If you fol­low comics news at all, you’ve prob­a­bly heard there’s this big reboot that DC Comics is doing in Sep­tem­ber. They’re start­ing all their books over from #1, redesign­ing all the char­ac­ters and redo­ing their ori­gins. You can’t assume now that you know any­thing for sure about who they are, their moti­va­tions or the over­all scenario.

I’m not going to get into com­men­tary on that here (there’s been plen­ty of that already in oth­er places online). But I’ll admit the idea of the retire­ment of the orig­i­nal char­ac­ters has me think­ing back on them a bit wist­ful­ly. Though tech­ni­cal­ly a child of comics’ sil­ver and bronze ages, I’ve always had a fas­ci­na­tion with the gold­en age era too. Despite the fact that work was often a bit crude in com­par­i­son to what came lat­er, there was a cer­tain life and raw ener­gy to those ear­ly incar­na­tions of the characters.

It’s a lot eas­i­er to lay hands on gold­en age comics sto­ries now. Back when I was a kid, most­ly you just got to read about them (in books like Ster­anko’s His­to­ry of Comics, or All in Col­or for a Dime). If you could lay hands on one of DC’s 100-Page Super-Spec­tac­u­lars though, you knew you were in for a rare treat.

Like I say, I’ve long had a soft spot for these ear­ly, pri­mal ver­sions of char­ac­ters like Super­man (the proof is at left; a scan of a fake gold­en age cov­er I did when I was about 12 or 13). And with the DC reboot com­ing, I thought I’d revis­it the orig­i­nal Super­man once again. The new image up top could’ve gone in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent direc­tions, but what I wound up hon­ing in on is a Shus­ter-esque ver­sion, posed more for­mal­ly. It’s been tak­en in the direc­tion of vin­tage poster art from an even ear­li­er era. Because that seemed like a fun idea at the time.

Just my salute to the gold­en age in gen­er­al, and the orig­i­nal Super­man in par­tic­u­lar. Thanks very much, Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster!

UPDATE: I recent­ly dis­cov­ered online these neat Super­man pages, drawn by Stew­art Immo­nen some years back. Done in the style of Win­sor McCay’s “Lit­tle Nemo,” they’re not entire­ly unre­lat­ed to what I’m try­ing to do here with this poster. I thought these were real­ly neat, and worth shar­ing. It’s fun­ny how well Super­man works in a style like this!