Superman Goes Back To His Roots (or, The Nerdiest Thing I've Written So Far)
So, DC's new Action Comics #1 comes out tomorrow... this is the comic that in its initial incarnation was Superman's first home in the publishing world. In DC's newly rebooted continuity, it's the home of Superman's "year one" stories, showing an inexperienced Young Man of Steel running (not flying) around Metropolis in a home-made outfit consisting of jeans and a t-shirt.
The "no tights, no flights" aspect of the project is sure to prompt comparisons to Smallville and his methods might call to mind the Reign-of-the-Supermen-era Eradicator, but I think it really is more about getting back to the character's roots... back to the age when he was more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and that was considered to be impressive enough without flight or pushing celestial bodies around.
In fact, as I read these preview pages, what I'm reminded most of is Philip Wylie's Gladiator, the seminal work of the modern superhero genre... if you read it with no idea of the timing, you'd swear it was an early deconstruction of the Superman myth, but in fact it's the foundation of it. The surface resemblance between Wylie's protagonist of Hugo Danner and the original Golden Age Superman are so noticeable that when the Golden Age version of the character was removed from continuity in the Crisis on Infinite Earths, his adventures were retconned to have happened to Danner's son.
(Gladiator was in the public domain at this point.)
Hugo Danner as written was a tragic figure in a way that Superman is never likely to be even in a Grant Morrison book, but his attempts to use his powers for great justice have a lot in common with the hands-on, in-your-face style of Morrison's Young Superman.
This entry automatically cross-posted from http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/304157.html. Comment hither or thither. Void where yon.
The "no tights, no flights" aspect of the project is sure to prompt comparisons to Smallville and his methods might call to mind the Reign-of-the-Supermen-era Eradicator, but I think it really is more about getting back to the character's roots... back to the age when he was more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and that was considered to be impressive enough without flight or pushing celestial bodies around.
In fact, as I read these preview pages, what I'm reminded most of is Philip Wylie's Gladiator, the seminal work of the modern superhero genre... if you read it with no idea of the timing, you'd swear it was an early deconstruction of the Superman myth, but in fact it's the foundation of it. The surface resemblance between Wylie's protagonist of Hugo Danner and the original Golden Age Superman are so noticeable that when the Golden Age version of the character was removed from continuity in the Crisis on Infinite Earths, his adventures were retconned to have happened to Danner's son.
(Gladiator was in the public domain at this point.)
Hugo Danner as written was a tragic figure in a way that Superman is never likely to be even in a Grant Morrison book, but his attempts to use his powers for great justice have a lot in common with the hands-on, in-your-face style of Morrison's Young Superman.
This entry automatically cross-posted from http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/304157.html. Comment hither or thither. Void where yon.