Episode 2: Happy Birthday, Superman! Part 2 – Anniversaries Past & Present
Welcome to the second episode of It All Comes Back to Superman Series Two, the pretty much the same, not really all that new reaffirmation of my Kryptonian faith. I am your host, Michael Bailey, and this time out I am finishing my two part series celebrating Superman’s 85th anniversary because…I really want to.
It’s just that simple.
In this installment I look at how Superman’s birthday has been celebrated over the decades and how big and small those celebrations have been. The bulk of this section is spent on the 50th anniversary, but that’s because his 50th was probably the biggest birthday the character has had judging by the sheer amount of…stuff that happened in and around 1988. I also talk about the barebones celebration from 1968, the almost non-existant celebration from 1998 and how the anniversaries ramped up for 2013 and 2018. After that I talk about the Superman comics and television series that came out in 2023 and what I thought of them.
(Note, during the first segment I state that the Lex Luthor and Brainiac makeovers went down in Action Comics #543. This is wrong. It was Action Comics #544. I totally kept blowing that one over and over again. My bad.)
Here are the covers to some of the anniversary issues I talked about during the course of this episode.
Here are the pictures that were sent to me by my buddy Alan of the Smithsonian American History Museum exibition Superman: Many Lives, Many Worlds.
Here are some more bits of business from Smithsonian exhbition plus something from the Cleveland Expo as well.
And here are the covers to Time Magazine and Radio Times that marked the 50th anniversary.
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The opening and closing theme to the show is titled Journey and was composed by Pontus Rufelt. It is licensed from Shockwave-Sound.
Next Time: Taking a short break for personal reasons but new episodes will return (hopefully) in mid-2024!