It's a bird, it's a plane...

Nestling among our latest batch of DC pre-orders (for January releases) is a simple-looking little collection entitled The Superman Chronicles Volume 1. DC have at last decided to start re-issung some of their classic material in a more affordable format - plenty of Golden and Silver Age material is available in the lovely Archive Editions hardbacks of course. But these are quite expensive and a fair old investment if you want to build a decent library of them (even with our generous 30% discount on them to ease the pain) and not every comic fan can afford this luxury (although they are beautifully made and usually feature very high art reproduction).

Recently we've had some Showcase titles from DC which are collecting tales from the 60s and 70s and are similar to the Essentials range Marvel publish. With the Superman Chronicles though DC are taking us right back to the beginning - the very first Superman tales, from Action Comics onwards, featuring the immortal Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Man of Steel's creators. All the way back to 1938... It is easy for comics fans to make jokes about Supes - he isn't as smart or as deep as the Batman, he often lacks the emotional empathy we feel for more human heroes like Peter Parker - but the fact is he towers over the superhero genre and I suspect we all have a soft spot for him.

Let's face it, he is the icon of the genre; people who don't read comics still recognise the big 'S' shield and anyone miming pulling their shirt open is instantly recognised as 'doing a Superman' impression (it was even referenced in the first Spider-Man film). We've had so many different superheroes since then and new generations of creators subverting the genre to bring us fascinating new angles, but through all those nearly seven decades, Superman has been there. These early tales are often very different to our modern eyes; perhaps rather crude and simplistic to be honest. Yet they are still fascinating in the same way that the works of Winsor McCay (incidentally a terrific new book has just come out on McCay) are still fascinating; they show the genesis of both a legend and our beloved comics themselves, the earliest steps in a shaky new medium which would grow over decades to be a huge and diverse industry. I think I'm going to have to bag one of these myself.