Speaker 2 (00:00.142)
I wish we had the budget for music. I might be able to find the music from the Fleischer Studios thing because it's public domain.

Yes

Speaker 1 (00:32.332)
That was always my favorite.

Flaming Hydra. Yeah, the Flaming Hydra round table podcast. Here we are with Sam Thielman and I'm Joe McLeod and we are talking about Sam's piece from June 4th, my 10 favorite Superman stories.

Hello.

Speaker 1 (00:55.552)
Yeah, no, as well as the as the world burns I have had a hard time continuing to write about the decrepit state of the world and as much as as much as that's sort of cathartic for me and so I decided I would just do something that made me happy and so I pulled out a thing on my favorite Superman stories because I'm I'm kind of I'm like cautiously stoked about the movie I've seen the last two or three and hated them but this one looks kind of fun so yeah.

about the movie yeah dog crypto

The dog is the one thing that makes me think it might not suck. It's a little terrier wearing a cape. It's like, OK, maybe you understand James Gunn. Maybe you kind of get it. I also really liked his other DC Comics movie, which is the Suicide Squad reboot. did it during the pandemic. So it just went straight to HBO and nobody saw it. But it's terrific. It's really funny.

the one with the giant star monster

Yes, yes, with Star O the Conqueror. Star O the Conqueror is the giant star monster's name. I have an action figure of Star O the Conqueror, but he's in the other room. But I thought I'd go over some of the things that I said were cool in the piece and then maybe add a few bonus stories in. My idea for the piece was that it would just be like a back issue dive. Like it would purely be stuff that was done in one issue and you didn't have to go through and read an entire run of whatever writer.

Speaker 1 (02:22.786)
on Action Comics in order to get the story. But this I'm going to try and make it stuff that's all in print. So the first thing I have is I have the facsimile edition, the hardcover facsimile edition, but there is a saddle stitch, like a stapled facsimile edition you can get in most comic book shops still of Superman versus Muhammad Ali, which is the coolest Superman book maybe ever. And Joe, you were saying you're a big fan of this one too.

When I was a kid, I couldn't wait. Can't recall. Okay. know what year was this?

So you knew it was coming out.

Speaker 1 (02:53.23)
78

Well, Jimmy Carter. Right, is that yeah.

public personality because he's featured on the star studded wraparound cover of the assembled to watch Kal-El of Krypton and Muhammad Ali beat the snot out of each other. I forgot it was to save the universe, right?

Yeah, absolutely. They have to fight each other and and Muhammad Ali wins, obviously. It's a it's Jimmy and Rosalind both on the cover there. The one thing I one reason I bought this like fancy facsimile is if there's a key in the back that tells you about every like a bunch of comics artists have tried to like send up this cover, but it's kind of Neil Adams masterpiece because he has it's a it's a huge book.

You guys can't see it, but it's like printed at tabloid size and he has drawn in like everyone he knows into the background there. There's Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, Sonny Bono, Batman and Lex Luthor all on the front row. Yeah. And there's little Easter eggs. There's some,

Speaker 2 (04:00.482)
love Sonny Bono.

Speaker 1 (04:05.258)
I mean mildly like shocking Easter eggs if you're into the DC Comics history of the moment because there's the DC publisher Jeanette Kahn who can be seen like right kind of like in the middle of the lower left-hand quadrant. She's a lady with red hair and next to her Neil Adams the artist has drawn himself because he was dating her at the time. They were living together. I got to interview him before he died and he was a trip but he was a really cool guy and amazing talent.

They made kind of an awesome couple because she was a wonderful force at DC Comics too. She was the first woman to run it and she kind of, when she took over, they had this, like a lot of the old DC Comics guys whose work had been censored in the 50s, they sort of washed up wherever they could find work. And this guy, Joe Orlando, who was an amazing horror comics artist and who had drawn the story that actually put an end.

to EC Comics about a black astronaut. He was an editor at DC and when they heard that they were getting a children's book editor to come in and take over the entire shooting match, which is what Jeanette Kahn was before, actually children's magazine editor, that's what Jeanette Kahn had done before she started in DC Comics. He legendarily like just threw up. That was how horrified he was, but she was great.

she like they honored him like he's the he's the only person besides Dave Givens to have done art inside uh inside Watchmen there's like one page that Joe Orlando got to do was like an homage to his older work yeah but I have sorry

That's the kind of boys club it was though, that's the of boys club-

Speaker 1 (05:40.888)
Yes, so I'm interspersing these with other books I haven't recommended and this one is the Superman vs Wonder Woman which is awesome. This is from the same series as Superman vs Muhammad Ali. It's the All New Collector's Edition.

another giant sized book, wide at least, twice the size of a normal comic book

Yes, yeah. It's so crazy.

And it's, yeah, as Joe says, it's vast. has beautiful art by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez in it. Good, great story by Jerry Conway. And it's just like, a lot of this stuff is very much for kids. And that's kind of how I like Superman. I feel like when Superman gets too serious and the question is, you know, well, how would he really use his powers for good? What if there was a moral quandary that Superman couldn't find his way out of? I feel like you've moved on to something else that I'm...

not interested in as a reader of Superman comics. Your mileage may vary. Not everyone feels that way, but I certainly do. and speaking of people who have that take on Superman, I did put a John Byrne issue on my list. This is from, this is Action Comics Annual Number One. They had actually never done an annual until the middle of the eighties. But Byrne is like a little bit of a weirdo about Superman, which I think maybe a lot of us are. I know I am, but he had a whole theory about Superman's powers.

Speaker 1 (06:57.038)
where he had to like, he was like, no, no, no, they're psionic powers. They come from like a sort of like a psychic powered sheath that goes over his body. And that's like his heat vision is just him letting off extra energy from that. And that's the only way Superman makes sense. And he had a long like argument with people in the, the, in like in the letter columns of a fanzine. And then he got to write Superman for years on the strength of his argument.

Which tells you a lot about the comic book industry.

Nerds arguing about Superman.

I just, John, he can fly. He doesn't make sense. That's just not a thing he does. That's his whole deal. Is not making sense.

He has laser beams that come out of his mouth.

Speaker 1 (07:43.414)
not going to be able to iron that one out in terms of particle physics. This one is another of my favorites. This is a more recent one. This is Superman the Space Age by Mark Russell, a contemporary writer whom I just adore, and Mike Alred, who I think is

absolutely awesome. His stuff is kind of Lichtenstein inflected. He does like great big bend a dots in his drawings sometimes, but it's a very cool, like you read it and you're like, is this like a parallel universe story? And the answer is no, but like in a really unexpected way, like this is not the Superman you're used to. He lives through a lot of real world problems in a way that is somehow not offensive to me as a person who doesn't want to see Superman face real world problems. And yeah, the art is great and it's, it's fun.

And then I have... Yeah, so this is Superman Annual Number 9, which I like a lot. It's got one of those ridiculous titles that doesn't make sense, you know, that only made sense 50 years ago, but it's called Villain Villain Who's Got the Villain. That's a reference to something. I don't care. The art is by this guy Alex Toth, who is just shockingly gifted.

He invented he invented Scott McLeod space angel. Which is an ancient cartoon. He did the art.

I didn't know that. I knew he did Space Ghost and I knew he did, he did a bunch of stuff, man. He did like Johnny Quest. Yeah, he was, but no, he was at Hanna Barbera for a while. Yeah, he, as with Orlando washing up at DC Comics, Toth was like legendarily hard to get along with. And he just kind of showed up on the doorstep at Ruby Spears Animation, which is a funny place because they're known for kind of legendarily shitty.

Speaker 1 (09:26.058)
animation like the you know it's like the they always have like the repeating backgrounds and the you know the the reused cells and everything but the thing is the character designs are so good they kind of carry the cartoons and the character designs are by toth they're by gil kane they're by jim woodring who does the frank books i think jack kerby did a bunch of stuff for them like there's all kinds of cool people who were involved in in in setting things up

I don't see your cargo mouth

I don't know, was that Hanna Barbera?

was the scott mcclough space angel had that but they didn't have wow they just had these little blurring color spots that would just kind of pulsate

I was gonna say they saw Clutch Cargo and they were like, that's so cool, we're gonna rip it off. Yeah, I remember Clutch Cargo. Clutch Cargo is hard to watch. Cambria Production. Okay, who am I to argue with Wikipedia? Yeah, no, God, that is a weird looking thing. My dad used to have VHSs of Clutch Cargo because he remembered it from when he was a kid. And as I do with my son, he was like...

Speaker 2 (10:07.928)
the

Speaker 2 (10:13.698)
It was Cambria Productions.

Speaker 1 (10:29.536)
I bet you'll like this. Let's watch it together. And after a few minutes, we were both like, man, this is weird and uncomfortable. For people who don't know what we're talking about, had like, they somehow they had, they would do like a still image of the head of the cartoon character, but to make the mouth move, there would be like a cutout and just like a moving blob that vaguely resembled lips. Really, really weird.

and it was weird it's creepy and if you're a fan of Conan O'Brien they used to do yes a desk piece where there would be a big TV screen and it would be Bill Clinton's head with the mouth cut out and somebody behind it so yeah yeah it was very disturbing and very funny they called those clutch they called those clutch cargo

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:14.254)
That was it.

Cargo yeah, yeah, no, I am I love Conan I think Conan is responsible or you know It's his fault that I think a lot of the things I think are funny today are funny. let's see Yeah, no is amazing the interrupter shows up it's

is Kennedy Center of

Speaker 2 (11:35.584)
Yes, it's probably the last one of the last significant things that happened at the Kennedy Center.

Yeah, before Civil War II. let's see. Okay, so the other another cool one this and this is from my this is not from the piece. This is Superman 400. This one is a little on the pricey side when you find it's like $10- $15, but it's really cool. And it's a jam book, which is a thing that I absolutely love to pick up a bunch of different artists. Yeah. And then then if there's people who like don't want to do a full like sequence, they'll have them do a pinup. So there are pinups by Jack.

the

It is Little Orphanage riding on Superman's back and Superman is holding the dog, I forget the dog's name.

Yeah, I forget the dog's name too. but there's also just like, if there are people whose work is not that who aren't that prolific, who signed on to do this, like there's a Bernie Wrightson pin up, there's four or five pages by Frank Miller, there's four or five pages by Jim Steranko, just like a lot of really cool artists who suddenly showed up to do that.

Speaker 2 (12:52.408)
Bernie writes and doing Superman, that's wild.

It's a great, it's a pin up. There's a Will Eisner page too. But it's just him punching through the wall. I'm gonna send Oh, and he looks creepy. Yeah, looks creepy, absolutely. Absolutely, it's a Bernie Wrightson drawing.

the

You

Speaker 1 (13:21.91)
Yeah, the creator of the swamp.

And is the Superman contribution by Jack Kirby, does that include his face or did they redraw the face? They hated the way.

because I'm sorry. Oh, the Kirby. Oh, yeah, I believe the Kirby is. I believe it's all Jack. Yeah, let's check this out here. My favorite is the issue of oh, and that's one that I don't have a copy of on hand. That's worth talking about, too. So I mentioned Commandy, the last boy on Earth, number 29 in my piece.

And that's the one where Commandy discovers Superman's costume and then is like inspired to do good by it. But no, I believe the face is, I think that's all Jack. Yeah, it's, but no, they used to have Kurt Swan redraw the faces of- Kurt Swan. And I love Kurt Swan. You were saying, we had our email exchange, were talking about Kryptonite Nevermore, which you like.

Yeah, and I don't remember what number that was of comics. was this guy, Denny O'Neil, came up with this idea that all of a sudden, kryptonite, the one thing that can kill Superman, would be rendered useless. so Superman was ultimately powerful, but apparently it turned out that whatever thing had caused kryptonite to be rendered useless created this rift in the adult dimensional rift. But the fun part of it was it created a doppelganger, which was sucking Superman's energy.

Speaker 2 (14:45.566)
Superman was getting weaker and weaker. And this is where we get into my thing that I bore everybody with, which is middle-aged Superman, my dream of middle-aged Superman. That is the real Superman. right now, quite frankly, Jon Hamm would be the perfect middle-aged

John-Him would be such a good Superman. don't I don't understand. Yes

And the great part about this whole thing was Superman is there's an episode where he's got a this goes over multiple episodes and there's an episode where Lois Lane got into trouble with some with some bad guys and he had to go savor and he was really mad and he was really grumpy because he couldn't fly anymore he could only leave and his powers were like getting weaker and weaker so he was a middle-aged man he was losing his powers and and it was just hilarious I loved it and he had to keep improvising and keep compensating for his increasing weak

And those are the powers that Superman was conceived with originally right like he couldn't initially fly He could leap tall buildings in a single bound, but he couldn't just fucking fly over one I don't think I put this in the piece when Superman first came out when action comics one debuted the cover of the famous covers and I have one of these on my desk the Mattel company has recently made a little green coupe with with with Joe Schuster s

There it is, there's a little-

Speaker 1 (16:07.336)
Esque Speed Lines, yeah, it's a Hot Wheels car with Joe Schuster shading painted on it that Superman lifts up in the on the cover of Action Comics number one. And when Harry Donenfeld, the publisher of then national publication, saw that he freaked out. He was like, we can't we can't. This is ridiculous. Like people can't lift cars. That's absurd. Absolute nonsense. We're going to like no one's going to buy this. And so for the next six issues.

He like, by decree from the publisher, they did not put Superman on the cover. And then they did a reader poll and were like, so what's your favorite comic? And the guys were like, and the kids were like, we don't know what it's called, but it's the one with Superman in it. So then Superman appeared on every cover after that. Another fun one that I don't get to talk about enough, and this is being reissued in a cool deluxe edition is Superman's pal, Jimmy Olsen, who killed Jimmy Olsen.

The Jack Kirby stuff is kind of legendary because it's part of the fourth world. It is, my opinion, the weakest of the fourth world books. It's my least favorite Jack Kirby thing. Yeah, they for yeah.

them to take it yeah they forced him to take the title so that he could do the cool stuff that he wanted to do

Yeah, and the cool stuff is much better.

Speaker 2 (17:23.182)
Non-nerds must know that Jimmy Olsen is the cub reporter for the daily planet. Yes, Superman's pal

Well, and he was kind of, he's sort of a Robin figure where he's someone for the kids to sympathize with. And I love old, like, Silver Age Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen comics because they do crazy shit to him, turn him into a turtle.

Yeah, they would always they would always torture him. I'm green

Yes, yeah. There's a very funny Superman pastiche called Supreme. Well, it's usually not funny, but then they gave it to Alan Moore for two years and he took it over and he made it into kind of a comedy book. he basically writes all of the pre-crisis Superman stories that he was going to write. There's a big event in DC Comics continuity where they merged everything together called Crisis on Infinite Earths.

and

Speaker 2 (18:23.928)
Again everybody Alan Moore is a famous writer who wrote the Watchmen series and he hates superheroes

But he used to love superheroes and he used to write really... Well, I think I think I love Alan Moore. His theory of superheroes is that the second you put them in a kind of real world scenario, you have to deal with the problem of abuse of power because you cannot have a perfect person ever. And that's kind of the idea of Superman is that he's like a perfect guy who never does anything wrong.

gateway to fascism

Speaker 1 (19:00.374)
And so I think that's like a reasonable take. But the funny thing is that in the mid 90s, he was like, okay, well, let's do just a completely ridiculous take on Superman. And it's really funny. The Jimmy Olsen character is, I've forgotten his name, but he's a very serious British comic book writer who always tries to make things grim and gritty and realistic. And he's forever being turned into like increasingly absurd Silver Age variations on himself.

So it's a very funny piece of self-criticism. Those are really hard to find, the Supreme Comics, but they're super good if you get a chance to pick them up. Wow. Actually, so he wrote what I consider the last Superman story, which is called Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow. And it's a two-parter. It was the final issue of Superman and the final pre-crisis issue of Action Comics from, I think, And he brings everything that they got rid of.

is in these two issues. Bizarro is there, Mr. McChish-Pedlic, who's the fifth dimensional imp. yeah, the dog dies a heroic death. It's devastating.

the dog.

Speaker 2 (20:10.52)
The dog I don't know like my my recollection of the dog is that he had he had an internal monologue. I mean he he Bubbles right? Yeah, like you know

Crypto? yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:23.874)
Yeah, he's like Snowy in the Tin Tin comics, think. Snowy, he's always like kind of smarter than Tin Tin. The other thing, so everybody loves Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which is a really good, like, I think it's a little more of a polemic than it is like an actual like instructive text, but I think it's really good.

I'm not related to him, my name is McLeod, just FYI. I'm not related

And he spells his name MCC L O U D

Home of Cloud knows how to spell their own last name.

No, think that's just generally an Irish thing. Amazing. I'm German, so we've lost several of the letters are lost in translation. That's critical marks. Give us our leather. Yeah, give us leather and flags and we're happy. But not really. No, kidding. Not really. No straight people are allowed to have leather and flags anymore because of the Germans. The fun thing about Scott McLeod is that he

Speaker 1 (21:24.014)
One of many fun things about Scott McAuliffe is that he wrote a year's worth of the Superman Adventures, which was the animated spin-off of the 1996 TV show. And during this period, the comics were deep in what they call now the Triangle Era, where every single Superman comic had to tie into every other Superman comic, basically so that they would run as like a weekly story. This was a good idea in theory. In practice, it meant that a different art

and a different writer was doing every episode, like every fourth episode of a serialized piece. And it ended up being kind of a huge mess and really hard to keep track of. When the animated series launched, when Batman the Animated Series came out and Superman the Animated Series followed, the tie-in comics are kind of the best stuff that's being done with the characters by DC Comics at that time because the universes are all streamlined.

They're all cut way down just so that the kids can understand what's going on on TV and can read about the characters who are written and drawn in the same way in their comics.

in the animated series was wildly successful.

Yes, yes. Batman the animated series was crazy. I mean, it was successful enough to launch Superman the animated series and the comic book when the Marvel started doing its animated series, their comics are just adaptations of the episodes. They're just like straightforward, like here's what we did. But this they were like, no, we're going to hire interesting people to tell stories in these worlds. And the Batman adventures are great, but the Superman Superman adventures are for my money even better. And there's a wonderful story in this, a sort of time running backwards story.

Speaker 1 (22:58.286)
called Cyanamod written by Scott McCloud and drawn by Rick Burchett. It's just really, really cleverly done and it's good science fiction and it ends exactly the way it's supposed to. Just like the kind of thing you would want to read if you were a kid and wanted to spend 30 minutes with a comic. So there's a couple others I want to get to here. boy. Heft the giant...

Listeners, he just pulled out a giant stack of books.

I'll keep it to three. I'll keep it to three. first is we were talking about Alan Moore and whatever happened to the Man of Tomorrow. His most famous Superman story is called For the Man Who Has Everything. It's a great story about Superman getting a magic birthday present from a supervillain. But he has visions of being

on Krypton with his family still because the magic birthday present is like, drains his life force while it gives him, while it makes him think he's getting his heart's desire. So as he fights it, his fantasy of being on Krypton goes like more and more sour.

and it's weirdly i don't think people understand what a direct commentary on the british politics of the era it is but here's what they basically jor-el joins the national front like the kryptonian equivalent of the nf and there's this like they go marching through the streets like you know like the nf goons did in the uk and

Speaker 2 (24:39.256)
friends, non-nerd listener friends, Jor-El is a s-

Superman's dad. Yes. So but that's

is a planet that was destroyed which

Yes, Krypton's Superman's Home Planet.

That's like the the English Empire crumbled.

Speaker 1 (24:54.646)
Yes. Leaving its sole survivor to write Superman comics. yeah, so that's a really, I mean, and then it's like an optimistic Superman story that ends on a high note, which is just the way things go with Superman. But the last two I want to show you, no, I'm going to make it three, I'm sorry. Secret Identity by Kurt Busiek and Stuart Amonan, which is wonderful. put...

Kurt's collaboration with Walt Simonson from Superman 666, which is called The Beast from Krypton. If you get the 666 issues of Superman and Batman comics, they all have kind of like biblical revelation.

and the one you cite in your piece on flaming hydra is superman number six

Yes, yeah, the batman 666 is worth getting to But yeah, this is this is set in the you know, supposedly real world and is a like Superman is the only superhero. It's like a sort of a I mean, they're all imaginary stories, but it's not part of the shared universe and it's really cool and well done the last two are kryptonite

Was he the only superhero because he killed all the

Speaker 1 (26:07.374)
No, no, we're not doing any of those god damn it That's so many people have done the story where Superman goes crazy and kills everybody because that's what happens with ultimate power and I hate them I hate them He's a man who can fly. We've already established that it's not the real world

Yeah

Yes, it's just if you do that, it's because you want to do it. It's not because it would be realistic because we're not being realistic in a Superman comic. No, this is Kryptonite by Darwin Cook and Tim Sale. And Darwin Cook, I'm very sorry he's passed away. He was a really cool cartoonist. He was a good writer too. And Tim Sale was, he also passed actually more recently. And this is just an amazing piece of work. It ran in Superman Confidential, which was a kind of like anthology.

series for a while. It anthologized short stories across multiple issues as opposed to being one ongoing story that never ended or an anthology of a bunch of shorts. And he has so much cool stuff. can like the Kryptonite when you see Kryptonite, which is the, you know, the radioactive mineral that kills Superman, it's a little off register, which makes it look like it's radiating. Like the colors are not quite in the lines of the drawing.

I'm holding up the page and I can see that it's very...

Speaker 1 (27:30.272)
Yeah, joke and confirm this. Yeah

printing mistake it just no

But what it does is it looks like printing mistakes of yore. And the last one I'm going to show off is Superman Birthright by Mark Wade and Lano Francis Yu. There's a lot of different Superman origin books out there. Some of them are quite bad. Sometimes when they're like, we're going to revamp Superman for the whatever era. sometimes they hire a...

like an artist who can't write or sometimes they decide that they're gonna tie it into every other book DC Comics is publishing. This is my favorite. It ran as a 12-issue maxi series. it's like, it's the length of a short novel. It's beautiful art, beautiful writing, and Wade is just somebody who loves and understands the idea of Superman as an especially good guy, like the best of the good guys and somebody that you turn to when it seems like the problems are insoluble, who can find a solution.

Well, and it's got to be good because you know, you are a critical reader. I hate Superman origin stories. You hate most of the Superman movies that spend all their time with Superman's origin. Yeah. So if you think one is good, then it's

Speaker 1 (28:43.276)
Yeah, that's the it's a particularly good one. Yeah, that's that's my strong feeling. But yeah, and I think it's it's always nice to end with the like, everybody's heard of Superman, but I feel like there's if you're like, well, what should I read? I feel like this is a good book to just kind of start you off. You like and it's fun to read. You're not having to read something that was published 80 years ago and slog through like weird political tropes and art and writing style that doesn't hold any

that's been totally unfamiliar to you so and and then you'll know who jimmy olson

I think what we're going to do is we'll update your piece and I'll just add a list today for anybody who cares to dive into this. The problem with Superman is there are so many, everything of Superman, there's thousands and thousands.

Great.

Speaker 1 (29:37.934)
It's a huge corpus.

So we do need to know what to look for.

Yeah, yeah. And as with everything, you know, it's the minority that's really, really good. But I think I can tell you where to start looking for that minority.

So how about that flaming Hydra subscribers you get a little extra? Yes. Some service some service.

You

Speaker 2 (30:20.27)
Please read the as soon as they come up with a title and.

We have a title. have a title. What's the title? DC Comics, the story of a universe. Harper One is going to be publishing it.

Perfect. I think we'll leave it there. Thank you for listening to the Flaming Hydra Roundtable, especially if you're not a nerd. And Sam, thank you. Thank you. And please subscribe to Flaming Hydra. It's three bucks a month. Amazing things to read from an insane diverse assortment of writers from...

like and subscribe.

Speaker 1 (30:53.27)
A diverse assortment of insane writers, yeah.

MUSIC: more powerful than a locomotive. To leap tall buildings in a single bound, this amazing stranger from the planet Krypton, the man of steel.

Superman! Superman fights a never-ending battle for truth and justice as a mild-mannered newspaper reporter Clark Kent

SPEAKER 2 Hey everybody, it's Joe McCloud, button pusher for the Flaming Hydra Roundtable Podcast. Urging you to visit the Flaming Hydra Superstore to secure your own copy of the All Book. Visit shop.flaminghydra.com. Shop.flaminghydra.com for the new All Book. A bazillion pages, gorgeously designed, a website in book form, supports Flaming Hydra. Shop.flaminghydra.com.