Superman was imagined in 1933 by Jerry Siegel, nineteen, penciled by his pal Joe Shuster, same age, and published in their fanzine, Science Fiction . The two kids realy though they had found the idea of the century. They expected to see their work published as comic strip in a big daily paper. They soon had to meet reality. They tried with all american papers and everywhere they where sent back by a kick in the bottom. A guy who leaped over buildings and lifted cars? Who would be intersted in such nonsenses? Who? Nobody but Sheldon Mayer.

The future creator of Sugar and Spike, didn't succeed in making his bosses of EC comics accept the character, but he could give it to one of their competitors, Harry Donenfeld, who was looking in emergency for anything in order to fill up the new title of the National Periodical (company which would latter be known as DC), Action Comics, whose number 1 would came in october... 1938. Yes. Five years hd passed.

And this kind of publishing was no more than a makeshift, comic books, then, were despisted, they made no money. First comic books were gived away with packs of washing. Nobody could expect that this was on the brink to change because Superman would make one and half million copies of Action Comics sold each month.



When Superman burst onto the scene sixty years ago there had never been a character quite like him, and he remains unique today. The innumerable imitators who followed in his wake have acknowledged his primacy by taking on the title of super hero, but Superman did more than start the trend that came to define the American comic book.

His influence spread throughout all known media as he became a star of animated cartoons, radio, recordings, books, motion pictures, and television, while his image appeared on products ranging from puzzles to peanut butter. He is perhaps the first fictional character to have been so successfully promoted as a universal icon, yet he also continues to remain a publishing phenomenon whose adventures appear in no less than five monthly comics magazines.

This triumphant mixture of marketing and imagination, familiar all around the world and re-created for generation after generation, began humbly with an infant art form in search of a subject, and two teenagers with an improbable idea.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both born in 1914, first met around 1931 when they were students at Glenville High School in Cleveland. Shuster, a native of Toronto, had recently moved into the neighborhood, and Siegel sought him out after hearing that the new arrival was an artist. Joe and I were tremendous science fiction fans, recalled Siegel. Their friendship was forged out of a shared enthusiasm for the first magazines to publish the genre regularly, including Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. They were also interested in films, particularly those that showcased the swashbuckling exploits of silent screen star Douglas Fairbanks. In addition, they were fascinated by the newspaper comic strips of the day.

At the time that we became interested in the comics field, Siegel said, the two outstanding adventure strips were Buck Rogers and Tarzan. Drawn by Dick Calkins and Harold Foster, respectively, these two features had introduced new elements of fantasy into the field when they first appeared in 1929. Comic books were still almost unheard of, so Shuster clipped and saved the colorful Sunday pages drawn by his favorite artists.
Conventional wisdom held that such interest in the more lurid aspects of the day's pop culture did not bode well for two poor boys living in the depths of a disastrous economic depression, but the pair clung to the hope that such escapism might also provide them with an actual avenue of escape from the gray realities of daily life. When no money could be found to heat the Shuster apartment, Joe had to wear gloves while drawing. Jerry's after-school job as a delivery boy brought in four dollars a week to help keep his family afloat.


Most of the boys' energy was directed toward work on their school paper. Joe drew humorous cartoon features for the Glenville Torch, and most of Jerry's prose had a similarly comedic slant. Among his contributions was a series of short stories, illustrated by Joe, about Goober the Mighty. This character was a parody of Tarzan, and the mockery indicated a certain amount of ambivalence about the idea of aggressive, muscular heroes. In a fit of superhuman energy, Siegel wrote of Goober, he snapped a twig between two great hands. Still, these tales from 1931 represent the first time the team toyed with the idea of a powerful protagonist. When they returned to the theme again, the superman they created would be a villain.


Outside their worlds of fantasy, Siegel and Shuster were classic nerds: bespectacled, unathletic, shy around girls. It's hardly surprising, then, that many of their dreams centered around omnipotence. While Shuster applied himself to lifting weights, Siegel began envisioning a man of limitless might. Given his unarticulated agenda of creating a modern myth that would both embody adolescent angst and offer a palliative for its pains, it's hardly surprising that it took Siegel several years to come up with the final version of Superman.

Superman latest reviews

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  Comic Reviews: Flashpoint: The World of Flashpoint Featuring Superman trade paperbac...
  19 Apr 2012 at 3:02pm
  The stories collected in World of Flashpoint Featuring Superman are all well done enough, if only hampered by their role as a tie-in and not the main event. In DC's last most recent crossover, Blackest Night, the tie-in miniseries felt more complete, usually with the hero defeating a Black Lantern villain; here, so much care is taken not to interfere with the main story that these miniseries feel impeded.
  
  [Contains spoilers]
  
  Flashpoint: Superman contains the Project Superman and World of Flashpoint miniseries, the Booster Gold tie-in issues #44-47, and the Canterbury Cricket one-shot. Of these, World and Booster Gold are neck-and-neck for the best (each succeeds, but fails in similar ways), though Project Superman and Canterbury Cricket are no slouches themselves with art by Gene Ha and Rags Morales respectively.
  
  To read Flashpoint on its own is to get the impression that this universe's Superman turns tail and runs away as soon as he's rescued from captivity by Flash Barry Allen, and only flies in to save the day when he has a change of heart sometime later. Project Superman demonstrates it to be more complicated than that; Kal is deeply moral, and doesn't abandon Barry but rather flies off to, what else, save Lois Lane. His departure and return make perfect sense in the context of the miniseries's events, as presented by Scott Snyder and Lowell Francis with Ha.
  
  This is exactly what I want from Flashpoint tie-ins -- stories that fit right between the pages of the main Flashpoint book and offer a more nuanced understanding of the events. Project Superman's moment-by-moment story is not much to speak of, a predictable mash-up of Captain America and Doomsday's origins (as with Batman: Gates of Gotham, one senses more of Snyder's co-writer than Snyder himself in the dialogue), but the overall effect is one that contributes greatly to Flashpoint itself.
  
  The World of Flashpoint miniseries by Rex Ogle follows magician Traci 13 in a tour of the Flashpoint universe. Ogle suggests early on that Traci 13 is in fact the DC Universe's Traci 13, a little tidbit that makes this "Elseworlds" story more relevant. Indeed, Ogle's character cameos are the best of the book, from Natasha Irons to Jason Todd to Guy Gardner and Beast Boy. Much of the fun of Flashpoint is the same as it was for Elseworlds, just seeing familiar heroes in new settings and catching the little details -- if you don't like that kind of thing, this won't be for you, but Ogle does it well.
  
  In addition, Eduardo Francisco's art is great throughout this part, often resembling Joe Bennett's.
  
  I was most looking forward to the Booster Gold story, both because I love when Dan Jurgens writes and draws Booster, and also because this is the last Booster story of the old DC Universe. Jurgens sends Booster off well, with a story in the recent "classic" vein of Booster arriving in an alternate reality and having to fight his way home, picking up a love interest along the way. It's an added bonus that Jurgens draws Doomsday here, too, and pits Booster against him. Jurgens is right when he reminds us that Booster named Doomsday and the characters have their own vendetta outside the death of Superman; Booster versus Doomsday is the perfect way to end the old DCU adventures of Booster Gold.
  
  The main drawback to these stories is how they're limited to the confines of the Flashpoint story. The Traci 13 story, for instance, ends very far away from Flashpoint's main action, and gives no sense of what happens next to the characters. The Booster Gold story's end is very sudden, with a "cosmic reset button" pressed, and no indication even, like in the main Flashpoint book, whether the final pages take place in the old or new DC Universes. How swiftly each story concludes suggests to me the writers are trying not to step on any toes -- whatever comes next is really writer Geoff Johns's show, not theirs. It takes something away from these tie-in stories, though; at the end of each one I thought, "Is that all there is?"
  
  (The Booster Gold conclusion, however, is just as frustrating as it is rife with possibility. Does Rip Hunter still exist in the DC New 52, and was Booster changed with everyone else or is he still the "old" Booster? Did Alexandra Gianopoulos write all of Rip's chalkboards, or just the Flashpoint one? And will Alexandra exist in the DC New 52, or was Jurgens's inclusion of her part of plans for the first iteration of Flashpoint before the introduction of the DC New 52, no longer to be? Certainly I don't mind some mystery in the end of Jurgens's Booster story; I just hope answers will be forthcoming.)
  
  DC editor Mike Carlin's Canterbury Cricket one-shot at the end of this book is an oddball story, a sometimes-violent, sometimes-absurd take on Canterbury Tales spotlighting Flashpoint's British setting (unusual to see Carlin writing this instead of Paul Cornell, for instance). It's also a monster mash-up, combining a bunch of hideous creatures under Rags Morales's pen, and that's where it got me -- Canterbury Cricket is a kind of not-quite horror story in the vein of Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein that's fun for its hideousness if not for its plot. Chronic Insomnia says it well:
  
  "Canterbury Cricket ... is charmingly awful. As a story it rarely makes sense. ... By the sophisticated standards of modern comic book book storytelling, this is not a good comic book. Really, really, not a good comic book. And yet."
  
  And yet, indeed.
  
  World of Flashpoint Featuring Superman is not perfect (Project Superman conflicts with Booster Gold, Booster conflicts with Flashpoint), but it was entirely more enjoyable than I expected for what are "Elseworld" tales that, depending on your point of view, "don't matter." Were the Flashpoint Traci 13 or Alexandra Gianopoulos to show up in the DC New 52 -- that is, were any of this to be followed-up upon -- I wouldn't mind a bit.
  
  [Includes original covers, Flashpoint text page]
  
  Don't miss our earlier review in this series, World of Flashpoint: Wonder Woman. We're continuing our lead-in to the Collected Editions review of the first DC New 52 collection -- Justice League: Origin -- with another Flashpoint review, coming up next!

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  This post was syndicated from Collected Editions, the chronicles of a "wait-for-trade-er" -- the new breed of comic book book fans who forgo monthly "floppies" for trade paperbacks and collected editions -- reviews, commentaries, low price alerts, news, and the occasional scoop. Visit collectededitions.blogspot.com.

  

  
  

  
  

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