Rocket Trips #5: The Amazing World of Superman (Metropolis Edition) - 1973

Today's entry is an interesting one. It was originally published in black-and-white in The Amazing World of Superman (Metropolis Edition), an oversized magazine published to coincide with the opening of a World of Superman Theme Park in Metropolis, IL, which sadly never opened.

The book features a bunch of interesting content, including a Superman drawing guide by Curt Swan, a review of the Broadway musical, a step-by-step description of how comics were made in the early 1970s, and this brand new retelling of Superman's origin, which would eventually be colored and reprinted a bunch of times, most recently in the Superman Through the Ages one-shot, which we'll be revisiting at least once in this series. I'll be pulling some of the color images for the post from Secret Origins of the Super DC Heroes.

Creative Team: E. Nelson Bridwell, Carmine Infantino, Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, and Gaspar Saladino.

All-Star Summary: Doomed planet. Desperate parents. Last hope. Kindly couple.

Key Elements: The distant planet Krypton is home to a highly-advanced civilization of super-intelligent humanoids. The scientist Jor-El believes that the planet is going to explode, but the Science Council dismisses his concerns. He returns to his wife Lara and their infant son Kal-El, and builds a functioning model space-ship.

As the planet begins its final destruction, the distraught parents place their child in the rocket and send it into space.

I've always loved this particular shot, which Byrne recreates in Man of Steel

The rocket lands on Earth and is discovered by Jonathan and Martha Kent, an older couple who are driving by when they see it crash. They rescue the child and bring it to an orphanage in Smallville. The child displays superhuman abilities, and the Kents return to adopt him. They name him Clark after Martha's maiden name.

Clark's powers develop as he grows older, including invulnerability, super-speed, amazing leaping abilities, and X-Ray vision. Eventually he becomes a costumed hero named Superboy, and his parents die of an illness. On his deathbed, Jonathan tells Clark to use his powers for good. Clark is distraught that for all his power, he wasn't able to save his adopted parents.

Clark leaves Smallville, attends Metropolis University, and gets a job at the Daily Planet, so that he can easily keep tabs on crimes and disasters as they happen. And when they happen, he's off to save the world as Superman. 

Jor-El has a flair for the dramatic

Interesting Deviations: Kryptonians have studied Earth and the abilities that a Kryptonian would develop on that world, which they attribute to both its weaker gravitational pull and yellow sun. Jor-El proposes "return[ing] to our abandoned space program and build[ing] giant space-arks to carry our people to another world!--Earth!" The Kryptonian Science Council suggests that this plan is an attempted political coup on Jor-El's part.

Jor-El builds his model rocket after meeting with the Council, probably to account for the existence of Krypto and Beppo in this continuity (though we know that this incident isn't the only time he's brought his concerns up to the Council, so it's possible that other versions where the meeting happens closer to the planet's destruction isn't a contradiction). He explicitly states that it's big enough to fit Kal-El and Lara, but Lara chooses to stay behind and die with her husband.

The Kents find Kal-El's rocket directly, and unlike in a lot of the early origins, the rocket remains undamaged and they bring it back home with them. They express desire to adopt the child right away, as opposed to coming back later.

Clark accidentally uses X-Ray vision to find Martha's missing ring behind an opaque object in a scene reminiscent of one in Lowther's Adventures of Superman novel.

Martha and Jonathan die of an illness, and Martha is first to pass in this version. 

Additional Commentary: The Kents have this plan to hide the rocket after they drop baby Kal off at the orphanage, but they drive into and through town with the ship uncovered in the back of their pickup.

It's ambiguous enough in the black-and-white story, but when it's been recolored, the Kents are elderly again when they pass away. Which makes sense, that's how they looked in Superman (vol. 1) #161 when their death (due to the dreaded fever plague, which they contracted from pirate treasure), except that in Superboy (vol. 1) #145 (which came out five years after the Superman issue and five years before this story), the Kents unknowingly drink a youth serum and are "permanently" made twenty years younger. None of this is a problem with this story necessarily, but I'm curious to know if any effort was ever made to reconcile the different flashbacks.

Similarly, the scene where Jonathan tells Clark to use his powers to better mankind is straight out of the Lowther novel, but makes less sense in a continuity where he's been operating as Superboy for years.

This story does a good job of weaving in some of the other popular media hallmarks, starting with the "Faster than a speeding bullet!" opening from the radio show and other programs, and ending with the familiar "Look! Up in the sky!" cry. It's exactly the kind of thing you'd want to have in a book designed to be consumed by the general public who may not be avid comics readers. I've mused about the difficulties caused here and there by the complex continuity that had accumulated up to this point, with different variations on Superman's origin and flashbacks to his adventures as Superboy, but Bridwell, Infantino, & Co. are wise to gloss over it as much as they do. Though they decided to include a kind of strange anecdote about Superboy's farewell to Smallville...

...rather than, say, a single line of dialogue from Lois Lane. But overall, this is a pretty solid retelling of the origin, and one that I think most people would recognize as pretty definitive.

The Rocket: And this is probably the most definitive thing here. When I think about Superman's pre-Crisis rocket, this is the one I'm thinking of. It's got that Superman color scheme (in the reprints, anyway), it's got a shape that's retrofuturistic but distinctive, it's The Rocket.

 Five out of five exploding Kryptons, would ride again.

Rocket Trips #4: Superman Year One #1 - 2019

Today we're tackling the most recent version of Superman's origin, as told in Superman Year One.

Creative Team: Frank Miller, John Romita, Jr., Danny Miki, and Alex Sinclair.

All-Star Summary: Doomed planet. Terrified parents. Last hope. Mesmerized farmer.

Key Elements: As the planet Krypton explodes, a scientist and his wife place their young son in a rocket and launch him into space. He lands on Earth and is found by Jonathan Kent, who brings him home to his wife Martha, and they adopt him. From the start, he has a dense body and superhuman abilities, and these grow as he gets older. He begins using his powers to punish bullies, but learns quickly that his actions sometimes have unintended consequences. When he saves Lana Lang from an attack, he reveals his powers to her and takes her for a flight. He uses his abilities to excel in sports, to Pa's dismay. He decides he needs to leave and see the world. Ma uses the super-durable blankets from his ship to make him a garment.

Interesting Deviations: Baby Kal is old enough to be standing and walking when he arrives on Earth. Jonathan Kent is alone when he finds Kal. It's heavily implied that Kal has some kind of psychic ability, and that he uses it to influence Jonathan to take him home. The Smallville High team is the Wolves here, which is an interesting choice. I don't think that one's been done before. They were the Crows on the "Smallville" TV series and the Spartans in "Man of Steel" as a nod to the director. 

Additional Commentary: I know it's probably cliché to criticize Miller's overwrought narration, but it's laid on pretty thick here, switching from baby Kal's perspective to third-person narration of various degrees of omniscience on a page-by-page basis.

Ma and Pa Kent talk like a very stereotypical, old-timey kind of farmer.

It's pretty clear that Frank Miller doesn't know what age high school freshmen are, since both the class and the kids are written as though they're in elementary school (when they're not being written as bizarrely anachronistic old men).

Later we see that Clark and Lana are conversant in Plato and Aristotle and Freud and Jung, none of whom are commonly read in high school courses. We know that Clark uses his abilities to speed-read, but it's Lana who brings up the topic. Also, I would have killed for a forty-five minute lunch period.

It's nice to see Clark being friends with a bunch of outcasts and misfits, though it would be nicer if Lana were part of the friend circle, since she's introduced as being somehow connected with Clark, but we don't actually see them interacting until considerably later, as a prelude to...well, to the unpleasantness that really didn't need to happen.

I appreciate having thought balloons here, but it's a really strange lettering choice not to make them into the typical scalloped thought balloon shape. And this is John Workman on letters!

And all the sound effects in this comic look like this, which is...a choice, for sure.

Speaking of strange choices: green oatmeal?

It's also a strange choice for Clark Kent to be reading Doc Savage. I suppose there hasn't been a clear indication of when this story is taking place, but there's no time I'm aware of when both goths and 1930s pulp fiction were commonplace. It's one of many places where this book feels adrift in time, not contemporary enough to feel like a modern retelling, not classic enough to feel like a period piece.

I could have done without Clark Kent peeing, but I guess this is a Black Label book, so.

The bit of this that got the most pre-release controversy is the idea that Clark would join the military (here, the Navy). Jonathan is surprised that he's decided not to go to college, but Martha expresses quite reasonably a fear of his prodigious power being turned toward war. That's still contrasted with Clark's glee at seeing an F-35 flying overhead—complete with a "Look! Up in the sky!" caption—when he arrives on base.

The F-35 is an interesting choice to compare so directly with Superman, one originally intended to be the super-powerful champion of the oppressed, the other a bloated, ineffectual example of government waste and the military industrial complex run amok. As with the Superman in the military angle, it'll be interesting to see how much of this is intentional commentary and how much...isn't.

As a bit of a final thought here, people were (justifiably) skeptical of this book before it was released. Frank Miller hasn't exactly had a great track record for the last (checks watch) eighteen years or so, and "the origin of Superman" is such well-worn territory that some chuckleheads have dedicated whole blog series to examining it. Heck, we just had a problematic dude writing a new, modernized exploration of Superman's origins four years ago. When the previews showed Clark joining the military, it's no surprise that there was some backlash. Awareness of the problems with the military—in how it's used, how its members are treated, and how it uses pop culture and superhero media as a recruitment tool—is at a high point in the last couple of decades, and people were uncertain how the guy who wrote Holy Terror was going to handle that relatively sensitive topic.

And one issue in, we still don't really have an idea. There's a definite "recruitment commercial" feel to the last few pages of the book, but Martha's vocalization of a lot of fans' fears gives me some hope that it won't all be rah-rah jingoism. As to the rest of the book? I'm interested to see where it goes as a fan of the character, but there's just...not a lot here. From the writing to the art to the letters and coloring, everything about this book feels phoned in. Miller and Romita in particular feel like they're parodies of themselves, and if you'd told me that this was lettered by someone brand new to the industry and not the legend who put words to Simonson's Thor run, I'd believe you. For the "definitive origin of Superman," this just kind of...exists. What's interesting isn't new, and what's new isn't interesting.

The Rocket: We don't get a really clear glimpse of it, but what we see is nonsense.

Not only does it look like a knockoff of some landspeeder from The Phantom Menace, but it looks an awful lot like it should be large enough to hold more than a baby. It's implied that there's some kind of on-board AI teaching Clark along the way, as in "Superman: The Motion Picture," but the overwrought narration and constant perspective-shifts obscure whether that's intended to be the case. Not a fan. One exploding Krypton for this rocket.

Rocket Trips #3: Secret Origins (vol. 3) #1 - 1985

One of my goals for this project was to hit some versions of the origin that are lesser-known, so here's one that I actually hadn't read before today: Secret Origins #1.

Creative Team: Roy Thomas, Wayne Boring, Jerry Ordway, Gene D'Angelo, and David C. Weiss

All-Star Summary: Doomed planet. Desperate superhumans. Last hope. Kindly couple. 

Key Elements: Krypton is a world of superhuman people. Its uranium core is leading to its destruction, as predicted by scientist Jor-L. Jor-L and Lara launch their child Kal-L toward Earth in a prototype rocket just before the planet exploded. An elderly couple, John and Mary Kent, find the rocket as it lands and rescue him from the rocket before a fire consumes every trace of it. They take Kal-L to an orphanage, where he astounds the staff with his unnatural strength, but come back to adopt him. They name him Clark Kent, and as he grows, he develops amazing powers, which his father instructs him to keep secret, but to use to help other people. After the death of his foster parents, he travels to Metropolis, where he eventually gets a job at the Daily Star newspaper under editor George Taylor and fights crime in a colorful costume made from his baby clothes. He meets intrepid reporter Lois Lane who shuns Clark Kent for his milquetoast personality but is fascinated with Superman.

Interesting Deviations: The Krypton of this universe orbits a star called Negus-12, rather than Rao. We're told that this version of Krypton has three moons, a number that will fluctuate considerably through the ages. The year of Kal-L's rocket landing is pinned down to sometime during World War I. 

Additional Commentary: Despite this issue releasing after the Crisis on Infinite Earths, it's explicitly about the origin of Kal-L, the Golden Age, Earth-2 Superman, and is bookended with captions to justify its existence, given that neither this character nor the world he occupied exist or are remembered. The story proper begins with an entry from the 30th Century edition of "Encyclopedia Galactica," which suggests that Roy Thomas is a Douglas Adams fan.

We're told that his Superman costume is made from his "swaddling clothes," even though he's not at all swaddled when the Kents find him, and the rocket is completely destroyed.

There's an interesting retelling of the events of Action Comics (vol. 1) #1 here, with a new introduction that shows how Superman came to be leaping toward the governor's mansion with a bound woman under his arm. It involves the Man of Steel preventing the lynching of a man who was wrongly accused of murder, and I do feel like Thomas and Boring missed an opportunity by making the victim of that miscarriage of justice a white man. Superman preventing a more typical (by 1930s standards) lynching would have been a nice nod to the character's Klan-smashing history.

When we see that iconic image of Superman smashing Butch Mason's car against a rock in the interior, they've decided to color the car in a reddish-brown for some reason.

This is a really interesting artifact, to be honest. The combination of Ordway and Boring on art produces an interesting style that bridges the gap from the Golden Age to the 1980s, even if you get the feeling that maybe Ordway was doing the bulk of the work on some pages. It's interesting in terms of Superman history as well, since it illustrates some of the differences between the Golden Age Superman and the Superman of Earth-2, who are intended to be the same character. Even this version is replete with retcons, from the names of the Kents to the absence of the passing motorist who originally brought baby Kal-L to the orphanage to the shape of the S-shield to the extent of Superman's powers in his first outing. Details have been massaged even in this relatively faithful retelling of the events of the first two Action Comics issues.

The Rocket: This isn't the last time we'll see this snub-nosed, red-and-blue version of Jor-L's prototype. It's not the version that became the most iconic/long-lasting, but it's on its way there.

Three out of five exploding Kryptons.

Rocket Trips #2: All-Star Superman #1 - 2005

I don't know what's weirder, that "All-Star Superman" is fourteen years old or that this blog is old enough that I commented on the first issue when it came out. But I figured if I'm going to use the origin here as a way to comment on the rest of them, it seems like a good choice to cover second. 

Creative Team: Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Jamie Grant, Phil Balsman, and Travis Lanham.

All-Star Summary: Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple.

Key Elements: At first blush, there's not much to say here, right? This is the eight-word origin that's become so iconic that I'm using it as a shorthand for this whole project.  A planet is doomed. A pair of scientists watch their world crumble around them. A spaceship flies away from the rubble. A kindly couple in rural attire finds a red blanket in tall grass. And if we consider the two-page spread that follows, we see Superman, framed against the brightness of a yellow sun. 

Interesting Deviations: Like Action Comics (vol. 1) #1, not much gets named specifically. No mention of Krypton or the names of those desperate scientists and kindly couple. Perhaps the most striking omission is that there's also no mention or even depiction of a baby. We know it's meant to be there because the story is so familiar that eight words can give us the basic jist, but leaving little baby Kal-El out of his own origin—not even depicting his little baby hands or anything in that first-person point-of-view fourth panel—is a bold and surprising move. I wonder how many people working just from memory would recall that the baby is never shown, and would instead conflate it with the similar first-person panels from Superman/Batman #1, which came out less than three years prior.

The passing motorist is cut out here, and the Kents are seen pretty explicitly discovering the baby, which has been the status quo since the Bronze Age or so. The plural "scientists" in reference to Jor-El and Lara is nice, subtly referencing that Lara was characterized as an astronaut back in the Silver Age, giving her science credentials separate from Jor-El's.

Additional Commentary: The explicit choice to include "last hope" in that short description hearkens back to Superman: Birthright, which established (for the first time, I think) that the S-shield is not just the crest of the House of El, but a Kryptonian glyph that stands for "hope." While Superman being the Last Son of Krypton and the last hope to save a dying people has been baked into the concept from the beginning, it's interesting to see an element from around two years before making it into this origin, however obliquely.

The Rocket: It's definitely different, but not particularly distinctive. It's got some of the starburst-shape that we'd see in the original Donner film and in Superman: Birthright, but otherwise it's just kind of gray. When we see Kryptonian architecture later in the series, it's all fluid crystal spires, and it would have been nice to see something more similar to that here.

One out of five exploding Kryptons for this one.

Chucky, It, and the Translation of Nostalgic Horror

There's a new "Child's Play" movie out. I'll start by saying that, despite being a big fan of slasher movies, I've never actually watched any of the "Child's Play" franchise. Even though it somehow managed to outlast "Nightmare on Elm Street," "Friday the 13th," and "Halloween" without rebooting, I've just never taken the plunge. So keep that in mind as I talk about this stuff from a complete outsider perspective.

With that out of the way, here's the new Chucky. 

I've seen a few different pictures of the updated doll, with varying degrees of uncanny valley-ness and similarities to the old version, largely depending on the lighting, but they all make one thing pretty clear: this is the same basic doll from 1988, but a little sleeker and slimmer. 

The thing I appreciate about that is that they haven't gone the same route as "It" and "Annabelle," making their titular creatures look actively creepy, which eliminates the surprise and scare factor of having something innocuous and commonplace made scary by doing scary things. Which is good, because that seems to me to be the whole point of "Child's Play" and the larger "killer doll" genre as concepts. 

But I see a related problem here: Chucky isn't commonplace anymore. The original Chucky doll was styled after the My Buddy and Cabbage Patch Kids dolls that were incredibly common in the mid-80s. I remember the My Buddy commercial, and the only reason I never got the Cabbage Patch Kid doll that I wanted for like a week when I was four is that my mom thought they looked ugly. But today? Sure, the thirty-year nostalgia cycle has brought Cabbage Patch Kids and Teddy Ruxpin back to big box store shelves, but the new Chucky has ditched the Cabbage Patch cheeks and chin, leaving only the slightly-updated My Buddy elements that look like nothing on the shelves today. 

If you wanted to do "Child's Play" in 2019, the place to start isn't by putting a fresh coat of paint on the original film, it's by cracking open the movie and getting to the core concept: a toy that looks disturbingly like ones that children love comes to life and murders people. My generation had Chucky, my parents' generation had Talky Tina. And I've seen enough of my mom's old dolls to know that Talky Tina looked a lot like what little girls were playing with in 1963. 

As someone who spends a not insignificant amount of time browsing toy aisles, I think your best basis for a modern "Child's Play" would be some kind of blind-box toy, like Hatchimals or LOL Surprise or other things I see advertised when I watch "Teen Titans Go!" like I did this morning. If you want to go the doll route, I think options are a little limited by the domination of multimedia franchises, your DC Superhero Girls and Barbies and Disney Princesses. I assume Monster High and My Little Pony still hold a decent share of the willowy wide-eyed doll market, which NuChucky seems to be leaning into facially, if not in any other aspect. I suppose you could also do something closer to the American Girl dolls, which would have a closer look and size to the original Chucky, even if they'd require some other changes. 

It's similar to some of the problems with 2017's "It." It's all well and good to want to move the children's section from the 1950s to the 1980s, but that transition doesn't work without making other alterations, so that the story concept—in particular, the aspects that make it scary—fit in the new cultural context you've transplanted the story into. In 1958, "clown" meant Bozo and Red Skelton and Barnum & Bailey. In 1985, "clown" meant John Wayne Gacy and "Poltergeist." In a lot of ways, It as a novel tracks how clowns lost their innocence just as the protagonists did. 

Pennywise works in the It novel and original miniseries because it's familiar. It's somewhat believable that Georgie Denbrough would see a friendly clown and strike up a conversation with it in 1958. That's a lot less believable in the Stranger Danger 1980s, where even aside from the fear of child kidnappings (something the new movie did incorporate into the update) clowns were viewed with a much greater level of suspicion and fear.

If you wanted Pennywise to be something friendly and familiar in a 1988 setting, you'd either make him a cartoon character with heavy merchandising, or you'd make him a Muppet. I suppose he could be a Mister Rogers/Captain Kangaroo/LeVar Burton-style children's TV host, but I think that would require more significant changes to the story structure. Though playing on some of the more salacious urban legends about characters like Barney the Dinosaur and Fred Rogers could make for very interesting horror. 

Similarly, in the novel, Eddie Kaspbrak is a hypochondriac and germophobe, so to terrify him in 1958, Pennywise takes the form of a "leper"—who's later determined to be a syphilitic hobo. The recent movie keeps this scene intact (though losing a lot of what gave it context), but as someone who was a kid in the '80s, syphilitic hobos weren't exactly commonplace fears. Instead, D.A.R.E. and urban myth and TV drilled into me a fear of "junkies" and AIDS even in the rural midwestern towns where I grew up. It's especially galling because there is a thematic thread of homophobia and the AIDS epidemic running through the 1980s segments of the It novel, so it wouldn't have been a whole-cloth invention either. 

The problem here is one of transliteration rather than translation. When converting a text from one language to another, you can try to do a one-to-one, word-by-word literal transliteration, but in doing so, it's likely that you'll lose some of the meaning. On the other hand, you can try to capture the intended meaning and connotation, but may have to be a little less literal in your word selection. The balance between these two approaches is part of why there's so many different modern English versions of texts like Beowulf and The Odyssey that were written in (effectively) different languages. It's why there's a current furor among Internet man-children that Square Enix censors shrunk Tifa's breasts in the new Final Fantasy VII remake. 

I think a similar issue plagues these nostalgic horror movies. They try to update only the setting and aesthetics without realizing how integral those things are to the story and the scares. The result is a warmed-over remake that doesn't pack the same punch as the original because it's tapped into fears from thirty years ago instead of current fears.

And it's not hard to see why this would happen. If you remade "Child's Play" to be about an American Girl-style doll, you'd end up alienating the Chucky fans and creating immediate bad press from the people most likely to pay for a ticket. And I'm sure the copyright holders and corporate powers are in play here: Chucky is a known quantity with merchandising possibilities and brand recognition, and especially in the current Hollywood economy, I can't imagine many of the pursestring-holders ditching that for a less recognizable main character. 

I'm not one of the doom-and-gloom types who decries the current state of Hollywood as relying exclusively on adaptations, sequels, and reboots. Frankly, I think that's always been true of Hollywood to one degree or another. But it's true that Hollywood is increasingly dominated by a few large media corporations, and that the economics of moviemaking and theaters in general mean that there's even less willingness to branch out and take risks. And that is a pretty distressing state of affairs, and not just for horror.

"Child's Play" and It weren't made to fit some nostalgic idea of what they should be. They were made to comment and capitalize on issues and anxieties of a particular culture at a particular moment in time, and that's what made them memorable and effective as horror. You can no more sever a story from its context and setting and expect it to work in a new one than you can transplant a heart from one body to another without reconnecting any of the vessels. If you don't connect your story to the rest of the setting, you're going to end up with a bloody, lifeless mess. 

Rocket Trips #1: Action Comics (vol. 1) #1 - 1938

Well, we had to start somewhere. Action Comics (vol. 1) #1 contains the first (canonical, comic book) appearance of Superman and starts with a one-page opening sequence that remains a marvel of condensed storytelling. I covered it in some detail way back when.

Creative Team: Jerome Siegel & Joe Shuster.

All-Star Summary: Doomed planet. Desperate scientist. Passing motorist. Remarkable orphan.

Key Elements: A distant world is dying. A scientist places his infant son in a "hastily-devised space-ship" and launches it toward Earth. The baby is discovered by a passing motorist and taken to an orphanage. The child has superhuman strength, and his powers of strength, speed, and invulnerability grow as he reaches maturity. He uses his powers to "benefit mankind" and becomes Superman, the champion of the oppressed.

Interesting Deviations: This is the first origin, so it can't really deviate from anything, but eighty-two years of hindsight allow us to see how much is missing, and what's included instead. There's no mention of Superman's birth mother, no mention of Ma & Pa Kent, no names for any of the sci-fi elements at all. Instead of the Kents, there's a passing motorist and an orphanage. Superman's powers are credited to an advanced physical structure and likened to the abilities of ants and grasshoppers. His powers are said to grow when he gets older, which sticks around a little in the Golden Age but then disappears until the Byrne reboot. 

Additional Commentary: Can we trade out "Man of Tomorrow" for "Champion of the Oppressed" as a moniker for Superman? That's one that really needs to make a comeback.

The Rocket: Not much to look at, really. Just your average bright-red Amazing Stories sci-fi rocket.

I give this rocket two out of five exploding Kryptons. 

Rocket Trips #0: Origin Stories

Once upon a time, just a little over nine years ago, I started a little series examining the different versions of Superman's origin story, in publication order, on this blog. That series petered out after nine entries, halfway through George Lowther's 1942 novel, The Adventures of Superman. There's half of an entry finishing off that novel's origin story in my drafts from...*cough* 2011. 

Since then, we've had a bunch more Superman origin stories, including flashback sequences in "Man of Steel (vol. 2)" and the current "Superman: Year One." And I'd like to dive back into the Superman origin waters. 

But I'm older and wiser now, and I realize that I made some avoidable mistakes. Chief among them being that I tried to stick to the origins in chronological order. I think there's value to that, in seeing how the myth evolved over time, but it also means spending a lot of time tracking down hard-to-find Golden Age and Silver Age sources. I really dig Golden and Silver Age comics, but I also know there were versions of Superman's origin told in the gap between 1961 and 1978 in that old master list, and I haven't found any clear indication of where they were. 

So I'm going to play hopscotch through the decades, covering Superman origins as I encounter them, and focusing on the key elements that carry over from version to version, as well as the interesting deviations. I can't promise a regular schedule or fascinating writing, but I'm going to try. Blogging may be a dying art, but I'm not ready to close the Fortress door just yet, and this is an easy way to have some consistent content that I can't just dump in the whirlpool of social media. 

Besides, I made a logo:

I hope you enjoy coming on this journey with me! The first installment will post later today!

Larry DiTillio: 1948-2019

Larry DiTillio was a prolific writer of television shows, books, and RPGs. He was responsible for some of the most memorable parts of the He-Man mythos, like the dragon Granamyr and the Lovecraftian Shokoti, not to mention being a co-creator of She-Ra. He was one of the showrunners for Babylon 5 early on, and Beast Wars throughout its groundbreaking run. 

In 1999, he had an AOL e-mail address. 

So did I. I was a sophomore in high school, and I'd been assigned to interview someone for my speech class. Being the giant cartoon dork that I am, and at the time still very heavily enmeshed in my He-Man fandom phase (I showed that same speech teacher some of my fanfic because of course I did), I reached out to Mr. DiTillio, who graciously agreed to answer my dumb, dorky questions. 

I sent him my questions. In my memory, I'm pretty sure there were some back-and-forths over e-mail, and I sent follow-up questions, but AOL lost everything from that time, so I have no way of going back to check. What I do remember is that the deadline was approaching, and I didn't have what I needed to put my speech together. I was pretty nervous about public speaking to begin with (my previous speech, an informational presentation on '80s music, had umm-ed and ahh-ed its way to being four times longer in reality than it was when I practiced), so I was naturally pretty bummed out about it. My parents convinced me to interview my aunt as a backup.

I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I think my dad e-mailed him, though I don't know what he said. I also think Mr. DiTillio was recovering from an illness at the time. I'm not sure how I pieced that together; I think Mr. DiTillio made a comment that my Dad really cared about me, or something along those lines, somewhere in the exchange. Regardless, he answered my questions in time for me to put together the speech, which I kicked off with a little video montage of TV theme show openings from He-Man and Beast Wars and Captain Power that I put together with a couple of VCRs. 

It was the first time I ever interacted with a professional writer. It meant a great deal to me then, as an aspiring writer, even if I couldn't accept his advice against fanfic at the time. 

I'm finding that it still means a great deal to me, as a still-aspiring writer. I can't remember ever being this emotional while writing a post on this blog throughout its long, punctuated history. 

Ever since then, I've always felt a little thrill when I saw "Larry DiTillio" pop up in the credits of a show I'm watching. Part of it came from that brief interaction, and part from my confidence that I was in for a treat. The man was a hell of a writer no matter what he was writing for. 

You can read my interview with him here, though years of site redesigns have proliferated some errors into the text. But to close, I asked him what advice he'd give to aspiring writers, to me: 

Simple. You need 4 things to be a writer - TALENT, DESIRE, PERSISTENCE and LUCK. With those 4 things you can go wherever you want.

BUT, there is something else. Don't look to trends or fads or "what is selling now" to tell you what to write about. Your heart and your head are what informs your work.

You must write the movie/TV show/book/cartoon/play etc., that YOU want to see and your characters must come out of your own experience and sensibility. That is all any aspiring writer brings to the table- human experience and reflection on same. Stories are always about human hearts in conflict, so look for what makes you and those around you human.

And good luck.

I always hoped I'd get a chance to meet him, to have him sign a toy or a video or a copy of his book Shotguns vs. Cthulhu which I think I'm finally going to get around to reading. I always hoped I'd get a chance to thank him for taking the time to make a fifteen-year-old nerd feel special. I didn't, and I guess I won't get to. 

But thanks all the same, Mr. DiTillio.