Word: supermans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Around the turn of the last century, Friedrich Nietzsche killed God and replaced him with the Ubermensch, or superman. In the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon; 380 pages; $27.50), Chicago cartoonist Chris Ware goes Nietzsche one better. He replaces God with Superman, the caped hero, who becomes a God/father metaphor to the emotionally crippled title character. Then Ware kills Superman too--or at least a man in a Superman suit, who, in a single bound, leaps to his death from a tall building in a scene, witnessed by Jimmy, that sets the tale's poignant...
Ware serialized Jimmy's story in The Acme Novelty Library, the idiosyncratic comic series that established Ware as a meticulous artist who reshapes older comic art into a new and expressive form. Like any good Postmodernist, he borrows from the past--the Superman bits, 19th century ads, a touch of Little Nemo and Krazy Kat. But Ware's appropriations all serve his story. The 1890s novella uses sepia tones to depict senior Jimmy's claustrophobic home life; the '50s comics motifs perfectly capture junior Jimmy's state of arrested childhood...
...right away!" After the laughter died down, he got serious, noting that his father had joined a labor union while in college and later became a hard-core Communist, making politics a big part of his upbringing and his life, even when he was a Hollywood star in the Superman movies. "At first, it was easy" being involved politically, he said. "I had anger at Vietnam, at the disintegration of the environment. I was angry about civil rights and equal rights. In a time of prosperity, it's hard to keep going...
...other star of the show was a stunning little machine called the G4 CUBE, a Power Mac G4 that Apple's engineers have somehow managed to squeeze into a gleaming 8-in. crystalline cube that wouldn't look out of place in Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Its vertical-loading DVD drive alone is enough to give a technophile goose pimples. Brrrr...
...have clearly seen the future in the New Economy and are staking out big claims. The intriguing question about Superman and Superboy: Are they working as a team or as future competitors? Much is made in the Hong Kong press of Richard's attempts to step out of his father's shadow; of how he was passed over in favor of elder brother Victor, now 35, as heir apparent to the Li empire; and of the differing styles of father and son. The father is reclusive, cordial, traditional and lives in the same house he bought...