Monday, October 22, 2012

Meanwhile, at ComicsAlliance...

As you may have heard, on October 11 the Cleveland-based Siegel & Shuster Society officially unveiled their Superman statue and permanent exhibit at The Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, celebrating the world's first and greatest superhero's point of origin.

It's a short drive from where I live, so I attended. And I wrote about it for ComicsAlliance; click here for some photos, a verbal tour of the exhibit and rundown of what went down during the ceremony.

Admittedly, I was somewhat disappointed that the statue itself looked like this...
...instead of something more on the scale of, say, Superman's statue of his parents from his Fortress of Solitude*...
...or that huge bronze statue of Superman the grateful citizens of Metropolis erected after Superman died fighting Doomsday...
If someone asked me to design it, I probably woulda went with Superman holding a car aloft in the pose from Action Comics #1, but the one they went with certainly suits getting-your-picture-taken-with-Superman a lot better.

It's a pretty nice exhibit though, and a great thing for the city of Cleveland to have; I thought it was cool that they showed the support they did, with the mayor coming out and some speeches and proclamations made by both the mayor and his office and City Council. The timing of the unveiling was perhaps unfortunate, as it fell on the Thursday before New York Comic-Con. I don't know if that's why we didn't see anyone from DC or any of the writers or artists to work on Superman comics over the years there, but it may have been.

Oh, and I was on the news that night.

If you watch the video here, the one accompanying the story by News Channel 5, the local ABC affiliate, you'll see a certain bald, bearded, be-cardiganed blogger...not once, but twice!

Here, have some screenshots:
(I'm harder to spot in the one above; that's me in the red in front of the big, blue column in the background there)

Producers of Man of Steel II, or any future superhero films filming on location in Cleveland (You know they shot parts of Avengers in Cleveland, and that film seemed to be pretty well-received!), please note: I am more than happy to stroke my beard or lean on posts in the background of any crowd scenes you want to put in your film.



*Imagine how awesome it would have been if they had, like, millions to work with, instead of thousands, and could have erected giant twin Superman statues like that, with the original Shuster design standing next to the eventual "standard" Superman design that was ultimately used, holding aloft a spherical map of Cleveland instead of a globe of Krypton...!

3 comments:

Aki Alaraatikka said...

Nice.

Can you attend as a party crasher to a wedding that`s hundreds of miles from Ohio? You`d get a fifty out of it. But you need to pay the trip yourself.

Joe Hennes said...

This is awesome. I'll definitely be checking it out when I fly into Cleveland this Thanksgiving.

Will you be covering the Harvey Pekar statue dedication too?

Caleb said...

Akilles,

Nope. An ancient curse prevents me from crossing the state lines to leave Ohio.


Joe,

It was actually the same weekend that the Superman one was (I thought...?). I wanted to, but it had a prior, personal commitment that day.

I do plan to visit it soon-ish though, and will probably take a picture and blog a bit about it.