Superman Through the Ages! Forum

I am a big Stan the Man fan. I love STAN lee's JLA and heroes as well as his marvel creations.
I am particularly a big fan of the new Superman that Stan did a ways back. He used a high tech flying vest to allow him  to fly. Lois was his publicity agent! He was very much the strange visitor.
What did you think? Would you like to see a crossover with him and the traditional Superman.?

it was called Stan Lee's "Just Imagine" series, Just Imagine, Superman with an alien marooned on earth, a former policeman,like Hawkman he was named SALDAN and worked in a circus for a while. He wanted to get back to his homeworld but human tech was so low it couldn't get there so he dedicated himself to help its advance.  by fighting crime

(http://home.comcast.net/~psybertrack/justImaginecollage.jpg)


http://home.comcast.net/~psybertrack/saldansuperman_John_DAmanda.html

Ignore the whiners harping on STRIPERELLA - the JUST IMAGINE...? books shows that Stan the Man's still got it just like back in the day.

Would the DC Universe be different if Stan could bring his approach to THEM instead of Marvel? Yes; it would be different, though no less interesting.

Stan Lee's SUPERMAN had an interesting, reality-grounded concept: a guy from a high-grav world getting incredible speed, strength and toughness on ours, and he has to "pretend" his feats come from a costume, which is a really amusing irony. Lois Lane makes an appearance as a shameless promoter; the personality is interesting, particularly on a female character.  

Stan Lee's THE FLASH was the best version of the character that we've seen in years. The "I just ran so fast I saw myself...because I went faster than light" blew my mind - as did the colored rainbow of hair behind the character.

The other triumph of the JUST IMAGINE series was the SANDMAN, a very well characterized character with distinctive powers (a crystal that created gas that put people to sleep and the ability to touch the Dream World).

I really liked Striparella.  It was funny as can be and  reminded me of the Tick in its send up of the comic super shero. I laughed like crazy and thought Pamela did a fine job of voice performance. I haven't ever seen a tv/movie production which Stan had control of that I didn't like at least part of . But I could see how Striparella wasn't everybody's cup of tea considering political correctness.  So What? It was fun and entertaining.  If  they want to whine, let them watch Mutant X instead.
  By the way, JulianPerez, I was born in Miami, Florida , in Mercy Hospital and grew up in Miami and the general area until I was 21.  I moved there again for a while in 1984 until 1987, though I ended up living in Miami Springs and Hialeah before moving to Oakland, California in 1987.

  Yeah , I liked the Stan Lee Saldan/Superman and wish it had become a regular series.
I didn't read the Flash or Sandman yet, i will definitelly check them out.  I liked Batman, and Green Lantern.

That is a distinctive power. Very useful but not often found in comics. Touching the dreams of others. cool.

(http://home.comcast.net/~psybertrack/JustImagineCrisis_big.jpg)

I only read half of the Just Imagine series so far, but I really liked Stan's Superman. Most Superfans hate it.

I am of the mind that you can never get enough Supeman related products and books.  I enjoy the alternate Supermen that have popped up over the years. I liked electric-Supes. I liked Superman red and blue. I liked the Generations Supermen and superwomen.  The WHAT IF factor has always been a cool way of writing new and unique stories about an older character.  I even like Superman as a non-super hero in Kandor . What was their name? I think it was Nightwing and Flamebird.
But I am also a big fan of the basic formula Superman, with his CK identity hid by mere glasses, his love Lois needing to be rescued and his strong stand for Purity, Truth, Justice, Honor, and Life. He may be a boyscout but so was I once.

Anyone know where I can get more information on Just Imagine's Superman?

Superman
Real Name: Saldan
Race: Alien
Occupation: Former police officer, now super-hero
Enemy: Gorrock
Powers: Saldan had alien technology that gave him some powers. He got some of his powers from earth's atmosphere and earth gravity.
Saldan can  super leap/jump, fly, has super vision, super strength, invulnerability, and superspeed/fast reactions.

gives some info on the Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating the DC Universe series, including stories done by Stan Lee, Jerry Ordway and others.
There was a couple trade paperbacks that gathered the individual comics.
Just Imagine Volume 1 and 2
I don't know if all of the following are put in a trade paperback yet but they were at least individual issues.
The Just Imagine series showed revised origins and stories of heroes from the DCUniverse. Some heroes re-imagined were :
Superman ( by Stan Lee, pencils: Jim Lee )
Wonder Woman
Green Lantern
Batman (Stan Lee and Joe Kubert)
The Flash
Shazam (Capt.Marvel) [by Gary Frank]
The Justice League of America (by Jerry Ordway)
Robin (By John Byrne)
Catwoman
Aquaman
Sandman
Just Imagine Crisis
Just Imagine Stan Lee : Secret Files #1


Different artists worked on these stories.
featuring art by Dan Jurgens and Bob Layton! Featuring the titanic writing talents of Stan Lee (with Uslan co-writing the "On The Street" backup stories and the Secret Files lead), this volume features art by Kevin Maguire & Karl Story, Jerry Ordway, John Byrne & Terry Austin, Gary Frank & Sandra Hope, Sergio Aragonés, John Severin, Kano, and Adam Hughes, who provided the original covers.

http://www.popmatters.com/comics/just-imagine-stan-lee.shtml


http://www.comictreadmill.com/CTMBlogarchives/2004/2004_Individual/2004_10/000560.php


http://www.hillcity-comics.com/graphic_novels/new_graphic_novel2069.htm

check out these links

Personally?  I was kind of hoping to see what kind of story Stan Lee would have written if he was writing Julius Schwartz's Superman.  

How would Stan have treated the Superman, Clark Kent,  Lois Lane, Jimmy Olson, Perry White, Lex Luthor, Terra-Man, Brainiac, Steve Lombard, and others that we all know and love?  

What would Stan have done differently from what Len Wein, Cary Bates, et al, did?  What kind of crises would Superman have faced?  

THAT'S what I was hoping to see.  

As it was, I was disappointed not to have seen any of that.  

Stan wrote an entertaining story, but it just wasn't Superman to me.  

Does any of the above make sense to you?  ;)  

Gernot...

Stan's Superman also had Super Agility and Super Balance, as demonstrated by his time in the circus. IIRC he also had Super Hearing, as he heard someone approaching his hotel. His flight power was granted by an anti gravity harness. It seems Stan couldn't decide on whether the harness was broken permanently or not.

re Julius Schwartz superman and co. in Stan lee version.

That's a brilliant idea!!
That would be an awesome future project!

good point concerning the other powers, balance , agility hearing etc.

but re the broken harness. I think that was just a writers mistake, which anybody could make. Interestingly perhaps Stan was suggesting he needed the harness to fly on his planet and on earth at first, but later his powers grew from Super-leaping to flying over a period of time as did the original earth 2 superman. in that Superman's debut he could jump over buildings. Later he could fly and change direction , even in space with out anything to jump off of.
or maybe he just got the harness fixed offscreen

re: superman as hawkman..
something tells me that superman as interepreted by stan lee was handcuffed by the fact that stan the man couldnt make radical changes to origins and characters and possibly would have been better if he had been given carte blanche over the concepts and allowed to do wheatever he wanted.

We already know the answer to that: Elliot Maggin's Super-Stories.  :D

Maggin has an astonishing number of similarities in his writing style to Stan Lee, especially his streetwise, "New York" dialogue; in his work, and in Gerry Conway's JLA, Superman wasn't below cracking wise. Maggin's greatest strength was in the incorporation of Superman into the DC Universe, humorous dialogue, and a tremendous ability to show and give personalities to characters...all of which describe Stan Lee too, nearly exactly. There were humorous slanted political stories in Maggin's Superman, and a lot of suckerpunch-to-the-gut emotions and skill at characterization, particularly with Luthor, whose motivation and misanthropy was never as clear under anybody else as it was under Maggin.

Stan Lee = Elliot S! Maggin. Twins, separated at birth?

Interesting point Julian...

Boy, I know that I do respect Maggin and his reverence for Superman (and his many fans here), but you've outlined most of what I didn't like that he did... :D

Elliot S! Maggin stories are incredibly great! They used to blow my mind!

Matter of preference, I didn't like most of what happened in the Bronze Age, and funny, for some of the exact reasons a lot of other people loved it... 8)

Well, the politics in Stan Lee and Maggin are generally used for humorous purposes (Maggin and Lee alike cracking jokes about hilariously overt political corruption and grafting) instead of to make a point - using politics to take things less seriously, as opposed to many writers of the 70s, who used it to make things MORE seriously.

This brings up an interesting question, which is: how much of Maggin is influenced by Stan Lee? The answer is probably a great deal, especially in terms of approach: characterization, humor, and strong worldbuilding - comics before and after Stan Lee are very different. But more likely, the similarities of the style between the two may have more to do with the fact that the two are very similar men. Look how different the plot-centered stories of Cary Bates were, and Cary Bates had a very different sense of humor, and ethnic and regional background than Maggin and Lee did.

If Maggin never reached some of the heights, he also never hit Lee's depths, either. In one crucial way, Maggin's work was an improvement over Lee: he never used the details of the Cold War. Lee can be difficult to read sometimes, because his "Cowboys and Indians" use of the Cold War to create Communist Gorillas and lobster creatures or whatever don't jibe with the type of paranoid, ugly conflict that the Cold War WAS, very different in tone from World War II; getting preachy and staging the conflict as "good vs. evil" was ignoring how complicated the world was and turns big ideas into small ones. Maggin, thankfully, was over the Vietnam hump and just focused on telling stories. He left the Cold War to Cold Warriors.

It does seem to be a fair comparison...

But I have to ask...Superman did team up with Batman a lot, he did his JLA stints, how much more would make it so that he was "more a part of the DC universe?"...

Having Supergirl stay the same age as Robin and joining The Teen Titans would've been a BIG step in the right direction, M-E Lad.  It would've given the \S/ a LOT more exposure, I think.

Well, the Titans could have used the juice, no doubt...but Supes didn't need any exposure, right?

Supergirl was busy being a member of the Legion of Super Heroes and going to school and the prom . She never would have had time for the Titans.

I always preferred Supergirl being in the Legion myself. Perhaps because the team has always been associated with the Superman family and it featured more alien characters.

Supergirl fit right in with the LOSH.  In fact because there were so many others with powers galore in the legion, the writers could make it more interesting  in the stories.  The Emerald Empress and her eye and the other villains could really give her a challenge.