Recent Posts

I picked up the Neal Adams series - nice, but it's got a few problems.  A lot like much of the cheesy 70s stuff; less like the fantastic 70s stuff.  But at least it's pretty much a pre-Crisis book.

And for anyone who has missed it, here is the new costume for the old Superman:



That's his son, Superman, Jr., on the left.

I wonder if the sons of Batman and Superman talk in that bizarre pseudo-70s hip jive anymore???
I sure hope so

and I like Neal Adams but I just can't stand the way he draws superman.

Remember this guy?


http://theages.superman.nu/History/2011_relaunch.php

He's gone!

Superman is back.



http://kotaku.com/dc-comics-handling-of-superman-just-got-more-convoluted-1736468072

Superman has a son


(cover to Super Sons #1)

And Neal Adams is back!


THE COMING OF THE SUPERMEN

(a preview)

Not a hoax - not a dream - not an imaginary story!

Would Superman be allowed into the boy scouts if he got hit with Red Kryptonite and it turned him into a female? Or would he become the big blue girl scout?

Superman's hideout was called the fortress of solitude ! and it was in the middle of no where.  (though it was filled with robots that looked like him and a bottle city of people from his planet)

I don't know if he was lonely but I guess he didn't really have a lot of free time to "hang out" anyway.

Huh. I know people have used the phrase "Boy Scout" ironically for a long time, but I didn't realize we already "didn't believe in" them by 1970. That seems awfully early.

Of course, in this day and age it's easy to see why the term is often disparaging, and to see why we often get bent out of shape when Superman is called a Boy Scout. Until 2014, boys were denied membership to the scouting program for not being straight! Until just last year, openly gay adults weren't allowed in the organization as troop leaders or what have you, and still allow for individual troops run by religious organizations to practice this kind of unfair discrimination. Transgender boys are completely excluded, though trans girls are not excluded from Girl Scouts. Not to mention the BSA's exclusionary stance toward atheists, despite having "respects the beliefs of others" listed in the Scout Handbook.

I could imagine Clark being one of those Eagle Scouts who mailed his badge back to the national organization over the discrimination that atheists and trans boys face from the organization. Calling Superman a Boy Scout doesn't just speak to our national cynicism about Boy Scouts, it also makes a political statement about Superman that I think is inconsistent with his character.

Is Superman lonely? No, not really. I tend to think of his relationship with Jimmy as being a genuine friendship; he's in the habit of telling his secret to nobody, but he deeply cares for Jim and Lois, and they probably know everything about both Kal and Clark except that they're the same person- which admittedly makes it hurt more, particularly for Lois, on the occasions she does find out the secret...

In addition to the two of them, he's got Bruce, Dick, Diana, Hal, J'onn, and the rest of the Justice League, and the likes of Billy Batson, John Irons, and the Kents post-Crisis. I would characterize all of his "coworkers" in the League as his friends, and obviously his parents are always there for him in the event that they survive his teenage years.

As for Kara and the orphanage, that did always bother me, but I look at it this way: at the time, the status quo for Superman was set in stone. New things could be added to it, but it could never really change, and giving Clark a cousin hanging around his apartment all the time would definitely have changed things up. So: orphanage.

Interesting thought about pushing people away from him, but if he really wanted to make sure people didn't get close to him, Clark Kent wouldn't have existed.

If it helps any, the earliest reference I could find of Supes described as a boy scout was on page 25 of the essay The Spawn of M.C. Gaines, written by Ted White, the opening piece in the nostalgic essay collection All in Color for a Dime. All was published in 1970, though Wikipedia says that the pieces contained therein were written in the early sixties.

I should have included the context of the quote and the quote itself above: White was discussing the unlikelihood of a Golden Age young Superman fan caring whether the creators (Ellsworth, et al.) got the physics of Superman right; in the next paragraph, he said, "Superman was a myth-figure: he was our dreams personified, even as he must have been Siegel and Shuster's. Superman was, almost literally, the perfect Boy Scout. We still believed in Boy Scouts then."

Batman, Robin and Superman salute the BSA (World's Finest #46)

Uncle Mxy (above) posted the cover to Superboy #15 (1951) featuring SB tying a tree in a knot to impress some Scouts. The feature story has Superboy actually joining the Smallville Boy Scout troop.

The whole thing is summarized here, at Comic Book Resources: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2012/01/31/comic-book-questions-answered-was-superman-the-big-blue-boy-scout-ever-an-actual-boy-scout/