Up and Away

I see where there’s a new Superman movie coming this summer. I’m not going to go see it, just as I didn’t bother to see any of these previous offerings of his adventures.

To me, Superman remains in my mind as I knew him in the pages of Action Comics when I was a ten-year-old. But the childish me enjoyed the Man of Steel’s adventures without the burning questions that have arisen in my (hopefully) adult mind over the course of so many subsequent decades. For example:

Where did Superman get his outfit made? It’s very specialized colorful duds, with that big S crest across the chest. 

If some little tailor in some back street fashioned it, then he would know Superman’s secret identity. Wouldn’t he talk?

And that outfit, looking like a skintight body suit. Apparently, Clark Kent wore it under his dude clothes—his suit and tie. Wouldn’t that be uncomfortable? And anyway, how’d he manage with the feet of the outfit, fitting under his lace-up shoes? And the cape—where’d that go? Down the back of his button-down shirt? I can’t imagine that.

But what confuses me most in my latter-day musings about Superman is the machinations of changing from Clark Kentish business suits into Spandex-like superhero duds and vice versa.

Now I may be wrong, but I seem to remember that when duty called, Clark Kent found a telephone booth in which to strip off his business clothes and reveal the Superman outfit. Well, this bothers my brain. What happens to the clothes lying there in the telephone booth? Does the pile just conveniently abide there until Superman finishes his superduties and returns to claim it? And are we to believe that at least once someone needing to phone home or his bookie didn’t step into the booth only to discover Kent’s clothes and glasses? Did the erstwhile phoner—as a good deed—then take the clothes to the police or the Salvation Army? And would Superman—now Clark Kent clothes-less—then have to duck into the nearest Brooks Brothers for a new togging up? 

None of these questions arose in my childish mind at the time. It was, as I noted above, only so many decades later that they bubbled to the surface in my skeptical, would-be logical mind. I need answers. Wikipedia, in its long entry on Superman, attempts to provide some. But they are flaccid, and so they don’t satisfy me. Unlike Superman, they don’t fly.