Clark Fable

WORD OF ROUTH
Superman Returns star Brandon Routh has a lot riding on his super shoulders: not just the long-delayed, very expensive ($350 million-plus) relaunch of a two-decades-dormant movie franchise, but also the pop-cultural future of a character born in a long-ago, more gee-whiz era. But Superman has been reinvented many times over the past 70 years, as the following gallery shows, and he's been embraced through each change, each new medium, and each world-historical stage. ''Is Superman relevant?'' director Bryan Singer recently asked EW, posing the rhetorical question behind his 2006 movie. ''Look around. Aren't we crying out for him?''