You know, I’m going to take back a lot of the bad things I said about the Pre-Crisis Superman.
Actually I didn’t bad mouth the Pre-Crisis Superman too much. I can’t think of an iteration of the Man of Steel that I truly hate with the fire of a thousand suns but at the same time there are some eras that I prefer over others. To paraphrase Lewis Grizzard I’m Post-Crisis born and Post-Crisis bred and when I die I’ll be Post Crisis dead. I’m still not keen on the Silver Age. Sure there are some great stories but when you read a bunch of them in one sitting they tend to run together.
The Bronze Age though…that’s a different story.
A few years back (probably 2006 if I had to nail it down to a year) I started going though my Pre-Crisis DC stuff. I have these things that I refer to as reading projects where instead of taking one of the series I own and read it all by it’s lonesome I will choose several somewhat connected series and read them in chronological order. The up side to this is that sometimes you can see how a comic company evolves over a period of time. The down side is that you have to slug through some real hunks of crap to get to the good stuff. In this case I was reading all of my DC books in chronological order starting from cover date February 1976. While my collection had some holes there was a good deal of Bronze Age Superman in there and much to my suprise I liked what I read.
In some cases I really liked it.
I really sold that era short in terms of characterization and continuity. I may not like the concept of Superman being the real guy and Clark Kent the disguise but writers like Denny O’Neil, Elliot S! Maggin, Marty Pasko, Gerry Conway and especially Cary Bates introduced and reintroduced a number of great characters and concepts.
It may not be all wine and roses and it may not be “my” Superman, but I dig it and I definitely see the appeal.
So yeah, gonna take back a lot of the bad things I may have said.
More to follow…