Superman in Japan – Tatsuo Yoshida’s 1960 Manga

June 18th, 2021

In the image below, you will find a cover from Tatsuo Yoshida’s 1959-1960 Superman Manga. While not properly in print, just from the cover we can see something very interesting regarding how Superman is seen in Japan. Particularly, his name.

The Katakana on the left, スーパーマン, is Superman said phonetically. So it would be read as Sūpāman. Katakana is used mostly for foriegn words, even though that’s just how the language works, I feel that it makes Superman feel more otherwordly. I do love that they still took the style of Superman’s classic typography and applied it to the katakana.