Supermanniversary

Panel of Lois Lane meeting Superman from Action Comics #1 © 1938 DC Comics.
Script: Jerry Siegel. Pencils, Inks, Letters: Joe Shuster. Colors: Unknown.

This post is currently down for maintenance.

Leaps and Bounds

We’re an hour away from Superman’s birthday, according to old comics lore.
Stories in various media conflict — even within their own continuity at times — over both when the Man of Steel was born on his homeworld of Krypton, relative to our Gregorian calendar, and when his rocket landed on Earth. As I wrote a few years back, though, DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz and writer/historian E. Nelson Bridwell noted in response to reader mail with a giant wink that Superman barely seemed to
age because his birthday only came around every four years.


Panel from 1st story in Action Comics #1 © 1938 DC Comics.
Script: Jerry Siegel. Pencils, Inks, Letters: Joe Shuster. Colors: Unknown.

On the heels of the February 29th date seeing print in a 1976 DC calendar and those occasional lettercolumns, Alan Moore used it in the acclaimed tale “For the Man Who Has Everything”, drawn by his Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons for 1985’s Superman Annual. The same calendar gave alter ego Clark Kent’s birthday as June 18th, however, carried over from a 1973 story establishing the date as that of Kal-El’s arrival on his adoptive planet. Writer Cary Bates may have chosen that month based on the character’s 1938 introduction in the pages of Action Comics #1, bearing a cover date of June but on newsstands at least one month prior — despite which DC celebrated Superman’s 50th anniversary in 1988 with a party on the Friday before Leap Day, instead of in April, May, or June!

Mini-Slog and Miscellany

I’m sitting outside in a lovely breeze, reminded of how wildly the weather
fluctuates this time of year — and how nice it is to sit outside in a lovely breeze.

The laptop says it’s 86° at nearly 6:30 p.m., which the stifling heat up in my bedroom reflects, but I only just realized that the storm windows probably aren’t coming down again. Hefting the air conditioner into place seems premature, though.

I’ve had a little more trouble restoring the blog after the other day’s sabotage than anticipated. Of course, I should’ve anticipated it — Blogger often doesn’t work as planned. The ability to export the entire code of your blog to your hard drive, however, makes for a decent bulwark against hackers and the service’s own glitches. Not long ago, I realized that I should be doing so regularly in addition to saving the HTML of individual posts. When my blog was vandalized Apr. 1st, the entire thing was deleted, but fortunately I’d saved the code to my laptop the night before. All the posts and even the comments were preserved; while the sidebar widgets unfortunately were not, they’re easy enough to set up. My biggest complaint by far is whatever bugs in Google
or Blogger security allowed this hackery to begin with — quite a concern since my password was total nonsense and changed frequently.

Case Closed

Cover © 1938 DC. Photo © 2010 CGC.

You may have seen the news reports that Action Comics #1, dated June 1938 and featuring the first published appearance of Superman, was sold for $1 million at a Heritage auction last month.