Tag Archives: soap opera rapid aging syndrome

Superman II 2.15: The Symposium

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Okay, so we’ve currently got Clark Kent and Lois Lane locked up in a fuzzy pink honeymoon box, and we’re planning to keep them there until they make some progress on their relationship. It’s tough love, for sure, but they’ve spent more than forty years avoiding the obvious, and unless we do something about it, Lois is going to start throwing herself off of things again.

But this is a major turning point in the Superman/Lois relationship, and you can’t take that step lightly. In fact, in 1977 — a year before the first Superman movie was released — a panel of Superman writers, artists and editors were assembled to take part in a Super-Symposium.

It was such a big deal that they gave it four text pages in DC Special #5, asking the question: “SHOULD SUPERMAN MARRY LOIS LANE?”

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Superman 1.28: Grad School

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It’s a weird quirk of human nature, that we think old things are smarter than new things. I mean, when you’re talking about the course of a single lifetime, then yeah, children need to be educated by adults.

But then people generalize that to entire civilizations, thinking that people in the ancient world had wisdom, medicine and daily life practices that were better than we have now — that they were healthier, which is untrue, and they knew more about nature, which is unlikely. So people buy expensive treatments and nutritional supplements, or go on fad diets based on shaky anthropological assumptions, in order to live more like people in the past.

It’s nonsense, of course; human knowledge is cumulative, and we as a civilization know way more now than anybody ever knew before — or, at least, somebody knows it, and the rest of us can look it up on Wikipedia. The ancients were not smarter than we are; they had worse teeth, they died younger, and their pop music was dreary in the extreme.

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Superman 1.15: Journey Across the Gulf of Space!

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Well, if little Kal-El thought he could stretch out and relax during the journey from there to here, then he was mistaken; his dad has prepared a three-year-long audiobook for him to listen to on the trip. We see the boy traveling through clouds of space plankton in his star bubble, and above the sound of a passing scherzo, we hear extracts from Jor-Audible.

The first fragment that we hear is “… which Einstein called his theory of relativity.” I don’t know if that’s chapter one or not; I would hope they’d ease the kid in a bit before jumping straight to Einstein. This is a weird belief that science-fiction writers have, that you can learn things more efficiently if you’re being brainwashed by a computer, because education is basically a data download, and actual engagement with the material just gets in the way.

So I want to take a look at what kind of schooling is going on here, and try, for at least a couple minutes, not to talk about Beppo.

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