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Before I leave childhood behind and push forward with these reminiscences, I want to tell you about some Superman stories I read while growing up. It's not exactly a list of favorites. But, for one reason or another, the following made an indelible impression.

Worlds Finest #110 1. World's Finest #110, June 1960. Fan that you are, you probably remember your first comic. You remember the magnetic pull, the lip-smacking anticipation of making the thing your own. I certainly do.

I was four years old. We were shopping in a grocery store in Findlay, Ohio. I was sitting in the child's seat of the shopping cart. Suddenly, I glanced up and saw a rack of... well, what were they? At four, I didn't know the term "comic book." I didn't even know the eastern Kentucky variant, "funnybook." There were these colorful pamphlets placed neatly before me. I can't tell you now what any of them looked like. I only had eyes for the one depicting a dynamic figure in red and blue. I didn't know who the other characters - one garbed in gray and black, the other in red and yellow - were. But thanks to George Reeves, whom I'd seen on TV, I knew Superman when I saw him.

I pointed, excited. I was on the brink of flying myself! "The book, Mommy," I cried. "I want the book!"

Mom, distracted as she usually was, casually replied, "What book, Honey?"

"The Superman book! I want the Superman book!"

Well, she looked around and saw the comic for herself. I don't recall any hesitation on her part. After all, at least another year would go by before her son would burst through the kitchen window in imitation of the creature on the cover of this book he wanted so badly. Thank goodness she apparently wasn't bothered by the sight of the green octopussy-looking monster that shared that cover with Superman, Batman, and Robin. It's a good thing she didn't hesitate. Looking back, I believe I was on the verge of hysteria. I doubt I was ever more excited about the prospect of getting anything like I was that comic. Indeed, nothing in all the world has ever excited me like Superman.

I don't remember whether either of my parents read it to me. It would be a couple years before I could read the story for myself. By that time, that particular funnybook was lost. Many years later, I bought a copy of World's Finest #110 at a convention. The lead story isn't bad. The Dick Sprang artwork is appealing. One panel shows Batman in an agony of fear for his dying Robin. You can almost feel the emotion.

Of course, at the time, I had no interest in Batman, Robin, or Dick Sprang. I cared only for the man in blue. I've read plenty of other comics with varying degrees of interest, but I'm always drawn back to Superman. As Steve Englehart wrote in a different context, "There are many risings and advancings of the spirit."

Superman #149 #2. Superman #149, November 1961. I was in the first grade. I rode the school bus that winding, hilly, seven mile-route home. There I found a present waiting for me from Mrs. Keeney, the nice neighbor lady whose husband had built our house. I don't remember Mrs. Keeney's first name, but I do remember her husband's. Shirley. (I am serious - and don't call me Shirley.) Or maybe it was Shurley. Anyway, Shirley's wife surely had no notion of what this innocuous looking funnybook would do to me. For this, my friends, was truly the Superman story to end all Superman stories, Jerry Siegel's The Death of Superman.

I don't need to retell it here. (Wallace Harrington has a fine review elsewhere on the Homepage.) The two pages that struck me most depict the slow procession of mourners by the striking glass bier. At six, I'd never experienced death. It would be years before anyone I knew died. In a way, I suppose, those two pages did me a valuable service in showing what grief looks like. As rendered by Curt Swan, the pain in the faces of Lois Lane, Supergirl, and others is palpable.

The differences between this one issue story and the multi-issue trilogy that appeared three decades later are striking. The latter tale was hyped for months before it finally appeared. Superman #149, however, arrived without fanfare, without warning. It took a slew of writers to tell what Jerry Siegel told and an army of artists to draw what Curt Swan and Stan Kaye drew. In contrast to the battle royal between Superman and Doomsday that filled several issues, there's not a single punch thrown in its predecessor. Superman isn't the mighty pugilist there; he's a helpless victim, as much of his own naiveté as Luthor's Kryptonite rays. Add to the list the fact that the old Superman comics were read primarily by children - impressionable, emotional children who, like me, had little knowledge or experience of death and you have a recipe for impact the latter version, for all its qualities, simply can't match.

As far as I'm concerned, Superman only died once - tragically, the victim of his own goodness; violently, as heroes often do; painfully, for him and for a whole bunch of little kids. Believe me, once was enough. With "The Death of Superman," Mort Weisinger's concept of the Imaginary story reached its peak. Reading it, a little boy was brought to tears. The story still touches me. To paraphrase Marc Antony, "Bear with me. My heart is in the coffin there with Superman. And I must pause till it comes back to me."

Lois Lane #64 3. Lois Lane #s 64-65, April-May 1966. The road is narrow and winding. The afternoon sky is gray. The ten-year-old boy is getting a bumpy ride on the school bus, but he doesn't notice. He's lost in a story. He doesn't know who wrote it. He doesn't know who drew it. He doesn't care. All he knows is the story - the wonder, rage, and pathos of the story. When it's over, he's overwhelmed.

I look at it now and shake my head. What in the world was there in this two-part tale to evoke such a response? It's campy and contrived. Much of the dialogue is unintentionally hilarious. At times, the thing doesn't even make sense. "The Lawless Lois Lane" a great moment in super-history? Surely not!

And yet, reading it now, I find the story oddly compelling. It's another Imaginary story again penned by Jerry Siegel. The set-up is ludicrous: Lois Lane falls in love with "The Incomparable Luthor," a concert pianist with a secret identity, a Robin Hoodish robber called Lexo. In one of the worst plot contrivances I've ever seen, Lois discovers a mind-altering gargoyle that turns her evil. Burning her bridges behind her, the soon-to-be Mrs. Liberace-Lexo gets herself fired from the Daily Planet. She promptly embarks on a life of crime with her new husband.

Along the way, Lois gets to tell off Perry White: "So I'm fired! But at least my mind and my soul are my own! Goodbye, Mr. Great Dictator! Remind me to picket your next testimonial dinner!" (And remind me to write more about Jerry Siegel's shallowly buried resentment toward his editor Mort Weisinger). Then she turns her guns on Superman: "Who asked you to appoint yourself everybody's big brother? Mere mortals like me prefer to work out our own destinies!... I'm about to marry the one man on Earth who is so toweringly overwhelming in every way that compared to him, you're nothing! He's a man with fire... spirit... and, yes, faults! But I love him." (Hey, I think I just found the speech Superman Returns needed!) Shades o' Stan Lee! To a ten-year-old boy on a bus this was high drama!

The script is marred by goofs, gaffes, and gobs of sixties' go-go lingo. Silly as most of it is, though, the last third or so of the story is anything but. Aided by the artist Kurt Schaffenberger in his prime, Siegel's tale takes on a life of its own. Raw emotion flies off the page like sweat off a boxer's beaten head. See the sheer terror on Lois' face as she begs a Superman mannequin for forgiveness. Observe Lex and Lois slumped on a couch in a silent bond of remorse. Watch Lois walking away from Superman in the last panel. Never did she look more the victim of the heart. Never did Superman look a more lonely and tragic figure.

I don't remember anything quite like this in any Superman family book of the time. As I recall, most of them were rather staid and mannered. Maybe that's why this one sticks out, albeit sometimes like a sore thumb. All I know is I can't forget Lawless Lois.

Superman #233 #4. Superman #233, January 1971. I was fifteen, a high school sophomore. I'd hung in with the Man of Steel for a long time, longer, I was beginning to suspect, than I should have. I stood there in Tradewell in my old, familiar spot in front of the comics rack. I was beginning to look and feel a bit old for funnybooks. Any notion I had of dropping the habit, however, died when I saw the cover of this one.

I loved everything about it - Neal Adams' bold cover, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson's dynamic art, Denny O'Neil's lean and muscular script. The title of the story was "Superman Breaks Loose," and, boy, did he! No more Kryptonite! No more newspaper reporting for Clark Kent! A new - and sinister - boss. A mysterious and powerful new adversary.

I loved the humor of the thing. The sequence wherein Superman munches on a now-harmless piece of Kryptonite is priceless. I loved the delicious thrill of suspense as the gritty-looking sand creature rising like a sightless mummy in the desert, "moving slowly, relentlessly, to a terrible destiny..." O'Neil's dialogue crackles. Without skimping on Superman's trademark action, he revealed in the character a humanity that had too often been ignored. In these fifteen pages, the world of Superman, a world of gimmicks grown stale and Kryptonite as common as old funnybooks under the bed, had turned upside down. "You say you want a revolution?" sang John Lennon. Well, DC "got it on!"

And O'Neil and Co. were just getting started. "Breaks Loose" is just a taste of the feast to come. It was the end of the Silver Age, which had really been a golden age for people my age. But it was the beginning of something new. I fell in love with Superman all over again.

Every fan looks back on a shining moment or moments when he discovered or rediscovered a favorite character. These are some of my moments. I hope your own memories burn as warm and bright.

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