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Dec 5, 2016

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 649: Superman: The 10¢ Adventure, March 2003

http://www.comics.org/issue/129792/

Sorry for the blip there. It was a busy weekend.

Can you imagine a time when comics were 10¢? I know, I know, keeping in mind the rates of inflation it still would have been a lot at the time, but from our vantage, it just seems....ideal, somehow.

A cool little comic, though considering it was given this low price in order to, I assume, bring in new readers, it's still very much a part of the ongoing story of the Man of Steel in the early 2000s. This issue is notable for introducing Cir-El, the new Supergirl and apparent daughter of Superman and Lois from the future. This turns out to not be true, of course, but the introduction of yet another version of Supergirl is interesting in and of itself. We're used to the different iterations of Superman, and much of the time the Supergirl/-woman characters are seen simply as gender-bent versions of the male character. But, especially with the success of the television series, I think it's become appropriate to see her as a hero with similar origins (of course, I'm speaking narratively here, not necessarily practically, in the circumstances of her creation), but representing something very, very different from the Man of Steel.

I came across a Tumblr post yesterday that shows exactly, exactly, how important this character is. The pictures speak so much better, so much clearer, than my words.

Onward.

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