Ponder, galen, please don’t link to this site–it’s been disabled by the mods before for spreading spyware / malware.
I have been told by a reliable source that the website Superdickery, fun though it is, was hacked and is laden with Spyware and “links to various virus nasties.” I’ve disabled the links, so that you can go there if you wish, but be fore-warned and cautious.
Kytheria, thanks for the warning – you beat me to it! But, please, in future, don’t quote a bad link, it just means I have to disable it in your quote as well. 
So, CWG, what does your kid think of the comics?
If you want to recapture some of the magic of the early superman books as a jaded adult I recommend Alan Moore’s “Supreme: story of the Year”. Reading it took me back to hot summer days in my grandmother’s stufy atttic, with a suitcase of 10 cent comics and a lemonade.
It runs through all the familar story lines from Superman with respect and a lot of love, not the tinny detached ironic touch that is “hip”. It meshes them with the modern superhero without feeling forced. Everything about the book is familiar and warm, even if you’ve never heard of supreme.
The book will let you be twelve again for a couple of hours. Which, for fifteen dollars, is a pretty good deal.
There’s no doubt that a lot of Superman stories from the late fifties and early 1960s were really reaching. As has been noted, they were shackled by the Comics Code authority and meant for pre-teens. So you ended up with Batman fighting alien menaces, and Superman dealiong with Kryptonian beasts that projected their thoughts onto a built-in screen (what possible evolutionary processes can lead to that?)
But it wasn’t all ludicrous. You had science fiction writers like Gardner Fox doing stories for titles like Mystery in Space, and some of the concepts and stories weren’t bad. Some of them were clever logic puzzles. And Adam Strange had a girlfriend on another planet! Was that cool or what? It even made up for him wearing that loony costume. DC comics had much better sciFi than Marvel, especially when Marvel was still churning out Giant Monster stories like “Kragoo! The Beast that Stalked Men!”
Of course, then Marvel started its own superhero line and blew a lot of DC out of the water.
But then DC re-vamped Batman, sending him back to his detective/crime-fighting roots. (He never completely left it – some 1950s Batman stories are straight detective stuff, with pretty neat solutions. But it was buried under the more common Invaders from Mars stuff) The “New Lok” Batman had a fast and speedy car and believable gadgets. But it didn’t last. When the campy TV series started, the comics followed suit, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that Batman became respectable and started slouching into what eventually became the Dark Knight stuiff.
Oh, he likes it, of course. Superman is cool because he’s got all these super powers. My boy is not really interested in the story, just the action.
In contrast, I can still watch Road Runner & Coyote cartoons and enjoy them just as much as when I was a kid. (Not true of made-for-TV Spider-Man cartoons.)