YOUTUBE…THURSDAY

Up against the clock today, folks and From Crisis to Crisis is going to be a day late, so I thought I would post a series of clips from one of the best two-part episodes of The Adventures of Superboy, the syndicated series that ran from 1988 to 1992.  Roads Not Taken saw Superboy traveling to two different alternate realities and in one of those realities the son of Jor-El became an evil dictator known as the Sovereign.  I loved this episode as a teenager and at some point will write up something on it for this blog.  For now, enjoy the clips even though the video quality is a little dodgy.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9O76d2U6ig

I seem to remember more of a fight between Superboy and the Sovereign, but that just proves that my freakish memory isn’t so freakish after all.  Either way I hope y’all liked this and I will see you tomorrow.

More to follow…

YOUTUBE TUESDAY FOR 07/27/2010

As I have mentioned once or twice in the past month I have pretty much walked away from the current DCU as far as the comics are concerned but I still love that universe and the characters that live in it.  Sometime back it was announced that there would be a Young Justice animated series coming soon from Warner Animation and today’s YouTube video is something that came out of San Diego this weekend and I thought it was keen.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiOjAmXDjW4&feature=player_embedded

I have to admit that all signs point to pretty darn awesome if this video is any indication of how the series is going to go down.  I have enjoyed the episodes of The Batman that I’ve seen written by Greg Weisman and Brad Douglas and my other friends over at the Spider-Man Crawlspace have said nothing but good things about his work on the Spectacular Spider-Man so I am confident the guy has a good handle on comic book characters in animation.

The biggest surprise is that the members of the Justice League are involved in the series, especially Batman and Superman.  Usually when these sorts of series are produced the mentor characters are either mentioned and never shown or never mentioned at all, so it is kind of cool that we’re going to be seeing the adults as well as the younger heroes.  The animation style reminds me of Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, which is fine by me and the shot of the Hall of Justice put a big ol’ smile on my face.  Would I have preferred a more direct adaptation of the comic series that the series takes it’s name from?  Sure.  I am a huge fan of Peter David’s Young Justice series, but I figured they were going to make some sweeping changes and was prepared for that eventuality.  Frankly I am glad the show looks as good as it does.

So yeah, I am going to go out on a limb and say I am excited about this series and look forward to it’s premiere.

That’s it for today.  Come back tomorrow for more Superman goodness.

More to follow…

THE DAILY PLANET FOR 07/09/2010

When I decided to bring back the Fortress as a daily Superman blog one of the ideas I had as far as content goes is scanning bits of business from my collection and sharing them with y’all.  On Wednesday of this week I posted a handful of covers from a Superman Family lot I had won on eBay, which I was sixteen different types of excited over.

As I was scanning the covers to those comics I noticed that about ten or so of them had Daily Planet pages on the back of them.  For those not in the know there was a point in the late seventies and early eighties where DC had what they called the  Daily Planet page, which was essentially a Bullpen Bulletin for DC and was usually quite cool.  The most interesting aspect of the Daily Planet pages on the back of these issues of Superman Family is that they are all Superman centric, which leads me to believe that they had different Daily Planet pages for different books based on the characters appearing in that book.  So every once in a while I post another scan of these pages complete with some commentary.

Click on the image to make it easier to see.  Commentary below the cut.

Continue reading THE DAILY PLANET FOR 07/09/2010

FROM CRISIS TO CRISIS EPISODE 53: FEBRUARY 1990

Episode 53: February 1990

Welcome to the fifty-third episode of From Crisis to Crisis: A Superman Podcast! This podcast has a simple premise; examine just about every Superman comic published between Man of Steel #1 in 1986 to Adventures of Superman #649 in 2006 in an informative and hopefully entertaining format.

Part index. Part commentary. Part history lesson. All podcast.

This is a big one, folks! Two and a half hours of From Crisis to Crisis goodness! Why two and a half hours? We have no idea but it sure was fun to record. This time out the boys talk about the Superman books that came out with the February 1990 cover date. In Superman #40 the Man of Steel fights the Four Armed Terror. In Adventures of Superman #463 we get the race of the century as Superman races Wally West, the Flash. Action Comics #650 comes up next and not only is it a great story but Mike comes clean about his criminal past. Finally Mike and Jeff bring in Superboy: The Comic Book with issue #1, based on the syndicated series that was airing at the time. They don’t cover the book as in depth as the others but they wanted to talk about it just the same. So you get all of this and the usual Elsewhere in the DCU and Elsewhere in the Real World segments plus an e-mail.

Next week: DAY OF THE KRYPTON MAN BEGINS!

You can subscribe to the show in two ways. First there is the RSS Feed and there is also the iTunes link .

If you want to comment on the show or contact the hosts you can always private message Mike and Jeff, at the Superman Homepage, leave comments here or at the Homepage or here or email them by clicking this link.  All questions, concerns, fears, trepidations and cheap shots are welcome. The guys will try to incorporate e-mails into the episodes once the show gets rolling.

Seriously, let us know what you think.

FORTRESS UPDATE! FLAMEBIRD AND NIGHTWING IN ACTION COMICS! NEW NIGHTING ACTUALLY CONNER KENT?

So last week I blew a fan gasket about Superman leaving Action Comics.  I threw out a few theories. Turns out one of them was right.  Here is a bit of what I wrote.

So we follow Superman in Superman and Action Comics becomes a showcase for either older heroes or newer ones.  With the mention of Nightwing and Flamebird3 in the solicitations it makes me curious as to whether or not they’re going to be the stars of Action.  I could be wrong on that.  It’s just a guess.  Maybe they’ll put all of the other characters that have had canceled series over the last two years into the book.  I’m a little fuzzy on that one.

Here are some quotes from a Newsarama interview with DiDio.

In Action, we’re going to see some major changes – Superman will not be featured in Action Comics. The stars of Action will be the new team of Flamebird and Nightwing. Flamebird is a character we’ve seen, but this is the first time we’re seeing her in costume. Nightwing is a character that we’ve known in the DCU for a little while, but he’s new to the Nightwing costume as well. The team on that book will be Greg Rucka with Eddy Barrows. Eddy will be moving over from Teen Titans.

Now – you’re going to be asking me two questions – and the question for me is, do I let you ask them and eat up your number of questions for this time, or do I go ahead and answer them before you ask them? I’ll do it myself, because I’d hate for you to use up your questions (laughs). The big question is where Geoff Johns and Gary Frank are going. They will be doing Superman: Secret Origin as a miniseries coming up later in the year. We decided to run that as its own miniseries, different from what Geoff just did in Green Lantern. It gives them a little more time to work it, they don’t have to struggle against the ongoing schedule, and it won’t throw off the triangles on the covers which keep track of the story. They’ll be doing the definitive origin of Superman as we’ve seen it all take place, and incorporating the changes that we’ve seen or suggested since Infinite Crisis.

With the Superman books following Infinite Crisis, we made some suggestions as to some of the changes that might be occurring within Superman’s origin and who he is. There were a lot of things that have been changed over a period of time, and what Geoff has done, what Geoff always does so well is that he incorporates so many of the various aspects of Superman’s origin to what I feel is really a clean, definitive take on the character as he exists today, and more importantly, how we will continue to present him in the years to come.

The John Byrne changes were important and strong when they occurred back in the ‘80s, and I feel that Geoff’s origin is going to make that same imprint now, for 2009 and past that.

All right.  Here is where I have to do something I really don’t want to do.

I have to admit that I flew off the handle.

I seriously jumped the gun and should have just taken a deep breath and waited to see what the actual deal was.

I was the worst kind of fanboy.

I really have to try and not have this happen again.

Does this mean I take back everything I wrote in that post?  No.  But as far as flying off the handle I should just give it a day or two and then write about it.

Sigh.

Everything he describes in the article sounds so freaking awesome.

I’m going to go do some house work now.

Though I do ask this question:

Is the new Nightwing  actually Conner Kent?

I mean he had the tactile telekinesis thing going on.

More to follow…