MAN OF STEEL

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a
plane! It’s…Well, you know how it ends,
don’t you? It’s a sentence so iconic,
there are probably kids shouting it in
Swahili as you read this.
The most recognized superhero in pop
culture, Superman has been elevated to
mythic folkhero status. Rocketed to
Earth from the dying planet Krypton,
baby Kal-El was found by a farming
couple who named the boy Clark Kent
and raised him as their own.
Discovering his enormous powers, they
instilled in him strong moral values—and
inspired him to become a hero.
Superman has super-everything—
strength, speed, flight, invulnerability as
well as his renowned X-ray and heat
vision. The most powerful being on the
planet, his amazing abilities are also a
melancholy reminder of how different he
is from the people he’s dedicated to
protect.
A universal icon, Superman means
different things to the many diverse
people he inspires: He’s an alien; an
immigrant from a faraway land just
looking to help; a country boy fighting
the never-ending battle for truth and
justice. And recent comics have truly
spotlighted his role as the people’s
hero: Following a neophyte Man of
Steel still learning his powers’ limits,
Superman fights the evil corporate
tycoons and corrupt one-percenters that
have overwhelmed the establishment.

Batwoman writers quit DC Comics after lesbian marriage storyline dropped

Two writers who co-author the
Batwoman comic book series have
resigned from DC Comics citing last
minute changes to their storylines –
including the gay marriage of
Batwoman and her girlfriend.
In a blog post, which is no longer
available online, the writers J.H Williams
and W. Haden Blackman declared that
they were leaving DC Comics alleging
that they had been asked to "alter or
completely discard many long-standing
storylines that we feel compromise the
character and the series".
They said: "We were told to ditch plans
for Killer Croc's origins; forced to
drastically alter the original ending of
our current arc, which would have
defined Batwoman's heroic future in
bold new ways; and, most crushingly,
prohibited from ever showing Kate and
Maggie actually getting married.
"All of these editorial decisions came at
the last minute, and always after a year
or more of planning and plotting on our
end."
Batwoman as a character disappeared
from comics in 1976 but was
reintroduced to DC Comics in 2006 and
earned her own stand-alone storyline in
2010 in a spin off series.
While there have been other gay
characters in the history of DC comics,
Batwoman is the first ongoing comic
series headlined by an openly gay
hero, and earned the series an award
from GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance
Against Defamation) last year. Issue 17
of the comic showed the pair getting
engaged, which was a first in a
mainstream comic.