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Dec 19, 2015

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 298: Action Comics #500, October 1979

http://www.comics.org/issue/33724/

From issue #0 yesterday, we travel exactly 15 years back in time to issue #500. These things do happen in comics.

There have been numerous retellings of Superman's origin, from Siegel and Shuster's opening page of Action Comics #1 to Morrison and Quitely's minimalist opening page to All-Star Superman #1. Literary theorist Erich Auerbach, in his work Mimesis, discusses the differences between a tale like that told in the Jewish Testament of the Bible and that told in Homer's Odyssey or Iliad. He notes the differences in the amount of detail, in the nature of the narrative's focalization, in order to draw conclusions about why particular stories get subsumed into the culture, while other remain simply stories. All myth, of course, gets retransmitted time and again, but only a few of them become culturally constitutive narratives. Auerbach suggests that it is because of gaps in these stories that they are more easily turned into kerygmatic stories than entertaining narratives. (That's a very basic breakdown of the idea. I'm going to be exploring it more fully in my dissertation) So the Superman story from today's issue is interesting in that it, barring series that tell the story over the course of a number issues, is the most detailed retelling of his origin and life that I've yet come across. And considering that it's a full 68 pages, it's technically the equivalent of 3 full regular sized comics.

While the detail is nice, and there's a remarkably effective moment where Superman relives the destruction of Krypton and has a breakdown in front of an audience of tourists, it bears out Auerbach's contentions about something like The Odyssey. Very basically, it adds so much detail, leaves so little room for the insertion of the reader's imagination, that it ceases to be a story that is atemporally relevant. This version of the story, published at the end of the 70s, cements this particular version of Superman in the 70s. Instead of a temporally-flexible narrative, like either the original or the Morrisonian, this story takes that single page, expands it by sixty-eight times, and demonstrates how, in a particular time and place, a myth comes to exemplify underlying cultural mores.

What those mores are differs with each expanded origin, and rather than go into it here, I'm going to see about doing a series that looks at each of these sorts of stories and what it says about the character, the time, and ourselves, the readers.

Because I don't have nearly enough things to do already.

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