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Guess who is following Elliot Maggin on twitter:



Looks like the former president really is a Superman fan.

 

Today, white watching a video on Youtube, I chanced to scroll down a bit and read viewers' comments.

What did I find?

Hate.

Hatred for the subject matter of the video, hatred for other commentors, just general hate.

And in the column on the right - of suggested videos - more hate.

Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, reddit, all more of the same.

The left hates the right.

The right hates the left.

The athiests hate the believers.

The believers hate the atheists.

The men hate the women.

The women hate the men.

Various religions hate each others, sexual preferences hate each other, races hate each other.  Pro-choce/Pro-life advocates hate each other.

And I got to wondering - where is all this hatered coming from?  It wasn't always like this.  This new hatered is stronger and deeper and angrier than it has ever been - it is something new to the human race.

To me, this rise in hate appears to correspond to the rise of the internet.

Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube all make money off of hatred.  Hatred gets them more views, more ad revenue, and more posts.  Their AI algorithms encourage, nourish, and promote hatred and create a highly addictive environment.

These tech giants are making money by inciting hatred and are thus motivated to continue to do more of the same - an endless feedback loop.  They have insinuated themselves into every single aspect of our lives.

In the early days of Superman, the villains that made money off of hatred were the munitions dealers and the weapons manufacturers.

Now, they are doing the same, but in a more virtual and visceral realm and in a more insidious manner.  The casualties are our civilization and our souls.

Stopping this is a job for Superman.

We were told that in the hour of our greates need, Superman would one day return.

I hope he does.

 

Hello Nykor,

Thank you for facing your fears and for your post here at Superman Through the Ages!

 

Hi everyone,

First of all, I still love this site and still use it. When I first discovered it (in the early 2000s) I was in college with a tech support job, and I had to sit in front of a computer all day. Suffice it to say, I had the time to read practically everything here. I've since gone to the festival in Metropolis a couple of times and I can't thank you all enough.

I'm currently trying to build a Reddit that I hope will serve the same function as this site (among redditors, anyway.) That is, it will be the only forum dedicated to Pre-Crisis DC Comics. I'll link to this site from there, but I need your expertise. If you find yourself on Reddit, please consider joining (and posting) at https://www.reddit.com/r/DCprime/

I'm posting this here because only a Superman fan would understand the significance of the date.


I had a sad and violent childhood and now I'm mentally ill; in August of '98, I was living with my parents and not working; I saw my only local friend on Saturdays when he was free, but was pretty lonely the rest of the week; my therapist told me the building next door was a social club for the mentally ill,  so I started loitering there, sipping my grape soda before walking the 3 miles home. I pretty much had the place to myself, but 1 day, 2 clients (recipients of mental health services are called "clients") showed up, a guy & a woman. We got to talking. I'll call her "Jaye".

Jaye struck me as intelligent, kind, & reasonable, so we arranged to meet for coffee the next Saturday afternoon; after several dates, she taught me of the existence of a new-to-me concept: Schizo-Affective Disorder, which meant that sometimes her schizophrenia took hold of her, and at others she was Bi-Polar, for which she took medication which reduced her symptoms, but didn't lessen all of them.

I joined the social club and went out with Jaye for a tempestuous 32 months, during which we broke up 14 times, 11 declared by her, and 3 decided by me, which included the last, final, breakup. She was just too ill. We remained good friends anyway & it was she, who, that awful day, called me to tell me about 9/11.


By the spring of 2007, I was finally on the internet and a dyed in the wool Superman comic book fan (which I'll explain in the my next post), & soon discovered "Superman Through the Ages", which became my favorite site, because it contained readable free comics & lots of cool articles: Finding the comic stories here was like discovering the local supermarket was giving out free bubblegum. And then my computer died.

Several months later I got another one & paid Jaye to install it (she had graduated at the top of her technical college class, before deciding not to take her meds anymore ("I was doing so well!") and went back to the hospital.) When, under Jaye's guidance,  my computer chimed to indicate it was alive & working, I faintly tasted "Bazooka".


Over the course of time, we each found someone else and enjoyed our first long-term successful relationships. On a cold Monday morning in 2016, my wife called me at home from the Social Club to tell me to go to there immediately, she couldn't tell me over the phone. When I got there, a clinic staff person sadly explained that Jaye had killed herself.

Months later, another staff person told me that Jaye had taken an overdose of Benadryl. She left a note, but I've never asked her boyfriend what it said; I assume she'd stopped taking her meds again, she hated the side effects. Her body was discovered on Friday, February 26th, 2016, and I found out 3 days later.


I have wondered what, if anything, God was telling me about the coincidence of the date. I've now decided that it means that life is short and I should take a much more active role in facing my fears & eradicating my Mental Illness; as you can see, I've been ill a long, long time. One of my fears was writing this down. But I hate to leave you with a sad ending, so I'll post again today, on a more happy subject.

If there's anyone there.





  

You don't have to be a telepath from Titan to know what they were thinking with Saturn Girl.    But Cosmic Boy was weird.  I confess I went my entire youth without noticing there was no collar to his costume, and it was the same color as his skin.  I just recently realized he went bare-chested aside from those two black areas around either side of his rib cage.  I have no idea how they would have stayed up.  Maybe they were partly made of metal and he held them up with his superpower.

Garth did win the "best male costume" in the Bronze Age Legion, which is only fair considering how uninspired his original togs seemed.  I also liked the blue and green iteration of Element Lad's outfit, though it may have been a little over-detailed.  Imra's outfit held obvious appeal to us young lads, but it doesn't seem very practical to go into battle in a bikini.  The one that always brought the story to a screeching halt while I stared goggle-eyed was Dawnstar.   

As far as the sideburns go, I suppose there's always a balance between temporal logic and commercial appeal.  Would kids of the 70s have wanted to read about a kid with a 50's wardrobe and haircut?  Anyway, we were used to these anachronisms as TV watchers:  60s-era TV heroes used hair tonic whether their adventures were set in the Old West or the 23rd Century.  The Happy Days gang started with authentic looks but soon sported Disco-era hairdos, wide lapels and bell-bottoms in the "50s".  Heck, pioneer family patriarch Pa Ingalls had a perm! 

Anyway, Grell only ever drew one hairdo for male characters, and that included sideburns.  When Ollie shaved his goatee over in GL/GA, we were totally dependent on the colorist to differentiate him from Hal.  If Ollie ever met Travis Morgan in a black-and-white Showcase volume, I'd be completely lost.

Oh, and he didn't have to enact any stupid changes to the costume to make him look contemporary either.

Just as well, since a "costume change" in this period of LSH history would likely have put him in speedos and a fishnet tank top. 

Haha, no doubt! Lightning Lad's costume looks pretty amazing during this period really, but I can never figure out what the hell they were thinking for Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl!

I don't mind Grell's otherwordly and unrealistic poses any more than I mind Kirby's giant proportions - huge heads with huge teeth, giant hands on beefy arms, etc. It's just part of the stylization.

Grell's Superboy, like the rest of his Legion, did indeed seem to have crossed that line from teen to adult, but to me, he was growing into someone different from the adult Superman appearing elsewhere.  His bone structure, his jawline, his frame were difficult to reconcile with what we knew from Superman, Action and World's Finest.  I was tempted to view the LSH character as "alternate Universe Superman" instead of "Superman when he was a boy."

I don't know about the art, but I definitely started feeling that way about the character to a certain extent. The Legionnaires were inspired by Superboy, but occasionally don't seem to know Superman exists, that kind of thing. The writers developed Superboy in the Legion a way not entirely different from how Dick Grayson evolved in the New Teen Titans, but since Kal already had a future self ready to go, it's definitely a little weirder, less linear.

You know, I said that Superboy's sideburns don't quite work given that he's not actually from the '70s, but like... maybe he is.

Anyway, Byrne made reading Superboy as a totally different character much more cromulent - but breaking a whole lot of the Superman Mythos in the process. Maybe it's best not to read too much into that stuff, haha! 

Oh, and he didn't have to enact any stupid changes to the costume to make him look contemporary either.

Just as well, since a "costume change" in this period of LSH history would likely have put him in speedos and a fishnet tank top. 

I loved Grell's Legion (and Green Lantern) as a lad, but I soon developed an aversion to his bizarre take on human anatomy and all those weird, stiff poses that by logic should have ended with people falling over.  By the time he got to "Warlord" I was totally over him, though I loved his writing on the eventual Green Arrow solo book.

Grell's Superboy, like the rest of his Legion, did indeed seem to have crossed that line from teen to adult, but to me, he was growing into someone different from the adult Superman appearing elsewhere.  His bone structure, his jawline, his frame were difficult to reconcile with what we knew from Superman, Action and World's Finest.  I was tempted to view the LSH character as "alternate Universe Superman" instead of "Superman when he was a boy."

All that said, if we're allowed to include SuperBOY artists here, I really liked Dave Cockrum's take on the character in LSH.  And though it seemed bland to me as a kid, I've developed a real fondness for George Papp's version, as well.

Obviously Joe Shuster is a classic. Big fan of Gil Kane and Neal Adams, and of course Jack Kirby is an all time great. I definitely dislike that so much of his Superman work was altered by others to preserve brand uniformity! And Great Rao mentioned (over a decade ago, but still rightly) that Bogdanove was great and should get an honorable mention despite not being pre-Crisis.

I want to talk about an artist who hadn't been brought up before, and perhaps the reason I like him goes a bit against the overall theme of the site but screw it. Mike Grell's Superboy is probably my favorite visual take on the Man of Steel, bar none. The reason? Despite the name "Superboy" he's visibly a young man, full of vigor and passion. I think "young Superman" as a concept doesn't get enough traction after the early Golden Age (when he was often described as a young man), as Superman is usually drawn to look well into his 30s. I like the Golden Age idea of a passionate young man driven to fight injustice, and for my money, Grell manages to update that concept visually for the 70s, even though his Kal-El wasn't native to that decade and barely spent any time away from the future in his stories! Oh, and he didn't have to enact any stupid changes to the costume to make him look contemporary either.

Whoa, my old login still works. Incredible.

I am so sorry to hear about Dick Siegel. He was a great one. When I was a young kid, I wanted to move to Ft. Meyers to work for the Weekly World News and he even wrote a letter of recommendation for me. It never worked out, alas, but he had my back.

He even gave me an introduction to a personal hero of mine, David Anthony Kraft. For years, I thought DAK was just a pen name for Steve Englehart, since Kraft followed Stainless Steve and even used his characters on various Defenders runs, so it was a surprise to find out he was a real person. I mentioned this to Dick in passing and he said, "oho, didn't you know he was a friend of mine from art school?" And he made an introduction. Cool guy, great artist too.

Once, I asked Dick why he shortened his name to Dick and he said that it was due to the fact he wanted to sign his name with a D like Walt Disney.

He was an endless resource for pulp know-how. He knew everything there was to know on everyone from Nictzin Dyalhis to Leigh Brackett. I think his love of Superman is an extension of his love of pulp scifi and the Astounding era.

If you can, read his book, "Alien Creatures," which had Superman.