May 07, 2006

This Is What I Do, When I Should Be Doing The Things I Should Do

I read internet forums where I find interesting links, like this one to Actions Comics #1.

2 comments:

Jason said...

I am curious when the Superman mythology that we now know came into being? I just read the first issue and it seems vastly different. Superman came from a planet of people with super strength, he was raised in an orphanage, The Daily Star, he cannot fly, etc.

MosBen said...

I'm not certain, and I won't be looking it up to see if I'm right until after this damn paper is done, but on a guess I'd say some time in the 50s at the start of the Silver Age. The Golden Age roughly covers the 30s, maybe just a tad earlier but not much, and first half of the 40s. After WWII, superhero comics went out of style in favor of horror and western themed books. As the 50s set in, and even more so as the 60s neared, the companies that became DC and Marvel started trying to revamp their old heroes, but where most of the Golden Age heroes were powered by magic or good old fashioned human ambition, the Silver Age was typified by a turn to the Scifi. I wouldn't be surprised if that's when the guys at DC decided to throw in stuff like the red/yellow sun distinction, Kryptonite being a piece of radioactive rock from Supes' home, etc. It would also almost certainly be around this time that he started fighting aliens and other things from space, which would make flight preferable to leaping.