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Preserving the Superman Fan site
What seems like a gazillion years ago, I started a fan page dedicated to Superman. Originally it was just a few static pages devoted to my favorite artists and stories, but when the blogging craze took hold, I transformed it into a blog and labored diligently to update it at least weekly and often two or three times a week.
The site lived, in those days, as a subdomain of a huge virtual entity known as “Superman Through The Ages,” on server space donated by the friend who ran it. But like the hero it honored, STTA seemed cursed by fate, haunted by repeated disasters and plagued with villainous attempts on its virtual life. It was repeatedly hacked and taken offline and at one point the site owner himself purposely knocked the whole thing offline for still-mysterious reasons. By that time, a number of us super-fans had built up something of a community on the site’s message boards, so to give us a new place to gather, I built new boards around my site, which I had meticulously reconstructed from back-up files and moved to a new host. Which in turn got bought out and shut down. And so on.
Anyway ultimately I figured it wasn’t worth the headache, so I dropped the whole matter for the last few years. But few days ago I figured, what the heck, I put a lot of time and effort into all that content, so it ought to live somewhere other than a CD-ROM at the back of a drawer. And so, once again recklessly courting doom at the hands of the internet deities, I’ve set aside a branch of this site as a sort of “museum” to the old Superman Fan site and blog, with my old blog entries reformatted into static pages…at least those I could salvage from my last, incomplete backup of the database.
Wow, that’s probably a lot more than anyone really wanted to know, but if you have any interest in Superman at all, I hope you enjoy browsing these pages, outdated as they may be here and there. They were fun for me to create, and as it turns out, kind of cathartic. I tend to get obsessive about my hobbies and won’t shut up about them while the interest level is high (as my long-suffering wife will tell you). In the case of Superman, having to turn out a weekly (or semi-weekly) blog on the Man of Steel for three years eventually burned me out entirely. When I quit, I had literally said everything I ever wanted to say about the guy, and to this day I’m pretty much “over” him. Interestingly (?) I had already gone through the same cycle with James Bond, who used to fascinate me endlessly but after eight or so years keeping alive the “Mr Kiss-Kiss Bang-Bang” site (also now-defunct) I’d pretty much lost interest in the mug. (In fairness, four Pierce Brosnan films in a row helped cool me off considerably, as well)
So now I know that yes, I can get beyond an obsession, but honestly if it takes that much labor, it’s not a strategy I’m likely to try again.
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David, last night I reached page 196 of Glen Weldon’s “Superman: The Unauthorized Biography” (2013), and found a quote of yours on the subject of the embiggening of the Bottle City of Kandor, along with an all-around endorsement of your “Confessions of a Superman Fan” website, which I am glad to see you have returned to the ArpaNet. I believe you can read it for free at “GoogleBooks”.
Glen Weldon is particularly well-suited to biographize the Big Blue Cheese, as his name rhymes with “Ben Welden”.
Hey, that’s awesome! I had no idea I got a mention in that book. Now I’ll have to check it out.
I wonder what I said…:-)
In case you haven’t found it yet, pages 195-196 quotes Len Wein, who authored the story wherein the Bottle City was reenbignified, which Wein acknowledges with some rue:
“All of us, at some point in our careers as editors and writers, have said, Oh god, I’m tired of >thatthatus< was new to somebody just coming in…So I came to Kandor thinking, I'm so tired of this. It's twenty years…of that stupid city. So I came up with a story I thought might have some emotional impact…And I regret that, because the idea of a bottle city of tiny people is a much cooler idea than what I left it as."
Then Weldon writes, "On his website, Confessions of a Superman Fan, writer David Morefield eloquently sums up why this major event left a bad taste in the mouths of many fans:" [And here he quotes you:]
"The shrunken Kandor served as a living connection to Superman's alien heritage and a potential seed for Krypton's eventual rebirth. Its presence was at once a painful reminder that even his powers had limits and a refuge, a source of solace when his longing for Krypton became acute. In short, I liked it better in the bottle…Somehow this story manages to enlarge Kandor and make it smaller at the same time." [All ellipses are quoted as they appeared.]
Weldon also mentions your website in the Bibliography section, describing it as "Clever, well-written Superman fansite by David Morefield."
"Superman Through the Ages" still exists online at theages.ac, though now it contains about one twentieth of the material it had at its peak, and Great Rao et al. seem to be adding items at a glacial pace. I miss it.
Thanks again for returning your site, and I hope you understand all of my punctuation, which is not usually my forte.
Well, I just reread my comment and I seem to have bollixed Mr. Wein’s quote; it should read:
“All of us, at some point in our careers as writers and editors, have said, Oh God I’m tired of that, whatever that is, so we changed it or dropped it. But I don’t think any of us realized at the time what was old to us was new to somebody just coming in…So I came to Kandor thinking, I’m so tired of this. It’s twenty years of that stupid city. So I came up with a story I thought might have some emotional impact…And I regret that, because the idea of a bottle city of tiny people is a much cooler idea than what I left it as.” Sorry about that.
I laughed a lot and had a really good time reading various parts of your web site today. It’s fun — and rare — to come across somebody who has / had some many of the same interests and television experiences growing up. I loved what you wrote about the Six Million Dollar Man: “For a kid like me, this guy was an embarrassment of riches: a super hero, a secret agent AND an astronaut?” Bingo! And you must be the only other person on the planet to remember “The Magician”. For some reason I can still remember the theme music even though I only saw a few episodes.
What I enjoyed the most, though, was your writing about Superman. It was fun to see your take on some of the silver and bronze age stories, all of which I know well since I still own the issues and used to read the stories over and over. I don’t actively collect any more but I still have most of the collectibles you mentioned (plus a lot more) and, more importantly, I still have the issues of Superman and Action I collected, mostly as a kid, going as far back as Action #33.
What I enjoyed most was, “That’s My Story . . . and I’m Stickin’ With It!”, because you’re the first person I’ve come across who really understood what Superman used to be about (“Superman’s real power lies in his ability to inspire us to be decent people”), or at least who liked him for the same reasons I did. I especially thought your take on Clark Kent was on target, but I didn’t realize how big a part he played in my fondness for the comics until they (in my mind) killed him off and replaced him with the “cooler” version. That’s also when I stopped collecting: in hindsight I realize that Superman was who I always wanted to be, but it was the classic Clark Kent that I could relate to.