Also cashing in on Superman month is my local Dairy Queen, which used the famous Superman s-shield in an poster promoting Father's Day cakes. I'm sure every young boy at some point compares his father to Superman, but it's kind of weird to figure that the Father's Day holiday would be promoted by an orphan who never met his father.

I think I mentioned earlier this month that DC was changing Superman's costume in September as a means to "youngify" their line of characters. (That's DC's term, not mine.) It's hard to imagine that they are serious when places like Dairy Queen are using his iconic logo to promote fatherhood. Well, promote the commerce of frozen dairy desserts in the name of inter-familial relationships via nostalgia-inducing popular culture characters, but you know what I mean.

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Tomorrow is Father's Day. It will be the first post-father Father's Day for Clark Kent, whose father died of a heart attack last October. Unless you count the 49 years of comic book stories in which Pa Kent was already dead before his sudden resurrection in 1986. Or the movies, in which Glenn Ford's Pa Kent suffered a heart attack in 1978. Or on television, where John Schneider's Pa Kent heart attack struck in 2006. But why nitpick?

Now who will Superman play catch with? Who will spank Superman when he plays hooky from school, or send him to his room without supper when he breaks the neighbor's fence? Who will give Superman a ride to the library, or lend him a sawbuck for a date with his sweetheart? Nobody, that's who. And that's pretty darn sad.

Let's just hope that the bitter pill of traumatic loss won't linger in Superman's gut, where the heartburn could fester into a burning sensation of hatred, destroying Superman's legendary appetite for Coca-Cola, apple pie, and a heaping helping of everything else boiling together in that great American melting pot.

Uh-oh.

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