Posted on 04/14/2013 5:53:09 AM PDT by Las Vegas Dave
Seventy-five years ago someone walking up to a newsstand in Cleveland might have seen something new -- a gaudy, yellow-covered comic book with a man dressed in a circus outfit lifting a car. The magazine bore the equally gaudy title of "Action Comics."
A perfect copy of that 10-cent comic recently sold for $1.2 million, but at the time just seeing that book on display would have meant more than money to the two young Glenville men who created the character.
Superman, the character Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created five years earlier while still in high school, had finally arrived. Comics would never be the same, and soon Superman would be among the most recognized characters in the world. From the steamy jungles of Brazil to the icy wastelands of Siberia, it's pretty hard to find someplace where people have not heard of him.
Yet, the superhero who spawned numerous television series and five films, including a movie due out in June, has never been fully embraced by his city of his birth. And while it's pretty hard to find a place where people have not heard of him, few know the idea came from Cleveland.
Superman rose from humble beginnings. The legend, as told by Siegel himself, says that one hot summer night in the early 1930s, the teen tossed and turned, unable to sleep in his home at 10622 Kimberley Ave., in the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland.
He stared out his bedroom window at a giant moon, his head spinning with the tales of science fiction he loved to read. He wished he could fly.
He jumped out of bed and hastily wrote down his ideas for a man who could not exactly fly, but was so mighty that he could leap hundreds of feet into the air. He would have the strength of Hercules and the invulnerability of Achilles and would be the hero of the dispossessed and downtrodden, like the people of Depression-era Cleveland.
The character would be more than a man, he would be a superman. < snip >
I read all of those as a kid in the late 60s from my grandmother’s collection.
Only the comic book character, not the real one.. < /poor humor >
Milton Caniff
he did both.....
of course Superman was not a comic strip...rather a comic book.
Obama's vision of Superman.
A message from General Zod to Kal-El and planet Earth has just been revealed at the upcoming ‘Man of Steel’ movie’s website...probably a precursor to a new trailer.
Both billed as "The Man of Tomorrow"
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