The older version of Superman,who's your favorite?

[victorsage]

I think Marv Wolfman confirmed it years ago that to be the original plan for Post-Crisis Superman prior to Byrne being hired, however I can't find the direct quote. I KNOW I've read it several times in the past.

My pick is other. Bronze Age Kal-El all the way!!! (although I really do like KAL-L and Golden Sun God Supes).

I actually think I read that on Byrne's own forum. First he told them he just wanted to work on Superman reboot or not, then management said they were gonna bring back Kal-L, then they asked him to do his own thing. If I wasn't lazy I'd try to search for it. Either way I know Byrne was heavily influenced by George Reeves, who's season 1 Superman was in the Golden Age mode before it became very kid friendly.

I could be remembering it wrong though.

[Steven Ely]

Early Golden Age Jerry Siegel Superman/Clark Kent. He had a playful sense of humor. As Clark he was a competent successful report, actually scooped Lois out of Superman stories, he got hired with a Superman interview, and he didn't always wear the same blue suit. Lois competed with him over stories, they had a playful rivalry (playful on Clark's part), Lois had a crush on Superman and had a kind of love/hate relationship with Clark. He also didn't have any mopey angst over Krypton. He didn't know he was from Krypton so there was no pining for Krypton, he didn't spend time worrying "poor me" about where he was from, he was raised secure in himself by the Kents as an American rather than feeling like a stranger in a strange land. He also wasn't totally invulnerable.

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Murray Bishoff asked in 1975: "Have you kept track of the Superman character today?"

Jerry Siegel: "I haven't watched it too closely because it's a traumatic thing for me. I have seen changes in the format and I think the change is made just for the sake of the change itself and I don't really think that it's really an advance."

Murray Bishoff: "Do you think that the way Superman comic books are today (1975), supposedly so much more sophisticated than they were in the old days, that your vision of Superman would be the proper one to go back to if you had some control?"

Jerry Siegel: "Well, if I had any say-so I should hope, I don't see why there couldn't be some editions of Superman that could follow that format. I don't think it would be harmful, it might even be helpful. They might find out the character and there might be millions of people out there who would like a simpler, direct, but very powerful version of Superman."

Murray Bishoff "You actually never had Superman being totally invulnerable."

Jerry Siegel: "No, no."

Murray Bishoff: "The robots could actually beat him down — they didn’t fall apart as soon as he walked into the room. You’d prefer a more human Superman."

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Jerry Siegel: "Well, yes, yes, and from the very beginning Superman himself had pretty much a sense of humor about the whole thing. One of the reasons why I gave him that attitude was because the whole concept in itself was such a wild, wild, wild thing, I think, I felt the only thing that would breathe any real life and believability into it was if Superman himself didn’t take the whole thing that seriously."

Joanne Siegel: "He had a sense of humor."

Jerry Siegel: "Except that he was very serious about helping people in trouble and distress, because that’s the way I felt."

Joanne Siegel: "He kidded himself, but he took crime and injustice seriously."

Jerry Siegel: "Now, it has been said that Captain Marvel had a great deal of humor in it and that Superman was absolutely humorless, but that just is not true. If you look back at the early stuff, you’ll find that Superman was kidding around quite a bit when he was tearing tanks apart and kicking airplane squadrons here and there and everywhere, and so there was a spirit of fun in the thing. And as a matter of fact, Joe and I, when we first started going into comics, we had intended to do a comedy strip, so we were very comedy-oriented and that’s why Superman did have this sort of comedy flair to it."
http://www.comicconmemories.com/2009...en-to-it-here/

[Steven Ely]

I actually think I read that on Byrne's own forum. First he told them he just wanted to work on Superman reboot or not, then management said they were gonna bring back Kal-L, then they asked him to do his own thing. If I wasn't lazy I'd try to search for it. Either way I know Byrne was heavily influenced by George Reeves, who's season 1 Superman was in the Golden Age mode before it became very kid friendly.

I could be remembering it wrong though.

Marv Wolfman explained how he had contacted John Byrne first because he knew John was going freelance and a fan of the same Superman that Marv was a fan of, the original Siegel stories, the Fleischer cartoons, etc. so they both wanted to get back closer to the same kind of Golden Age Jerry Siegel style Superman:

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And yeah, George Reeves from the Golden Age of Hollywood film and television. Clark Kent also got hired by scooping Lois out of the first Superman story in the first episode of the Adventures of Superman "Superman on Earth" (filmed in 1951, aired in 1952).

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Murray Bishoff: "Did you ever meet George Reeves?"

Joanne Siegel: "Strangely enough, long before he ever got to be Superman in television, I met George Reeves in Los Angeles, and we became very good friends, and he never knew I had posed for Lois Lane. We never talked about that. He was a bit player and a stand-in man, and he was doing movie work, and I was working in a club as a cigarette girl. I was much too young to do it, but I got away with it because when they said, 'Well, are you really that age?' I’d say, 'You want to see my birth certificate?' And they’d say, 'Well, all right. Never mind.' (Laughs) And I don’t know if they’d asked me to show it what I would have done, but you know, when you need a job, you have to be gutsy, I guess. And we became very good friends. George Reeves was like a brother to me, and he used to stop in every night, and we talked and we became very good friends. And then, years later, he became Superman on television, and it was strange because I had posed (as Lois) and he never knew that."

Jerry Siegel: "And then there was a strange experience where my wife and I were walking down the streets of New York one day, and walking right towards us was George Reeves, the fella who portrayed Superman on television."
http://www.comicconmemories.com/2009...en-to-it-here/

And Jerry Siegel explained on Superman: The Comic Strip Hero documentary (1981), "Superman stands for exactly the motto that they've used on the television show - Truth, Justice and the American Way. A very clean cut guy who could have ruled the world and is powerful, but instead he uses his powers to aid the helpless and deserving rather than to exploit them."



But all that Golden Age Jerry Siegel, Fleischer, George Reeves influence only lasted Post-Crisis from 1986-1988 until Marv Wolfman and John Byrne left. Marv left the comic in 1987 and worked on the 1988 Ruby-Spears Superman cartoons. John left in 1988. Except for one flashback in "Crisis at Hand" (1992) by Louise Simonson of Superman remembering fighting the wife beater in Action #1 by Jerry Siegel, showing that it still hand happened.

[DieHard200904]

I liked Kingdom Come, but that's probably the fact that he was painted with detail by Alex Ross, as well as sometimes making me think I was watching a movie. He also seemed to be modeled after Golden Age Superman too.