★★★★★ 5
Superman, a Dark Knight in the Skies
Format: Paperback
This is a beautiful tome of the first issues of Superman under Action Comics and the first Superman issue. Although providing the same texts of Chronicles, I find this series better because they have more issues per volume. In spite of its 390 pages, these volumes are light and easy to handle. Albeit the simplicity and innocence of these stories, Superman impresses me as a "dark knight" of the skies given his toughness with the bad guys. In these stories, he's got no compassion for criminals. He also defends the working class, stand for fair treatment of workers, and even takes an "isolationist" stance which was popular in the days before WWII. Another surprise for the first-time reader of this period is that Superman can't fly; he can only leap over tall buildings. There is no Krypton and no Daily Planet. The city of Metropolis is introduced for the first time in the second half of this tome. And Lois Lane is often relegated to unimportant journalistic tasks, while she has greater ambitions. It is a great experience to read these old stories in a beautifully designed tome. I hope they reproduce the others quickly.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2016
