Join me as I take a look at an imaginary story (aren’t they all?) from the 60s, in which Superman is split in 2, and systematically ties up just about all of the main Silver Age Superman plot points!
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This episode made this old fellow very happy. I’ve always loved this story, from the first time I read it as a 7-year-old back in 1963. It is my favorite Imaginary Story, and no, they’re not all imaginary, as I believe even Alan Moore himself knows, since he’s a couple of years older than I am. “Imaginary Story” was a “term of art” in the Silver Age, and even as a kid I understood that it meant “a story outside of normal continuity, meant to explore ideas that wouldn’t properly fit into that continuity”.
With that bit of carping out of the way, let me thank you abundantly for your look at Superman-Red and Superman-Blue. I know it’s not in your “sweet spot” of Superman eras, but I think you took a pretty fair look at it. No one can expect someone who didn’t grow up in those days to have the same perspective as someone who did, on a story like this. It is absolute Silver Age to the nth degree, including the necessity of the willing suspension of disbelief at a higher level than is common even in the Bronze Age, to say nothing of post-Crisis. That is a large part of why I love this story so much. I can read it with the heart of the boy I was then, with the old man I am now looking over his shoulder and smiling.
I hope that you have similar experiences revisiting the things you loved as a boy, perhaps joined by Grayson to help you keep in touch with the boy you were, looking at boyhood treasures with the heart of a boy and with a grown man’s appreciation for those memories, too. Thank you for letting me have that experience with this story.
I believe that reprinting this story would have been a far better ending for the pre-Crisis Superman continuity than “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow”, and I will stand by that opinion for the rest of my life.