Man of Steel: Super Man … or Human God? Being Superman was so cool; that’s what decades of comics-reading boys thought. Outracing a locomotive, bending steel like licorice, leaping tall buildings, flying around saving people and sneaking into phone booths to slip out of your civvies and into your form-fitting red-and-blue outfit, with a cape as a manly fashion flourish. Sure, Lois Lane, the cutie-pie on the school newspaper, pretends to ignore the Clark Kent whom you appear to be in class, but she adores the inner you, your secret Superman: strong, noble, virile and darned near indestructible, except for your Achilles’ heel, Kryptonite. And your X-ray vision comes in handy when you stroll past the girls’ locker room. That notion of manliness is now as antique as locomotives, phone booths and great metropolitan newspapers. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced the first four-color superhero in the pages of Action Comics No. 1 in June 1938 — 75 years ago this month. Dated is the word to be applied to Superman’s accoutrements today. As the prime mode of long-distance business travel, trains gave way to planes and then to Skype. The daily newspaper is threatened by the Internet more than Metropolis ever was by Lex Luthor. And you can’t change clothes in an iPhone; there’s no app for that. If anything has survived and thrived in the three-quarters of a century since the Man of Steel was born into the American consciousness, it’s superhero comic books and their billion-dollar descendants, superhero movies. Read more: entertainment.time/2013/06/12/man-of-steel-super-man-or-human-god/#ixzz2W4KI7E3V
Posted on: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 04:52:29 +0000
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