for the next four or five Justice League movies. Or maybe going back and digitally adding trunks back into various films and cartoons from the last few years. …And as long as I’m on the topic, let’s see Justice League: The Moustache Cut too. I mean, why not.
§ August 7th, 2017 § Filed under firestorm, superman Comments Off on Was putting together something else for this site…
…and it didn’t work out, unfortunately, so instead let’s admire this page from DC Comics Presents #17 (January 1980) by Gerry Conway, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Steve Mitchell:
That Garcia-Lopez fella…he knew what he was doin’.
…didn’t exactly come together, so in the meantime, please ponder this important question and answer it in the comments section, if you’d like:
NO CHEATING
ATTENTION! THIS IS NOT A DRILL: Swamp Thing appears in this week’s Superman Annual #1:
Aside from the fact that this is the…fourth? “Superman Annual #1” to be released by DC over the years, it’s not a bad comic. Swamp Thing confronts Superman about the fact he’s not really from this universe, the harm that’s causing and what must be done to fix it. Somewhat reminiscent of DC Comics Presents #85, another story where Swamp Thing has to come to Superman’s aid, only this time Swampy is all up in Superman’s face, as opposed to surreptitiously doing so in that old team-up book. Maybe a little too heavy on the fight scenes, but it does establish Swamp Thing as being able to hold his own against the Man of Steel, which was fun to see.
So between this, Swamp Thing appearing in Batman in a month or two, and Swampy’s appearance in Wonder Woman a couple of years back, the old muck-encrusted mockery of a guest-star has completed his tour of the recent versions of the DC Trinity, post-Flashpoint/Rebirth. Now to get him to pop up for brief team-ups in DC’s other superhero books…like, I don’t think he’s been in The Flash ever. Well, the Flash has been in Justice League Dark with him a couple of times, but clearly we need a Flash/Swamp Thing race in the Flash comic itself.
Hey, in 2021 it’ll be Swamp Thing’s 50th anniversary. We gotta start planning for this stuff now.
“So long, my Super-Robot! Bring back lots of juicy loot!”
LATER
“I said ‘loot,’ you stupid robot! LOOT!”
images from The New Adventures of Superman, “The Two Faces of Superman” (originally aired December 24th, 1966)
So I have to say I was pretty amused by this week’s preview booklet for DC’s “Young Animal” imprint. As you can see by the cover, it apes the look of DC’s Who’s Who series, down to including Who’s Who-style entries for some of the characters in the first few pages. The rest of the pages are filled with art samples from the forthcoming titles. Mostly I’m impressed by the “lo-fi” nature of the preview, a black and white digest-sized pamphlet that stands out in this age of full-color sampler comics and full-size first-look magazines, selling ideas, not production values. An interesting statement on the aesthetic of this line, I think.
What’s interesting about the Superman titles during DC’s “Rebirth” initiative is that, all things considered, people shouldn’t like them. This is about as convoluted a set-up as you can have for a Superman franchise, involving parallel universes and whatnot, and oh Superman and Lois have a son, too…but ultimately people are interested. It’s a combination of “here’s something sorta new with the character” and “this isn’t the New 52 version of Superman you didn’t like, but the one that’s been around since the 1980s Byrne revamp, more or less.” The hooks for the two series have been engaging (with Action focusing on the maybe-redemption arc for Lex Luthor and the mystery of the Other Clark Kent, and Superman focusing on the Supes/Lois/Jon family dynamic).
I generally prefer Action, and at first I wasn’t entirely thrilled with this week’s issue of Superman…there’s a whole lot of fighting with the Eradictor, and not a whole lot else…but it does provide the next step is Jon’s evolution as the Son of Superman, and that does leave me wanting to see more. Which, of course, I’ll eventually be getting in the forthcoming Super Sons book, co-starring Damian Wayne…which makes me wonder. Did DC’s relative success in giving Batman a biological son pave the way for DC doing the same for Superman? But then, a father/son dynamic has been present in the Batman comics for decades…it’s just now the son is actually his son, not a ward or an adoptee, so there’s not really any change in that dynamic.
I guess in the Superman franchise, Supergirl sort of filled the role of the mentored youngster, but that’s not really the same as “Superman has a child.” He’s not even really had any kind of established Robin-esque sidekick like Batman, despite Supergirl’s occasional guest appearances. So, while Batman having a son didn’t really affect the franchise, giving Superman a son does alter things from the established model quite a bit. (It strikes me, sometimes, how lonely Superman seems to be in the pre-Crisis days…going to the empty Kent home, keeping his double life secret from his friends, even separated from Kandor in either its shrunken city or on-an-interdimensional-planetoid forms.)
Anyway, this is just a lot of meandering about a current plot development that will likely go away in whatever big shakeup the whole “Rebirth” thing is eventually leading to. The current story of “Parallel Universe Superman” will probably be wrapped up sooner rather than later, and whatever permutations that make this Superman differ from the Official Licenseable Version will be sanded away. But in the meantime, the Superman books have made for intriguing reading, if only for exploring how flexible the franchise is after nearly eight decades of existence.
So here’s a Superman comic that I bought off the stands way back in 1983. That’s a scan of the actual comic, straight out of my collection, up there. There’s nothing particularly of-note about it, as individual issues go. It’s not a key issue, no first appearances (aside from Superman’s “brother,” whom I believe is never seen again), not particularly scarce by any means. Just your plain ol’ Superman comic, with a dime-a-dozen Gil Kane cover, and yet another art job, the latest in a string of hundreds of assignments on the character, from Curt Swan. Another story by Cary Bates (plot only this time, scripted by Paul Kupperberg).
So, you know, nothing special…
…we thought at the time.
What I wouldn’t give to be able to wander into a local newsstand (or even my own store, though that dispels the nostalgia somewhat) and be able to pick up a new Superman comic, with another wonderful Gil Kane cover like the one above, with more beautiful Curt Swan art, written by either Cary Bates or Paul Kupperberg…or, you know, both. Or with Kurt Schaffenberger art. Or with Elliot S! Maggin scripts.
Or…well, you get the idea. The Superman comics were always just sort of there, but looking back at them today, knowing that exact style of Superman comic will likely never return…well, they all seem a little more special now.
Even the ones where Superman meets a brother he didn’t know he had. No, really. And his brother’s a secret agent! It’s all pretty awesome.
EDIT: See the comments for more comic book appearances of Superman’s brother.
Due to popular demand (and because I should have mentioned it in my Curt Swan post myself), here’s a beautiful example of the Swan/George Klein art combo featuring Superman and his friends from Action Comics #309 (February 1964):
For more on this issue (including more representative panels) I direct you to
this previous post of mine, as well as
this one.
So the latest Question of the Week over at Trouble with Comics was about our favorite penciller/inker teams, and…well, I won’t play coy and say “you gotta go there to find out my choice” since I’m going to post a scan of their work right here, but you should go and read what we all had to say, anyway. I get a bit…florid in talking about my pick, but it’s borne of enthusiasm for the work, what can I say.
I did send a scan along with my entry just to show what I was talking about, but it was a tad large, and may have disrupted the flow of the article. However, I don’t care whether or not anything I do here interrupts any kind of flow, so here’s the pic from Superman #247 (January 1972) by Elliot S! Maggin, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson:
Just look how torn Superman is in that second panel. That’s a man about to make a decision he doesn’t want to make. But you can read more about what I think about Swan and Anderson’s artistic teamwork
right here.
Swan has been paired up with a few interesting inkers: Al Williamson over Swan sometimes mostly just looked like a full Williamson art job, but it was still an odd if enjoyable combo that echoed Anderson’s work in the facial expression department, like in this example from Superman #416 (February 1986):
A Twitter pal brought up George Perez’s inking of Swan in the first half of Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” story (Superman #423, September 1986) which brought a slick richness to the art:
And I’ve mentioned in the past Kurt Schaffenberger’s inking over Swan, though the primary example is, as I mentioned at that link, too obscured by the terrible printing. But the other half of that Moore story, from Action #583 (September 1986), we get a better look at Kurt’s smooth, expressive lines over Curt’s pencils:
And then of course, there’s Curt Swan inking Curt Swan (in more ways than one!), from Superman Annual #9 (1983):
Man, Swan was always the best, and that he was almost always paired with wonderful collaborators couldn’t help but make his work shine. There’s a big Curt Swan-sized hole in the comics artform ever since his passing, but thank goodness there’s just so much of work left behind that we can still enjoy.
So anyway, there’s Jimmy Olsen with two members of the Jimmy Olsen Fan Club at their campsite out in the woods, about to sit down and have breakfast, when suddenly Brainiac strikes! One thing leads to another, with Brainiac wreaking havoc with his Enlarging Ray, and ultimately Brainiac is defeated, and Jimmy’s got hold of said Enlarging Ray. Meanwhile, Superman is at the bottom of a steep hill, his life endangered by a giant piece of Kryptonite! (Which used to be a small piece of Kryptonite, until Brainiac enlarged it, and, well, there you go.)
Jimmy is stuck about how to help Superman, because he and his pals can’t climb down the hill due to being bitten on the legs by giant fireants (the Enlarging Ray, again), until inspiration strikes!
After the guys rescue Superman (by enlarging a giant lead tackle between Superman and the Kryptonite, thus depleting the Enlarging Gun of all its juice, so too bad, Bottle City of Kandor), Supes asks “what the hell were those giant tire-things you rode down in?” if I may paraphrase slightly. Jimmy thus ends the story with a blatant bit of product placement that beats out
Superman: The Movie by about a decade:
I did a little Googling research, and all I can turn up was that
Superman was licensed to Kellogg’s in the 1950s for Frosted Flakes, and that DC didn’t team up to produce comics with General Mills (makers of Cheerios)
’til 2011. Granted, “licensed characters on cereal boxes in the 1960s” is not my particular field of expertise, so I could very well be missing something, but it looks like Cheerios was just used as the punchline for this particular story, no deals attached…unless there’s some kind of backroom deal we didn’t know about, or DC Editorial was fishing for some free boxes of cereal. “Thanks for featuring our product…have this truckload of Cheerios on us!”
If someone has any additional background on just what was going on here, or if it simply was “we’ve got a funny gag involving Cheerios,” let me in on it please!
from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #116 (December 1968) by Otto Binder, E. Nelson Bridwell and Pete Constanza
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
