Following up on yesterday's post about the S-shield on Superman's cape: it has never appeared on any of the Superman balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.

I previously posted about the very first Superman parade balloon from 1940 back in November 2008. That original balloon, used for only one year and record holder as the tallest balloon until 1982, had a loose red cape that came down just to the seat of its pants. The second Superman balloon (a particularly ugly one with a round chest) debuted in 1966, and its cape was a little longer but just as solid red. The third Superman balloon, the largest balloon since WWII and the one I painted in 2020, entered the parade in 1980, and despite several mishaps, flew each year until 1987. This last one also had a solid red cape, though it was a horizontal "flying" pose, so the back was never seen from street level.

The parade balloons are expensive to create and fill with helium (though the people who walk them through downtown Manhattan are all unpaid volunteers), so it shouldn't come as a surprise that the balloons that make the annual cut are the ones that Macy's can make money on. That was true even in 1940, when Macy's had a sponsorship deal with National Periodicals to produce exclusive Superman merchandise, as you can see from this advertisement from page 21 of the May 16, 1940, edition of the New York Daily News:

If you look at those illustrations of Superman, the S-shield is clearly visible on his cape. However, the "playsuit" that Macy's sold to kids, not so much. It was just a solid red sheet with a comics-inaccurate blue drawstring. (The pants featured pictures of Superman around the waist, so comics accuracy was clearly not a big concern.)

For the record, the very first Superman to ever appear in a parade was Ray Middleton, who dressed the part as the Metropolis Marvel for "Superman Day" on July 3 at the 1940 New York World's Fair. The event was created to promote the New York World's Fair Comic 1940 Issue featuring Superman (and Batman and Robin!). In the comic, Superman very clearly has a shield on his cape, but Middleton's costume didn't. If the "real" Superman had a solid red cape, the kids at Macy's couldn't be too disappointed.

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Today is my fiftieth birthday. That's a nice, round, easy-to-add number, which is probably why I remember figuring in elementary school that I would turn 50 in the distant, future year 2025. That seemed a very long way off back then. A 50-year-old me still feels a long way off, and I guess that's just going to have to be good enough.

UPDATE: Look at this sweet stack of books that my aunt gave me! Famous Last Words: An Anthology, A Brief History of Death, Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Imperialism, The Fires of Lust: Sex on the Middle Ages, But Can I Start a Sentence with "But"?: Advice from the Chicago Style Q&A, Who's a Good Dog?: And How to Be a Better Human, Canine Confidential: Why Dogs Do What They Do, and Show People: A History of the Film Star. (Don't blame her. I picked all of those titles out from a University of Chicago Press catalog. What can I say? I like to read about death, comic books, sex, grammar, dogs, and movies, maybe even in that order.)

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Today is the The Good One®'s fourth birthday!

I told Henry he had to sit real nice for a birthday portrait, and he did.

However, I think his brother is starting to get jealous of all that special birthday attention.

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Look, I know 2024 was really rocky but we can do better. I'm probably the last guy who should give an invocation pep talk, but I'd like to share a few words with America to get 2025 started on the right foot:

So take that look out of here; it doesn't fit you. Because it's happened doesn't mean you've been discarded. Pull up your head off the floor, come up screaming, cry out for everything you ever might have wanted.

I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered, but you can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered. I'm not expecting to grow flowers in a desert, but I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime.

In a big country, dreams stay with you (like a lover's voice fires a mountainside). Stay alive.

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For a guy who claims not to like Christmas very much, I sure do buy a lot of Christmas-themed comic books.

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Want to know why Louisiana would willingly violate federal law to require the 10 Commandments in all kindergartens? The 1991 Chick tract Sin Busters has the answer:

Declaration of Independence writer and third president Thomas Jefferson may have written that Congress should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," but that's just because he was part of the evil world system!

God bless the real America!

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