The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times. Joseph J. Darowski, Ed. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012. Editor Joseph J. Darowski reports that . . . has remained relevant for than seven decades of uninterrupted narratives (1). This remark becomes significant when we are told that the comic books been published continuously since 1938, with a new story, or even five or six new stories, appearing on a more-or-less monthly schedule (2). The high side of such calculation yields ten thousand tales. However, that number does not include daily strips, Sunday funnies, animations, radio, TV, or movies. To Darowski's reckoning one should also add Superman experiences enabled by comics scanned for the Internet. Thanks to comiXology (a company that digitizes comic books), action comics has been licensed for streaming to Apple iPhone, iPads, iPod Touch, and Sony Playstation PSP. Darowski and contributors have chosen to place all these tellings in culturally evolutionary perspectives, exploring how a fantasy character, born for kids, could survive so many altered cultural and commercial imperatives. (By comparison, Dennis Dooley and Gary D. Engle's edited collection, Superman at Fifty!: The Persistence of a Legend [1987], focused less consistently on the how of cultural survival.) When one recalls that the stiffly drawn and formula-plotted creations of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel showed plot fatigue in the late `30s before the franchise felt thematic temblors from Axis fascism and Soviet Communism, the survival has long been a miracle. The chronologically ordered essays narrate and interpret coherent periods that are aligned with emergent articulations of the Superman character and his supporting cast that occasionally spun off into their own books. These scholars write snappy essays with rich footnotes and bibliographies that lead to unexpected and fascinating primary and commentary sources. Those who feel knowledgeable about the history of Superman should be prepared for instructive embarrassments. Space permits me to mention just a few expositions. Todd Munson's Says You Can Slap a Jap! sketches a racially motivated warrior who often fought Japoteurs on the home front and the Japanazis elsewhere (6-7). Superman and Lois even visit a Japanese internment camp and find it more than a reasonable setup (9). A less fervent post-WWII Superman sat out the Korean and Vietnam Wars while attention turned to radiation and space invasion, both Cold War metaphors, and to the limits of Superman's own power-echoing the frustrations and castigating self judgments about Vietnam. …