Word: supermans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Vincent Sullivan, editor of Detective Comics, had a terrific idea. So what if it was someone else's? The year before, a muscle-bound man from Krypton had landed in the pages of rival Action Comics and become an instant icon of pop culture. Sullivan may not have owned Superman, but he could clone it. He called in cartoonist Bob Kane, then 18, and asked for a similar "super-duper" character. Kane went home, tossed the movies The Mark of Zorro and The Bat Whispers into an imaginary blender with Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine, and dreamed up Batman...
...when producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters obtained the movie rights. What took so long? At first the project was greeted with tremendous skepticism. "I'd say I was doing a Batman film, and people would laugh," recalls Peters. "They saw him as a guy in tights, and unlike Superman, he didn't fly." Finding a suitable script proved an additional problem. Early drafts followed Batman from the childhood trauma of seeing his parents gunned down by vicious Jack Napier. "You had to wade through 20 years," says Sam Hamm, one of the three writers who worked on the film...
...books are not immune from the violent trend. While parents may fondly remember the dating shenanigans of Archie and Veronica or the wholesome exploits of superheroes, their children are now being offered a titillating blend of sadism and sex. A stripper was crucified in one issue of Green Arrow. Superman, in a story called Bloodsport, battled a deranged Viet Nam veteran who was shooting people at random on the streets of Metropolis with a gun in each hand...
...publishing, its cable programming and its cable-TV operations with Warner's movie, TV and video production, music labels, cable systems, paperbacks and comic books. The new company would include not only Time's stable of talented journalists, spread over two dozen magazines, but also Warner's Mad magazine, Superman comics and such recording artists as Madonna and U2. The businesses are thus related, but largely complementary. "This is the first merger in a long time that makes a lot of sense," said Edward Atorino, a media analyst at the Smith Barney investment firm...
...geneticist today would even talk about creating a master race. Scientists are careful to point out that experiments in gene therapy will be aimed at curing hereditary disease and relieving human suffering, not at producing some sort of superman. But what if people want to use the technology to improve genes that are not defective but merely mediocre? Could genetic engineering become the cosmetic surgery of the next century? Will children who have not had their genes altered be discriminated against...