★★★★★ 5
Just for Fun
You can't help, in reading these stories, remarking on how comics (and popular culture in general) reflect what we want on our minds and how we want to feel about ourselves.
Superman today is intense. He fights apocalyptic battles, and he sometimes loses! There's a lot at stake -- everything, EVERYTHING, lies in the balance. Superman himself seems literaly beyond human. In order to live the life of challenges he faces, he must be beyond the concerns of everyday life -- he can't really share in the life that the rest of us live.
Superman in the fifties lived in a much more comfortable, stable world, and his own life was much more continuous with ours. In these stories, he discovers that he is not alone -- his long last pal, Krypto, shows up, and he discovers his cousin, Supergirl. He has girlfriends -- Lana Lang and Lois Lane compete for his attention (without a lot of the psychological anxiety that Superman will face in the future over his inability to live a normal life and raise a normal family).
The villains, like Lex Luthor, aren't even purely evil -- they have their limits. Bizarro is not evil at all, just . . . dumb and amusing so long as Superman can repair any damage he does.
It's a little bit trivial to point out how comics reflect cultural reality, but . . . they do. It's fun to revisit the fifties here -- i suspect it's not so much an innocent age as one in which the story we told ourselves about ourselves (as in our Superman comics) was focused where we wanted it to be focused -- family, friends, the pleasures of everyday life.
But, putting aside all the sociology and pretenses of cultural history, these stories are just fun to read. It's not the Superman we know now, it's just different, a change of pace, fun.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2013
