Superman leaps in to the sky...?!

 I never had a chance to read the original superman comic or even the latest superman comic, but in my mind superman’s most iconic power is the ability to fly…and I find it shocking that I was wrong. In fact Superman can only leap for about 1/8^th mile according to the net, and is to my understanding that not before may 1943 that people can say that superman can fly without being questioned. While flying is surely a cooler super power than leaping everywhere, the history and reason behind it is even more interesting than this super power.

There are many funny and interesting things that I want to point out when superman first come out, and many of them has change since then. The “thinking” bobbles is almost the same as a “speech” bobbles back in the time, and no wonder why they had changed that in to the cloud shape that we see today…it was really confusing sometime.

The first superman only has thirteen pages, and it’s really hard to tell the epic origin story of an original superhero in so few pages. The artist therefore made the story move as fast as possible, and took great advantage use of the narrator, as half of the story was told in those words. I think is really funny how they shows example of superman’s power can be “real” by showing us the ants and the grasshoppers…so why is superman call superman? Not Antman or Hopperman? Sure superman sounds much cooler.

The style of narrative change due to the limited pages, and almost every character feel extremely aggressive. Superman feels a little crazy to me because he keeps leaping around and punches people for some not very developed reason. I also realize there are a lot of yellow in the comic, I don’t know if that’s a popular color in that time or if the technology of printing had something to do with it, but lots novel cover art in the old days also use lots yellow.

In the end I have to say that it’s always nice to learn something in a comic, and as most of the reader are children its good for the parent to know their kids are learning something such as when Superman said: ”Birds site on the telephone wires and they aren’t electrocuted…so human can walk on it too, unless we touch a telephone-pole and are grounded…OOPS!”