15. Whitney Fordham Isn't From The Comics
Although films can often influence the comics (recent Marvel heroes bear a startling resemblance to those we see on screen), its rare for a comic book movie to take much influence from anything other than the paper source. This is mainly due to most superheroes having little more than a Saturday morning cartoon to their name when they hit the big screen. Superman, on the other hand, has a ten season TV series to his name (amongst others). And Man Of Steel has some fun in referencing characters purely made for Smallville. Whitney Fordman, the child who attacks Clark outside the garage, appeared in the first two series of Smallville (albeit under the slightly altered name of Fordham). Its nice to see a character so instrumental in making Superman cool to a new generation get an (admittedly very small) cameo here.
14. Fortress Of Solitude Is A Mishmash Of Ideas
Fans of the original Superman films will have noticed some startling differences between the representation of Kal-Els Fortress Of Solitude. The original movies had it as a crystal castle formed from a gem sent with Superman to Earth, which isn't too comic accurate, but the one most people imagine thanks to the first two films immersion in popular culture. The fortress in Man Of Steel is a long lost Kryptonian spacecraft frozen in the arctic, which may seem like a totally new idea, but is in fact a merging of three different versions. The arctic setting (as well the El key) come straight from the Silver Age, the same source for the original movie's, but the notion of it being a remnant of Krypton and in particular a spaceship is straight out of later comics. This is really representative of the rest of the film; pieced together from various bits of Superman mythology.