Sorry that I haven’t posted all that much lately. Real life has been very busy over the past five or so days leading me to lose my will to livedo much of anything so posting on my blog was one of the casualties. I was going to try and get caught up on everything yesterday but Rachel (my wife if you weren’t aware) fell while getting out of the tub. Thankfully nothing was broken (Rachel has a condition known as Osteogenesis Imperfecta, the thing that Samuel L. Jackson had in Unbreakable, that makes her bones soft and break easily) but she was banged up pretty bad and needed some care.
I have a pretty basic rule to life; the wife comes first. It’s just that easy.
I wanted to catch up on my reviews today, but I’m just not in the right head space for that sort of thing so I figured it was a good time to roll out another Favorite Cover post. Many amazing covers have graced the Superman books over the years and DC even put out a book of them back in 2006 titled Superman: Cover to Cover, which I think is one of those few “must haves” for fans of the Man of Steel.
So it’s 1989 and the majority of comic book fandom (and the real world as well) was gearing up for the release of Tim Burton’s Batman film. I was too, but I was also (and still am obviously) a devoted reader of the Superman books and at the time Superman was going through a storyline called Exile that had him leaving the Earth due to circumstances that I won’t get into here because I want to write something more in depth about that arc later. In short the storyline had Superman visiting other planets, running into an old enemy and making a new one in the form of a Post-Crisis Mongul while the world tries to deal with Superman’s disappearance and the supposed death of Clark Kent. Exile is my all-time favorite Superman arc and probably always will be because it was the first time in terms of being both a comic fan and a Superman fan that an extended arc really meant something to me. I had only been reading comics full time for two years in 1989 so when Superman left Earth I was left with this feeling of, “Is he…Is he going to come back?” If that story happened today I would be like, “Ok, he’ll be back in six months to a year, let’s see how this works out,” but it was a different time and while I don’t think I ever want to go back to that I do think that much like remembering what it was like to be a kid during the holiday season it is important when you’re an adult comic reader to occasionally remember what it was that made you a regular comic fan and Exile was that story for me.
As Exile was wrapping up it was announced that Action Comics (which had become Action Comics Weekly in 1988) was becoming a monthly again and that some guy named George Perez was going to be writing and drawing Superman. Now I write “some guy named George Perez” mainly as a joke but in all honesty I didn’t have my ear to the ground of fandom at the time and while I was aware that there was this guy named George Perez and boy could he draw I wasn’t aware who exactly Perez was and why he was already a legend. In any case, the book was coming back to the monthly grind. That happened in Action Comics #643 and this was the cover.
Superman #1 from 1939 has one of those covers that have been re-done to varying degrees of success but this one knocked it out of the park. Perez’s recreation is probably my favorite though. He brings that iconic quality to the piece and that can’t be easy considering that Superman is so pervasive in comics and pop culture that just about everyone has a sense of what Superman should look like even if they don’t particularly like the character.
If I was to sit down and make a Top Five All Time Favorite Superman Covers this one would definitely be on the list. A few years back a buddy of mine traded me the promotional poster that DC released to pimp the new direction the Superman books were going in that used this cover and it got kind of banged up to the point where I had to take it down, which was my own fault because it wasn’t in the best of shape when I got it and moving it from one spot to the other didn’t exactly help. Luckily I managed to secure another one for a very reasonable price (under ten bucks) and will most likely have that one framed.
I don’t know where I’ll put it since the Fortress’ home office has plaster walls and you can’t exactly put nails into them, but I’ll figure something out.
More to follow…
Just do what I do, Rub your hand through your hair to create enough static eletricity and then just stick it to the wall. Just like Static.