"Flights of Fancy" ("Superman Returns")
Nobody remembers but back in the late '80s, there was a short-lived Superman cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings. I'm not talking about "Superfriends" or the excellent Bruce Timm version; this one broadcasted on CBS really early in the morning. And it was terrible. I mean the animation was crummy, the stories were weak, the voice acting was beyond cheesy. But it did do one thing right: it had the coolest opening I've seen in a cartoon. In it they used John Williams theme along with the entire monologue from the '50s live action television series. Now it's been more than a decade since I last saw it, but I can still hear the announcer boasting "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive..." while Williams' score triumphantly played in the background.
And I remember all of this because of awe.
Just like seeing Christopher Reeve flying around with a smile on his face or George Reeves making a mad dash to a storage closet and leaping out of a window, the one thing that best describes Superman to me is awe. Believing in something unbelievable; becoming pure in your ideals and compassion. However you want to look at it, it always has a feeling of awe included.
So when it came to this illustration, I knew I couldn't parody the Man of Steel or the memory of Christopher Reeve (I was going to do a picture where Erik was surprised to see a man fly out of his wheelchair but somebody already beat me to it). I couldn't even bring myself to do a play on words ("Faster than a riding lawnmower...") because it came back to that one theme. Well, I quickly discovered awe is hard to illustrate. But mix it in with the basis of a classic cinematic scene and something comes of it. This is my attempt at that.
Should I have used Superman himself? Probably. But no amount of skill I had would have done it justice. - Jake