Glen Weldon's Superman

Glen Weldon has a weird fixation on Superman's mullet.

His new book, an Unauthorized Biography of Superman, contains a lot of plot summaries. There's some behind the scenes stuff, lots of evaluations of what works and what doesn't work for the character, things like that. He starts at the beginning--no substantial references to influences until later on--and moves right on up to 2013.

Weldon writes a blog for NPR, and his writing style reflects that occupation. His wordplay is often clever, sometimes grating, but always fluid and clear. There's nothing new to his book, nothing that you can't get in others, but Weldon's focus on release dates, on some contextualization, and on some minor aspects of Superman trivia, is good t read. Of course, there's a lot he's left out. There's not a way around that when you're writing about Superman.

Still, he can't seem to get over that mullet.

There are other oddities, such as Weldon's inclusion of the odd detail that Jerry Siegel happened to die on a day when a Superbowl was played. But this is exactly the type of book I expected to see this year, Superman's 75 year in publication. No pictures, though, which is a shame.

There's another new book, called Superman in Philosophy. Haven't read that yet.