Super powers on display

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: Jun 26, 2009

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Zowie!

He can leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Wait a minute. That’s mixing Batman terminology with Superman’s, isn’t it? Can’t think of a single time Superman said “zowie.”

And really, can’t think of too many times that he actually jumped over a tall building.

In a single bound.

Really, why would he need to leap when he could fly?

“That’s one of the interesting things about Superman,” Hugh O’Connor said. “Originally, Superman couldn’t fly. He started out leaping over tall buildings, but the Fleischer Studios had a lot of trouble animating this, so they asked if they could change it so Superman could fly.”

That was in the 1940s. Action Comics debuted Superman in 1938.

“And he really didn’t have all the super powers that he has today,” O’Connor said.

Fleischer Studios, meantime, animated nine Superman episodes before Paramount bought the rights to the hero. But that’s jumping ahead.

First, everyone meet O’Connor, who calls himself a true comic geek. Well, he’s more than that.

O’Connor is the curator of the exhibit KaPow: Superheroes in the Comics and Cartoons, showing through July 30 at the LSU Student Union Art Gallery.

That fact, in and of itself, sort of makes O’Connor a superman — or a super curator, so to speak. For there’s so much to see here, maybe too much to take in during one visit.