I didn't like Sandy Superman. He was coarse and rough and irritating and got everywhere.

I remember reading this as a kid and just waiting for the reveal.

"Oh, is Sandy going to be Bizarro? Or Parasite? What is it? Who is it?!"

It's a Sand-Man. He's made of sand.

"brain damage, sprain spramage, I'm spreeling sprine" lol

Still waiting for the gritty, miserable, realistic reinvention of TITANO, THE SUPER APE

When you described his powers being weaker after the Kryptonite explosion I went, "Ah! So the explosion permanently dampened his powers and also removed all Kryptonite so that he could believably struggle without the need for the contrivance of Kryptonite, smart!" then we kept getting more and more stuff about his powers going up and down....and more......and more

I yelled out loud "Oh, not this guy!" when I Ching showed up. I like his character nowadays (he was great in New Superman), but I desperately try to forget that era of Wonder Woman.

Sandy Supes sounds like a reporter from a pulp detective novel

Author's main focus: Let's weaken Superman generally but take away Kryptonite, so the stories get more interesting!
Next Author: reverts the weakening, does not reintroduce Kryptonite
Result: Superman is now more powerful and even less in danger than ever before
...poor author...

I read Superman to my son all the time when he was young , always a fan

Growing up we had a random collection of comics one of my brothers had bought which included only the first issue of this arc.  It’s nice to finally know how it ended.  Thank you.

So all the Kryptonite turning into Iron says something fascinating about Kryptonite. There is a function in chemistry that sometimes can create an infectious cascade of molecules shifting from one crystalline form to another with different properties. It happens when just the right conditions are met, and a bit of a crystalline structure shifts into a different state that has a lower energy requirement to maintain, but in doing so crosses a threshold where the energy required to resume it's usual state is too high to be achieved. As these altered molecules contact other molecules of the same original structure they too cascade into this lower energy state, and soon as molecules travel on the air, or carried as dust on clothes, and find their way to untainted reservoirs of the compound, and soon you have a substance that no longer serves its original function. It's happened before with pharmaceuticals. Veritasium recently did a video about it. Anyway If Kryptonite suddenly shifted into regular iron, what it could suggest is that kryptonite is actually an alternative crystalline form of iron which gains it's special properties not from its chemical makeup, but the specific structure of it's molecular bonds, but when exposed to the right conditions (the kryptonite engine exploding) it caused the kryptonite to cascade into its more energetically efficient configuration, regular iron.

Dennis O'Neil, just like James Gunn, understood that it isn't the superpowers that define Superman as a hero, it's the man behind the cape who inspires hope, optimism, and love.

I love that ending thought about Superman's appeal lying in his dedicaton to helping, even when he has no logical reason to do so. That core goodness is what makes him so interesting and unique, and your channel has allowed me to better understand why I feel so drawn to him. One of my Best Superman Ever moments is in the My Adventures With show, where someone asks him how he knew he was bulletproof. His response: "I didn't. I just knew you weren't."

The earth-shattering bombs were clearly q-36 space modulators, available from Acme (and Warner Brothers).
I counted at least 5 "as you do" spaces during your narration.

23:27 There we go, that center panel, that face cracks me up. I'd call it a shit-eating grin but he's snacking on kryptonite.

At this time, Jimmy Olsen was involved with the Fourth World in his own title; however, before Kirby came on board, millionaire Hal Rand was ready to adopt Jimmy.   (He didn't, because Jimmy's dad was still alive.)   I'm sure he would gladly pay Superman's medical bills.

Jimmy Olsen taught me that asking for ketchup in a French restaurant was not a good idea.

The idea of a Kryptonite Fusion engine is amazing!

I love the mix of fantastical sincerity, sardonic incredulity, and genuine love for the character that you delivered this with. It made me feel like my adult self and my child self were sitting down to read a comic book together 🙂

3:30 The mail rocket was a real concept that never escaped early design stages despite multiple attempted designs in the early 20th century. It was theorized to be a potential solution to rapidly delivering sensitive paperwork such as military orders cross-country and the US Post Office was successfully using guided cruise missiles to experiment with delivering mail rapidly between military bases as recently as the late 1950s (the US Navy provided the missiles sans nuclear warheads but deemed the system unworkable due to the cost of the rockets). In 1964, Xerox created the first fax machine that could transmit over a standard telephone line and soon afterwards that became the globally preferred technology for instant sensitive document transmission as a single legal sized page of text or photograph could be delivered anywhere in the world via fax in less than 10 minutes - much faster and cheaper than any physical mail delivery system.

Can’t wait to see Steve talk about Man of Steel separately; I was a John Byrne X-Men fan and loved Man of Steel series and it was what humanized Superman for me  and got me interested in the character.