My image of Superman was formed during the years 1957 to 1962 when I was reading the various comic books in which he appeared: Action Comics, Superman, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Adventure, Superboy (those last two were the adventures of Superman when he was a boy) plus World’s Finest, where he teamed up with Batman, and Justice League of America, where he was one of several superheroes.

Those were formative years for the Man of Steel as lots of new subsidiary characters were added to the franchise such as Supergirl and Bizarro, and some parts of the mythology finally came into being.

For example, it was well known that Superman’s superstrength and his ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound (later this became his ability to fly) were a result of his being born on the giant planet Krypton with its gravity much greater than that of earth, so when he came to earth, naturally he was stronger than any earthling and could fly. That just made sense, right?

But how did the difference in gravity between the two worlds explain some of his other powers? Like his X-ray vision? Or his invulnerability? Over the years his powers had multiplied. Apparently any time a writer needed to get him out of a jam, he was given a new power. Superbreath that could instantly freeze anything. Not only did he have X-ray vision but he also had heat vision that could boil water instantaneously.

Where did these powers come from? After a while even the eight year olds who read the comics began to wonder (well, perhaps it was the twelve year olds who were learning science). The difference between Krypton’s massive gravity and earth’s couldn’t explain all those other powers.

Finally, someone at DC Comics came up with an answer: Krypton had a red sun, while earth had a yellow sun. It was the difference in the sun’s rays that gave Superman all those extra powers. That seemed to satisfy everyone, so it became part of the the Superman lore forevermore. Only a wise guy would point out that our sun isn’t really yellow, it just looks that way because of the scattering effect of the atmosphere; the sun’s rays are actually white (at sunrise and sunset the sun’s rays are scattered even more and look red), but nobody ever listened to those wise guys.

But I digress.

It was also during that period that the double L mythology was born. Lois Lane had been part of the Superman family from the very start, when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster first created their character derived from their Jewish mythology. Just as baby Moses was sent away in a reed basket and adopted into a foreign culture, so baby Kal-El (Superman’s Kryptonian name) was packed into a rocket to earth where he was adopted by the Kents. The “El” suffix in his name means “god”. But I digress again.

When DC decided to spin off a series of stories of Superman when he was a boy, they placed a girl in his life named Lana Lang.

Sometime in the late 1950s one of the writers noticed this and realized that Superman’s arch villain Luthor had never been given a first name. In devising a story of how the young Luthor (with a full head of hair) met Superboy and ended up wrongly blaming Superboy when an experiment went wrong and he lost his hair permanently (that being the explanation for why he became his arch enemy!), the writer gave Luthor the first name of Lex, and the “LL” mythology was born. From then on the letters “LL” kept re-appearing all over the place in Superman’s life.

I wrote this piece several months ago when the latest Superman movie came out, and for some reason I never got around to publishing it till now.