SUPERMAN Comics FAQ

[Kal26]

will do. Thanks for your help.

[Bizzaro1975]

More of a SuperBoy Question

Can someone hlpe me find this comic. As a kid growing up i read a lot fo superman and superboy comics. There were two particular issues of superboy i had been looking for since i grew up. One was when superboy gets turned into a merman and cannot live on land. I did end up finding that comic book and it brought back fond memories from my child hood. I am still looking for another issue.
The story from what i recall was that superboy has created a bunch of superbot robots to help him fight crime and cover for him while he is at school etc. Anyway somehow or the other they all have his powers but they start malfunctioning. He ends up having them follow him into the sun which in turn destroys them.
If anyone knows which superboy comic book issue this is i woulod appreciate that. Also I am not talking about superboy from the aftermath of supermans fight with doomsday. Im talking about superboy before he became superman.
thanks

Anyone know how i can find this comic book digest. Back when i was a child they also had superman digest with a whole bunch of superman stories packed into one book. There was one i really liked in which Lex Luthor ends up killing superman. Anyone know which one this would be. I believe the digest's were taken from original individual comics books and all packed into one book.
Only image i recall form the digest is superman laying in lex's lab or something and he places the kryptonite on supermand and superman i believe is completely restraint.
I would love to get a hold of that comic book. Any help you can provide would be appreciated. IM talking about superman in the early to mid 80s maybe. atleast thats when i read it.

[zelly]

As I'm reading through various sections of K-site SV sections I've come across a few things that obviously have to do with the comics and I have no idea WTH they mean.

The first is Golden Age, Silver Age and Bronze Age. I have absolutely nom idea what this means.

A common thing I hear when people talk about various smallville things they use the Superman mythos to back it up. They often use post-crisis and pre-crisis. What do these refer too?

[dsv100]

Fans find it useful to divide up the history of Superman comics, due to how the comics are different from one era to the next.

Golden Age comics start with the comics of the 1930s, when the character Superman was not well-established, and the creators of the myth were making it up as they went along.

Not all fans agree on where the line between Golden Age and Silver Age comics should be drawn, but the comics of the 1950s and 1960s are roughly the Silver Age. The silly stories and characters from this period were quite popular and remain important concepts in Superman today. The different flavors of kryptonite are a good example of what the Silver Age means thematically for Superman. So were the various Super-Pets. While it's fine to expand out the legend of Superman and reveal new stuff, it got out of hand having a zoo of animals with Superman's strength and a whole rainbow of kryptonites.

Bronze Age comics are ... probably of less importance to the novice fan except that you should know that the stories got more "serious" -- they dialed back the more silly qualities of Silver Age comics, starting in the late '60s and early '70s. They relied less on kryptonite in this period. The antics of the Super-Pets fell out of favor.

You also ask about Crisis: all the stuff I describe above is pre-Crisis, which means it was published before 1985. At that time, Superman (and other DC characters) needed to be overhauled, at least according to DC's editors, so they rebooted Superman. Rather than simply shift focus away from one type of story and start telling different stories about Superman, as they had done when the Golden Age became the Silver Age and that became the Bronze Age, DC wiped clean Superman's history and started fresh, as if there had never been a Superman before.

Thus, the Post-Crisis Superman (and his Lex Luthor, and his boyhood adventures in Smallville) differs quite a bit from the Pre-Crisis Superman. They're like two different characters, thus requiring the two names for clarity's sake. I could go into what the "Crisis" was, and I could describe what differentiates the Pre- from the Post- versions, but you can google these things, if you're interested enough. I hope this explanation makes things clearer for you for now.

[mvblacnyte]

Originally posted by dsv100

Not all fans agree on where the line between Golden Age and Silver Age comics should be drawn, but the comics of the 1950s and 1960s are roughly the Silver Age. The silly stories and characters from this period were quite popular and remain important concepts in Superman today. The different flavors of kryptonite are a good example of what the Silver Age means thematically for Superman. So were the various Super-Pets. While it's fine to expand out the legend of Superman and reveal new stuff, it got out of hand having a zoo of animals with Superman's strength and a whole rainbow of kryptonites.

The thing you forgot here is the novel idea that DC had to fix the discrepancies in continuity between the golden age and silver age. As it turns out, everything that happened in the golden age (through WWII and the 1940's and very early 50's) became Earth 2 events, and everything after that became Earth 1 events. That way, they were able to have the original, Golden Age Superman existing in comics at the same time as the Silver Age Superman. The two different Supermen met and fought alongside each other on many occasions.

There's quite a bit more to the whole Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Modern Age, post-pre-Crisis, pre-post-Infinite Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis-post-Crisis, yada yada yada, but it's been discussed in many other threads in extremely great depth.

[dsv100]

Well, you can say I forgot if you want to, but I rather think zelly's post didn't require an explanation of Earth-2 Superman and Earth-1 Superman. So much of the time, non-comics-fans will ask simple questions and get very detailed replies from comics-fans that are not useful, because the asker then needs to sift through the irrelevant details to get to the information he or she was asking about in the first place. I try to avoid that. By saying so, I don't mean to put you down because you did define the terms Earth-1 and Earth-2, I'm just saying why I didn't.

[zelly]

Thanks for that. I'm not really into comics as such but have been looking a little into the superman comic universe since it comes up alot in Smallville discussion threads. Now that I have the basics I'll probably start looking into it more in depth now, thanks again .

[Omniblast]

Is it illegal to discuss torrent downloads of Infinite Crisis? If so please remove this post.

[ducky]

question: what changes to the timeline affecting superman did the crisis make? like what major events no longer happened etc...

[mvblacnyte]

Originally posted by ducky
question: what changes to the timeline affecting superman did the crisis make? like what major events no longer happened etc...

Answer: Check my reply to your similar question under the DC Universe FAQ. It's the same answer.

[ducky]

Originally posted by mvblacnyte
Answer: Check my reply to your similar question under the DC Universe FAQ. It's the same answer.

okay fine. then i have a new question. how do they explain all the different storylines in each of the different superman comics?

(Superman, Action Comics, JLA, etc...)

also, what happens if he has a life changing event in one? (like a divorce for example), he is then divorced in all of them?

[mvblacnyte]

Originally posted by ducky
okay fine. then i have a new question. how do they explain all the different storylines in each of the different superman comics?

(Superman, Action Comics, JLA, etc...)

also, what happens if he has a life changing event in one? (like a divorce for example), he is then divorced in all of them?

All of he storylines in Action, Superman, JLA, and I think now Superman Confidential are all in-continuity. While these stories are often self-contained and don't affect one another, anything that happens in any of them is considered canon. So if Superman were to get divorced in one, he'd be divorced in all of them. (Except Confidential, which seems to be kind of a year-one, in the past series). All of these titles are in the DCU, which means that not only would the things be true in all the Superman comics, they'd be true in all DC Comics period. If Green Lantern appeared in a Superman comic and had his eyes gouged out, he'd be blind in his own comic as well. All the mainstream titles in the DCU are supposed to interweave with one another, forming an overall universe and maintaining a fairly consistent past-present-future history.

Stories that are OUT of continuity are the Johnny DC titles (JLU, etc.) and the All-Star titles. These are not considered to be a part of the overall DCU.

[greenlanternfan828]

who is supermans son jason or conner? whats the origin of connor? and whats the story behind superman and wonder womans son? and do they have all of supes powers or not they'd have them right some people say that the powers would fade away after a few generations but wouldnt the powers be resesive genes or dominent genes to where his desendants either have or dont have the powers? please help

[Backward Galaxy]

Jason is the son of Superman and Lois Lane in the movie continuity spawned by Bryan Singer's Superman Returns. The character of Jason does NOT appear in the comic books. Nearest we can tell as of right now, Jason has some of Superman's powers (at least Superman's strength), but it has not been made clear which abilities he possesses and/or how he is able to control them.

Conner Kent is a comic book character. Courtesy of Wikipedia:

Superboy (also known as Conner Kent or Kon-El) is a fictional superhero in the DC Comics Universe. He is a hybrid clone of Superman and his archnemesis Lex Luthor.

Superboy's origins start with Project: Superman, which is the Superman cloning project originally intended to recreate the Man of Steel. Due to the inability to replicate Kryptonian DNA, the clones' bodies degenerate after a short period of time.[1] Upon Superman's death,[2] the project is reinstated in secrecy in conjunction with Lex Luthor and Cadmus Labs to replace the fallen hero. After 12 documented attempts at recreating a Superman, human DNA, secretly that of Lex Luthor, is partially used to stabilize the Kryptonian DNA and the result: Superboy, the first successful clone of Superman.

For more information about this character, see Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conner_Kent

The idea that Superman's powers would fade away after generations has to do with Superman having children with humans or other species of women who are NOT Kryptonian. In other words, as Superman's descendants moved further away from the Man of Steel himself, the DNA and genetics of the other people in their family would dilute how much of Superman's own genetics were passed down. This is why you share more in common genetically with your father than with your great great great grandfather. There are simply more people contributing to your genetic makeup between you and your great great great grandfather than there are between you and your father (in point of fact, the only other person would be your mother).

The argument that Superman's genes would be dominant... I'm not sure where that came from. It could be in a comic book storyline that I am unfamiliar with or am forgetting. I don't know if it has any basis in fact as far as preserving his genetic hand-me-downs. Maybe someone else can better handle that one.

I don't know much about Wonder Woman and Superman having a child. I do know that Kingdom Come ends with Superman and Wonder Woman having a child, with Batman being the godfather. Batman suggests that they name the child "Bruce", but later on, Wonder Woman admits that the child could be a "she". So, we don't know if it's a son or not. I'm told there was a sequel to Kingdom Come... one that failed... and then one that sorta happened maybe? I dunno. I heard it wasn't very good, so I never bothered reading it and so I don't know if THAT story elaborated on the child at all.

[ducky]

Originally posted by mvblacnyte
All of he storylines in Action, Superman, JLA, and I think now Superman Confidential are all in-continuity. While these stories are often self-contained and don't affect one another, anything that happens in any of them is considered canon. So if Superman were to get divorced in one, he'd be divorced in all of them. (Except Confidential, which seems to be kind of a year-one, in the past series). All of these titles are in the DCU, which means that not only would the things be true in all the Superman comics, they'd be true in all DC Comics period. If Green Lantern appeared in a Superman comic and had his eyes gouged out, he'd be blind in his own comic as well. All the mainstream titles in the DCU are supposed to interweave with one another, forming an overall universe and maintaining a fairly consistent past-present-future history.

Stories that are OUT of continuity are the Johnny DC titles (JLU, etc.) and the All-Star titles. These are not considered to be a part of the overall DCU.

I kinda hate that. I liked it back in the 90s. Only one story line going at a time. Now each time I pick up a new Superman comic I gotta remember what happened in that title last month...