Superman Through the Ages! Forum

What about the DC New frontier version of Superman? I dont'like the "S" 40s cartoons style for stories set in the 50s.A Wayne Boring style version would have been better.                            (http://img68.imageshack.us/img68/808/newfrontierth8.jpg) (http://imageshack.us) (http://img235.imageshack.us/img235/1453/supermannfnf1.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)

Well, Batman's even more messed up, isn't he?  He's wearing a variation of his original outfit from Detective #27 and doesn't get a Robin until the end of the storyline, somewhere around 1956.

And the JSA and JLA exist on one earth, with Hal, Barry, etc a generation younger than Clark and Bruce.  So it ain't Earth-1 and it's not post-Crisis continuity, either.  Obviously New Frontier is Cooke's own alternate timeline.

I agree though that the Fleischer-style red-on-black "S" isn't nearly as cool as a lot of artists seem to think it is. And nobody ever drew a prettier S-shield than Boring.

I like it!  A simple, elegant S.  The classic post-40s S is too easily messed up.  (3 classic superhero items that were hard to draw when I was a kid (and still are, I guess!): Spider-Man's costume, The Thin, Superman's S).

As a kid, I would spend hours drawing Spiderman.  The time consuming part was working on all those webs on his costume.  I loved doing that.  I also drew pages of nothing but the various versions of Superman's S logo.  I thought I did both Superman's S and Spidey's costume just fine.

I've never drawn the Thin before, but I'll give it a go:

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Yes, the Thin, the "2-dimensional hero trapped in a 3-dimensional world".  I only had the 1st annual, written by Steve Gerber with art by Frank Thorne, when I was a kid, but I pored over that comic for hours at a time, studying the art, trying to locate the hero among the mass of crosshatching and right angles.

I like the New Frontier S, it's fun, but I still prefer the one on my avatar. As a boy, I used to draw it sort of negatively, making the pentagon first and then drawing the shapes around the S: a triangle at the bottom, a sort of loopy thing, a curvy lozenge, another triangle at the top right, then another loopy thing that looked like a pregnant arrow. In Ancient Greek class (unavoidable in my day), I did a version using the Greek Sigma, which was pretty cool (a diamond, an arrow and a triangle when you draw it in negative); if I ever get my scanner working, I'll draw one and post it here.

The Thin was fantastic, but very hard to draw with a felt-tip. I only have the special half-sized 50th issue.

That issue is very hard to find!