That's so nice of you to say. Thanks.Your excitement and constant posting of stuff from the film played a part to, so for that I thank you!
The thing is...Superman was the first fantasy character I discovered on my own. Mom used to read the Oz series to us at bedtime, and Milne's Pooh books and E.B. White's Stuart Little. But I'm pretty sure my first attempt to read anything to myself was around 1959 - and I know that's the point at which I discovered comic books.
Someone up the street had a classic "my kids have outgrown these, maybe your boys would like them" conversation with Mom and gave her a huge box of comics, some of which I learned later dated back to the mid-50s. So I'm reading years of Wayne Boring Superman comics, and scifi-ish Batman books where he seemed to have a different costume or new science gadget every issue, and all in whatever order I reached into the box and pulled out.
When I was six - maybe a bit too old for this - I used to take red and yellow poster paint and paint an "S" shield on an old tee shirt. Mom would throw it in the wash every few days, but the paint dyes left a shadow on the white fabric even after cleaning. I'd trace the same emblem over the ghost of the previous one, and off I went...to the general mockery of my peers, as I recall.
Superman was in my life nearly a decade before Star Trek existed - or for that matter, years before the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man.
