Superman & Me: In the Beginning…(Part 1)

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Doomed planet, last hope, kindly couple, up in the sky… Superman.  As a child that’s all I needed to know, in fact I think I knew less than that and yet I immediately found my hero.  For as long as I could remember I have always loved Superman.  However if I have to put a start date or age I would venture to guess that it was when I was about 4 or 5 years old.  So 1984-1985, you do the math.  The Superman franchise had already been a huge success and to me Christopher Reeve was Superman.  The Man of Steel would even become Saturday morning cartoon.  So here I was 4 or 5 years old, Superman 3 was released on video.  Parts 1 and 2 were cable TV top picks as they were always being shown and a toy line of all the DC superheroes was released in stores as, the Superfriends.  It was a kid fan boy’s dream.  Despite the lackluster performance of the Supergirl movie and its lack of Superman, who was originally written to make a cameo, I was still faithful to the mythos.  I played with the toys and watched re-runs of Super Friends and was glued to the TV set anytime the Superman movies were on.

Photo: blog.newsok.com

To me all was right, but in the comic book world a great change was on the horizon, a great Crisis was about to begin.  In 1985 DC comics did something that at the time was very bold and risky.  They decided to reboot the entire Universe they had created, and Superman was in the forefront of this great change or Crisis.  As a 5 year old I was not really interested in the comics but do remember seeing the impact this great event had made.  It was as though interest in comics had been rebooted and now more people were all of a sudden interested in super hero comics.  The fourth Superman film in the franchise was released in 1987 and a year after that a short lived Superman cartoon, which only lasted one season on the ABC network was part of my Saturday morning cartoon schedule.   A couple of years had passed and I was now older, wiser and more knowledgeable in all things Superman.  Like I said I was yet to be interested in comics so after the end of the Superman cartoon and the emotional high of the fourth film passed I fell into Superman limbo.  That was short lived because in 1992, now at the tender age of 12 I was about to be thrust into comics because of an event that stretched from geek conversations at local comic book shops right into the news media.  An event so big it once again changed the game and added new comic book readers into it’s medium, even myself.  “The Death of Superman”.  I couldn’t believe it, here I was about to hit puberty and just as my childhood ways were dying so was my childhood hero.  It was a blessing in disguise however because this comic book event breathed new life into a character that according to society, was loosing relevance.

Photo: republicjewelry.com

I was hooked; week after week I would rush to my local newsstand and pick up the latest episode in this blockbuster series.  With Superman gone having apparently died due to his epic battle with the creature Doomsday, four “Supermen” stepped up and claimed to be the real deal, and so the drama would continues to unfold.  I encourage anyone to go back and read that series or at least Wikipedia it so you can get a better understanding of how epic this story was.

What a way to get into comics, this was all new to me and it only increased my fascination with The Man of Steel.   Of course Superman was not really dead, he was more on sabbatical then dead.  He would eventually return, defeat the bad guys, reclaim his place in the world and thus the next chapter in the legacy of Superman would begin.  Unfortunately the stories began to slack after that and now a teenager I was slowly loosing interest.  Puberty hit and I had other interests, namely girls and driving.  But little did I know that Superman and I would cross paths again, in fact the mythology was about to be reborn in a big way on the small screen and it would single-handedly reignite my passion for the Man of Tomorrow.  NEW Adventures were still in store for Earth’s greatest superhero, and I was ready to go along for the ride.  To be continued…