My Marvel Life Presents : Fabulous First Issue – Man of Steel 1

Why I picked this comic:

I wasb’t going to do an X-Title so soon, (despite how much fun it was) and I have recently watched several of DC’s recent-ish TV output. This left me inspired to pick a DC property and if it’s firsts we are looking at then you can’t get more first than Superman and for me, the best Superman was the Crisis to Crisis version, which first appeared in Man of Steel 1.

The Comic Itself:

Man of Steel 1: July 1986

 

From out of the Green Dawn was written and pencilled by John Byrne with inks by Dick Giordano and lets be honest, this isn’t an untold story is it? Desperate scientist Jor-El and his wife Lara send their baby Kal-El to Earth to save him from the destruction of their home planet of Krypton. The space ship and a fragment of the destroyed planet escape with him and travels to Earth. The ship is found by Kansas farmers Johnathan and Martha Kent who take the baby home, call him Clark and raise him as their own.

At 18 Johnathan tells his son where they found him and how that can relate to the superhuman powers that he has stared developing. Shook by all of this, Clark leaves town.

Years pass and a prototype space plane is about to crash into the city of Metropolis, but it is saved along with all aboard (including intrepid reporter Lois Lane) by an unknown ‘Superman.’ Clark has been noticed after ten years of saving lives in anonymity, ‘flying’ under the radar. Unsure of what to do, he goes home to see his mum and dad and the three of them come up with the idea of a costumed alter-ego. In his regular life, he will hide in plain sight, with a combination of a change in body-language, wardrobe, voice and hair together with a pair of glasses and when he is needed to fly to the rescue in a skintight suit and cape. When there’s danger it’ll be a job for Superman.

The Thoughts of The MIGHTY Rosie

Question 1: Have you heard of this property before? Yes

Question 2: What were you expecting? ….pretty much the origin of Superman.

Question 3: What did you think of the cover? To the point.

Question 4: What did you think of the story?  ….it had a bit of a twist that I did not expect. It’s not my first origin of Superman. I felt that it was a little bit rushed if that makes any sense.

Question 5: What did you think of the art?  Don’t like it, too scratchy.

Question 6: What did you think of the dialogue? …Okay, but no background, Jor-El mentioned rules, but there’s no information to back anything up and to be honest, he sounded like a dick. This is Lara’s child too, yet she isn’t part of any decision, everything is taken out of her hands and Jor-El just does what he wants to.

Question 7: Does it make sense? That the planet was about to blow up and no one knew? Especially in such a highly advanced society.

Question 8: Was it accessible to a new reader?  Yes

Question 9: Did you enjoy it? Errmm… yes, however I have watched/read other origins of Superman before,

Question 10: Would you read the next issue?  Yes….maybe?

Question 11: What would you do differently? I didn’t like the Krypton stuff and felt it didn’t need to be at the beginning of the comic. We could have spent more time in Kansas with Clark and is parents (I loved that by the way, how close he was with his mum and dad) and that was the better part of it. Then you can devote longer to Krypton and learn more about it, not the rushed stuff we got. From what I was told (by me), Clark learns about Krypton later in the story, maybe we can learn it all then too rather than at the beginning when it doesn’t mean as much.

Next time: He he he