Superman and My Homies, by Martha Thomases
The month of July was a veritable traveling sideshow for me. Between professional obligations and family emergencies, I barely saw my husband … and my kitty even less. I’ve had to seek out new, ever more tantalizing kinds of cat food for her to tolerate my continued presence in our home.
All of this makes me think of Superman.
When John Byrne relaunched the series, there was a lot of talk about Superman being not just the Last Son of Krypton, but the last Kryptonian. That didn’t last very long, and today we have remnants of the old continuity, with Supergirl and the Phantom Zone and the Bottled City of Kandor.
I like that Superman, but he’s not the character with whom I grew up. My Superman is the pre-Crisis version, the one published from the late 1950s up to the Byrne reboot. Sent to Earth shortly after his birth, his memories of Krypton are vivid but brief. He was already a toddler when the Kents found him in that field in Kansas.
Maybe it was because the character had been around for such a long time, and the creative teams were having trouble coming up with new ideas for stories, but there is a certain melancholy about the Man of Steel in that era. Kal-El had huge responsibilities, and no one close to him. His parents died with his planet; his foster-parents died before he left for Metropolis. He was afraid to commit to the women he loved, not because of anything as terrestrial as a fear of close relationships, but because he was afraid he’d put them in danger. Even his own cousin, who could have been a close confidante, was kept at arm’s length so he could train her to protect their adopted home.
This is the Superman who needed a Fortress of Solitude, where he could escape, at least for a while, the cries for help that flooded his every waking moment. Amid the cold from the top of world, he could conduct experiments, write to his intergalactic pen-pals, and build enormous monuments to his dead parents.
Howard Stern may be the self-proclaimed Master of All Media, but Kyle Baker is giving him a run for the title in the graphic story-telling media. He’s got his autobiographical family comedy, The Bakers, in development for television at Fox. He’s got his reality-base war comic, Special Forces, at Image. Abrams just published gorgeous hardcover and paperback editions of Nat Turner. He’s worked on Captain America and Plastic Man for the Big Two. He’s won every award comics can give.
If you wanted that original T.I.E. fighter miniature from Star Wars, you missed your chance. You could have outbid the person who spent $402,500, and it would have been yours. At an auction in Calabasas, CA, on July 31 and August 1 from 
In today’s brand new episode of 
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It’s nearly a week since Comic-Con ended, but still it haunts my dreams. I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, then the fifth largest city in Ohio (behind Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus and Akron), yet there were more people in the San Diego convention center. 
In today’s brand-new episode of 
Cynosure is famous as the city at the crossroads of all the dimensions. In this all-new, full-length graphic novel by John Ostrander and Timothy Truman, John Gaunt not only spans universes but the very fabric of time itself. As he is compelled to track down the mysterious Manx Cat, he learns the dirty secrets about his city’s origins and the tragic price to be paid for the stuff that dreams are made of. All this and the secret origin of Bob the watchlizard and his place at the fabled Munden’s Bar!
In today’s brand-new episode of 
