Flower Rock

Check out this very nice page of Cartoon Characters done by different artists.
I LOVE CARTOONS!

Growing up on comics in the eighties, the best by far were the Marvel comics. Marvel were just better written and did not suffer from the overall goofiness of DC. Although, I had enjoyed some of the DC World War II Superheroes (Earth Two for us fan boys), such as the Sandman Theater. As it happen, Earth-Two is where the original Superman of WWII lived.

I could never understand the whole popularity of Superman. This guy was near the power of a god, there was no real challenge in reading his stories. No matter how smart Lex Luthor was, Superman was smarter, no matter how strong the villain was, Superman was stronger. By the time the Eighties rolled around, he could move planets! Marvel Superheroes, like Spider-man, were more down to earth, with powers that were limited and had real-world problems.

DC had gone over the top with Superman. It seemed with Superman, no matter how complicated the scheme, he was able to use his super-brain, super-speed, and super-breath to a even more complicated solution (Like shoot a microscopic heat ray from his eyes, bouncing off objects and finding a weak spot in the villain’s force-field, thus penetrating a weak spot to exploit …..blah, blah, blah).

Then I got my hands on a hard-cover book with reprints of the first Action Comics and Superman Comics stories by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Seeing Superman the way people seen him for the first time in 1938 was refreshing. First off, Superman’s only power was that he was from another planet with a higher density. Since his body was adopted to a stronger gravitational pull, this made him stronger and able leap higher. In fact, Superman did NOT have the power of flight, that came later (along with x-ray and heat vision). He had to jump around, much like the Incredible Hulk does today.

When you read these comics you can see that something new was happening. No one has ever seen anything like a superhero before. With a simple science explanation (the more density on his home planet), Siegel and Shuster were able to make it believable that a Superman can exist. This charged every man’s imagination. Who didn’t wish they had the power to fight injustice.

Back then, Superman was no boy scout. Since he didn’t have the power of flight, he had to leap on buildings to get around. His favorite scare tactic was to grab someone by the seat of their pants and start jumping on the top of buildings, telephone poles, and ledges. This just scared the crap out of Superman’s victim.

One story had Superman fighting the slumlords.  First he had the tenants leaving their homes and then begins to destroy the dwellings. The National guard were called out, where they begin shooting at Superman from airplanes. He didn’t give a cat’s ass. Superman just went ahead and continued to destroy the homes, forcing the slumlords to rebuild them. In another story, Superman is beating up a gangster, when some other gangsters come in and started shooting at him. Well, being Superman, all he had to do was stand there an let the bullets bounce off, but instead, he flings the gangster he was beating up into the line of fire (thus killing him). This is just bad-ass. As time went on with the beginning of World War II and the following patriotic mood in the country, Superman began to morphed into the American boy-scout we recognized today. Soon, the X-ray and flying were added and then the heat vision. This pretty much marked the end of original Superman.

During the early days of Superman, the Fleischer/Famous studios created some very nice cartoon series for the theaters using rotoscope technology. These cartoons should give you an idea of the original Superman. When watching these episodes, remember the limitation of Superman’s powers (such as the lack of flight, etc). As a matter of fact, I believe it was this series that introduced the power of X-Ray vision. If you would like to watch these episodes, go to the Toonami Digital Arsenal site. Keep in mind, that some of these episodes are not politically correct due to Wold War II, Pearl Harbor attack or just plain ignorance.