“In these times of fear and confusion, the job of informing the public was the responsibility of the Daily Planet—a great metropolitan newspaper whose reputation for clarity and truth had become a symbol of hope for the city of Metropolis.”
I was ten years old when I first heard those words.
In the third week of December 1978, I was firmly placed in a movie theater seat in Syracuse, New York. The lights dimmed. The first notes of music began. On-screen, black and white curtains parted as a boy approximately my own age turned the pages of a comic book to a panel of a magnificent edifice we all instantly recognized. The pure strength of stone. The vision of a world united upon its apex. It was every bit the national monument to what this country should be as the Statue of Liberty.
THIS was the Daily Planet.
I thought the people who worked inside those windows must be the most honorable, trustworthy, and courageous people you could ever hope to be—and I hoped to one day be one.
‘Go! Get on that story!’
I did, of course, what any kid would do who wanted to work at a newspaper right away.
I made my own.
My first front-page headline story was of a family of possums I had seen in the woods behind our house. I didn’t have a cub photographer to take pictures of them for me so I made do with my own illustration.
Fast-forward to 1988. I am now a sophomore at North Texas State University and working at the North Texas Daily campus newspaper as an editorial illustrator. I had a realistic pen and ink style the editor liked for hard news items he couldn’t get pictures for—just like my possums. I would draw AK-47s for articles about violence, the scroll of the Constitution for legal issues, and even King Kong climbing the campus radio tower for a piece about censorship.
Seated next to me was a cartoonist who had more of a clean, flowing style. His name was Jeff Snow. By 1993, he was in Hollywood working as a storyboard artist for “Batman: The Animated Series” and “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm”—not to mention the award-winning career he’s had since with Disney, Dreamworks, Warner Bros, and others. His IMDB credits are beyond enviable.
We became friendly colleagues. He showed me a few tricks. Sometimes, I would daydream that my phone would ring, and he’d say, “Come out to LA and make cartoons with us!”—but I was happy. I was working at a paper with the word “Daily” in it, and the editor liked me. I was getting there.
It is now 2002, and my graphic design degree has turned into a career as an art director for city magazines, where designing logos and mastheads was a core strength. I also wrote an article or two.
Then, on February 7, 2023, I got the shock of my life.
By that time, I had been doing charity work as the (of course) Christopher Reeve version of Superman for a few years. Podcaster Anthony Desiato invited me to be a guest on his show Digging for Kryptonite to talk about it. The episode came out. I was proud of it. I thought that was that until I got a message from the editor of the Daily Planet.
He liked the interview so much that he made it the lead story on the front page.
I was on the front page. Of the DAILY PLANET.
I messaged the editor right away to thank him. His name was Zack Benz. He was, and is, a great guy. It turned out we had a lot in common, as he said he always wanted to grow up to be Perry White, and I ended up becoming Clark Kent. I mentioned I had written an article or two myself back in the day. He said, “I’d love to read one! Maybe you can write something for us.”
I am quite sure that sentence sent time ripples back to my 10-year-old self with whatever the quantum equivalent of a universe obtaining completion would be.
Since then, I’ve written numerous articles for Zack and interviewed some amazing people. I tell you this story so you fully understand what the Planet means to me and why, even then, it was a shock to see his text on October 4, 2024:
“Hello! So, how would you design the Daily Planet logo?”
Resculpting Mount Rushmore
The question rang in my ears. How would I design the Daily Planet logo? On one hand, how many people in the history of the Superman mythology have ever been given the chance to do what I was just asked to do? On the other…how would I design the Daily Planet logo?
So I did what I always do when I have no idea how I am going to do something, but there is no way I can let the opportunity pass me by. Say yes. Figure it out later.
And start with the history.
Since the Fleischer cartoons of the early 1940s, the look of the newspaper has evolved with the times. Zack was about to celebrate his 10th year of publication and really wanted to reinvigorate it with a decisively new look that would be all its own. He had a short wish list, but everything on it was important:
“Something more modern/crisp without being ultra-modern—that acknowledges the history while still standing alone. Not whimsical. It needs to instill journalistic integrity. News orgs that are old and storied instill accountability and trust. I want the logo to do that, too.”
I knew exactly what he meant. I gathered up a landscape of current major newspapers.
They ranged from the completely minimalist blue dot of USA Today to those who, even in 2024, refused to give up their Old English gothic font treatments. I couldn’t help feeling that the more modern the look, the more tabloid the vibe—and that was NOT what the Planet deserved.
So then…what?
Zack had written a prior article showcasing every Daily Planet newspaper logo in history. I looked at those. Some were a generic planet. Some looked like Saturn. Some looked like Saturn with the words sitting on the ring. Some depicted Earth with a band around it for the words. Some were Earth with a ribbon banner. One was deeply Victorian in its ornamentation. Some were very early 2000s modern—already now dated in their look. Some had map lines and continents. Some had neither.
I looked at exterior shots of the globe from the first appearance of it in 1942’s “The Arctic Giant” cartoon to the magnificent Alex Ross painting of Superman holding it like a modern Atlas.
Clearly, the Art Deco influence persisted throughout, even in the “Lois and Clark” and “Smallville” TV series versions—but again, that was the past. None were a clear guide to the future.
Then it occurred to me: “What does Perry White have?” If anything would endorse what the Daily Planet should embody, it would be whatever he had in his own office.
I quickly remembered my answer.
This globe sat proudly on Perry’s desk in “Superman: The Movie” but was much more famous for being the one he threw at General Zod’s giant henchman, Non, in “Superman II.” It showed a thin banner clinging tightly to the globe with moderately sized type.
I also discovered Perry once had his own comic book, complete with a globe on the cover of issue no.1. It showed simple latitude and longitude lines but no distinguishable continents.
Now we were getting somewhere.
The epiphany
Looking at the Jackie Cooper version of Perry kept bringing me back to the Richard Donner interpretation—and my childhood response to first seeing the Daily Planet in that intro.
Seeing that building dissolve, transition, and become real was a tangible, indelible experience. There was nothing like it. To me, that was the Daily Planet and…
It hit me.
In all the years of Daily Planet newspaper logos, they’d only ever used the globe…no one had ever done the building.
That’s what we would do. I quickly worked one up just to see how it vibed.
It was, as they say, “a start.” A straight depiction of the Donner version in silhouette made the globe look like a water tower, and the building lacked the character it deserved, but I felt the idea was solid. It just needed…something. I was satisfying my own nostalgia, but was I really giving Zack what he was hoping for? I mean, after all, he told me he loved the Daily Planet so much he once built a whole Metropolis in his backyard complete with a sculpture of the building in it and…
I scooted back in my chair.
That was it. We’d use his sculpture. We’d tie the whole thing into not just the fictional history of the paper but his own actual history of creating it out of pure love and his own two hands.
Knowing the oversimplified silhouette was too far in the minimalist direction, I wanted to try something more detailed, like the Donner version. I also wanted to tighten up the vertical spacing between the top two floors, add windows, have the globe itself straight, and tilt the words in the other direction. Most printed newspaper versions have the globe and banner tilted left. I felt having the banner tilt right would be another distinctive feature of ours.
Two things were important to me about the globe itself: that its navigation lines show the direction to be straight—a world not off-kilter but upright, rotating on a central axis with a sense of stability; and that it does not show borders. This was the Daily PLANET. Superman sees Earth as all one world and the home of Superman should too. Any reader anywhere in the world should be able to see our icon and not feel like their home was left out of the picture.
I gave the globe the Perry White comic book amount of navigation lines while keeping Zack’s original sculpture font size and position. I added the windows I wanted to peek through as a kid. It was important as a metaphor that the building felt alive. You should sense the vibrant activity going on in there and want to be a part of it.
I had the sketch. It was time to test it on the ultimate canvas: a Richard Donner newspaper with a customized new Daily Planet font and Zack’s pitch-perfect tagline underneath.
That clinched it for me.
The rest (hopefully) would be all execution.
The art would be built from scratch with as close to the lettering from Zack’s sculpture as I could make, a more centered banner, and corrected building perspective that would make it feel “real”—especially once all the detail was put in. I love old 1920s architectural posters and hoped to capture some of that for the new logo.
Disappointingly, as much as I put into the classic Art Deco look (and as happy as I was with the outcome) when shrunk down to masthead size, all the detail was lost. I was going to have to go simpler. Some of those clean-line techniques I picked up from Jeff Snow came in handy as I made a logo for a digital era. Times have changed in the hundred years since the 1920s. This would have to work as tiny avatars on smartphone screens.
I created the illusion of detail by keeping the inner lines thin while thickening the outer ones. Darkening the banner and the center of the building gave the icon weight as well as paid homage to Donner’s version and the sculpture.
Some final tweaks to line weights, the incorporation of cast shadows, showing it around to everyone I knew for their gut reaction and…it was done.
Hard to believe. But it was done.
Zack loved it. I was still silently grieving the loss of the Deco version, so I channeled that feeling into productivity and made a commemorative poster as if we were the architects (which we were). In the end, I sent him both. I made sure the poster was 24×30 so he could have a huge print of it for his office, like Perry would.
For the lettering of the masthead itself, Zack seized an opportunity he’d been hoping to capitalize on for years—paying tribute to a publication he sees as the original source of the paper’s legacy.
I found a font that very closely captured the original while he worked on a sleeker version that would hopefully keep that same sense of history and integrity.
Zack’s instincts were dead on. The solid weight of his customized font matched the icon perfectly.
It had been over two and a half months since that first text asking what I would do with the design. As it turned out, the answer wasn’t what would I do—but what we would do together.
The curtains open
“Daily Planet gets real-world makeover”
I was 56 years old when I first read those words.
In the third week of December 2024, I was placed firmly in my home office chair in Dallas, Texas. The early morning lights were still dimmed. The first heartbeats of anticipation began—my finger hovering over my mouse as the cursor hovered over the refresh button. I clicked it.
On screen, the black and white masthead of the last ten years blinked. For a moment there was only white. Then that space full of potential was filled as all the dreams of a young boy beheld the front page of the Daily Planet display a magnificent icon we all instantly recognize. The pure strength of integrity. The vision of a world united with truth. It was every bit the symbol of what this newspaper could be as the man in the cape himself.
THIS was the Daily Planet.
The wonderful irony of the timing is that it debuted within the same 48 hours as the first look trailer for James Gunn’s “Superman.” There was so much hope and joy about those first images. It seemed everyone was talking about Superman. It was glorious to see the world react like I did as a boy. I felt like we fit right into all that love. I will always look back on those two days as the birth of a new era.
Zack was hard at work implementing our design everywhere: Facebook, X, Instagram…and each time I smiled at how well the icon played in those spaces. When I added the direct link to DailyPlanetDC.com to my iPhone’s home screen and saw the avatar appear I allowed myself a tinge of pride. There was no mistaking where it was or what it was.
However, nothing—and I do mean nothing—compared to the feeling I got each and every time that day when I gazed upon the new Daily Planet itself.
I won’t tell you how many times I did that. It was “over 21.”
It was 46 years to the week since I saw that first image of the Daily Planet building fill the big screen. I thought the people that worked inside those windows must be the most honorable, trustworthy, and courageous people you could ever hope to be—and I hoped to one day be one.
They say all art should have a story. This was mine.
For everyone reading this now or who may come to this publication for years to come—if you are here in search of everything you’d expect to find under the masthead that carries that name and that image, I have no doubt you will find it—for you have found that place. People who live and breathe its ideals literally sculpted it into being, and they did it for you.
So for you, and for generations to come, we quote Lois Lane:
“Welcome to the Planet.”
