It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s …
Idea
I woke up one morning and an idea popped into my head for a pop-up with a Batman-like cat jumping from one rooftop to another. After thinking about covers and mechanisms for Batman, I decided to switch to a different superhero: Superman! Although revived and popular these days, the Batman I knew was Adam West, in black and white. And George Reeves was Superman. Those are classic. And even now, I enjoy listening to old-time radio shows, such as Superman, as I work on the pop-ups. What can be better than a man who “fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way!”
The intro to the TV and radio show also gave me the idea of mini pop-ups for the three powers it mentions:
Faster than a speeding bullet,
More powerful than a locomotive,
Able to leap tall buildings
in a single bound,
Look, up in the sky!
It's a bird!
It's a plane!
It's Superman!
Design
The main mechanism is two parallelograms. Supercat is attached to the back of the card, which pulls him up. The flag is on a vertical piece of card attached to the base that slots through Supercat’s support.
Parallelograms
You may think that the cat looks familiar, and you’d be right. The design was created for the “Three Little Kittens” pop-ups used in May through June of 2018. They also appeared in the “Hole in the Road” pop-up of April 2023 and “played” chess in May 2024.
These main mechanisms were printed on the computer and cut out using the print-and-cut feature. I was pleased how well it worked this time, with only a tiny bit of white showing on some edges.
In front are three mini pop-ups.
Faster than…
For “Faster than a speeding bullet,” I wanted the bullet to come out of the gun as the mechanism was opened. This proved to be the trickiest part of the design. The gun is a floating plane, but I needed a right-to-left movement for the bullet. I thought of using a flap that pops up as the card is opened. I’ve used a flap before in a pull-tab (see 2023 birthday), but in this instance, I used the main fold to pull the tab as it opened.
The image of my sketch below shows how it works. The pull tab and flap are in orange. It is attached on the left in this view, goes through a slot on the right (dotted), and then back up. As the main fold opens, it pulls the orange tab to the left. It pivots on the blue asterisk, which pushes the green part (the bullet) to the right.
Bullet mechanism
I had to be careful to make the orange part fit under the floating plane of the gun without hitting it as it closed. At the tip of the gun barrel is a sleeve for the bullet to slide through as it moves right.
This gif may help visualize how it works. See how the gun (green) comes down as the card is closed? The orange tab can’t be too tall, or it would hit as it closed.
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Of course, you noticed that the tab goes through the base of the card, which is the front of the mini. To hide that, this mini has a layer of paper on the top. To allow for the tab’s movement, it must be glued only on three sides.
Since the gun’s tip is on the left, as you open it, you just see the tail end of the movement. I tried putting it on the right side, but then it was very strange since it made it look like the gun was coming out of the bullet!
The other minis were simpler. For “More powerful than a locomotive”, I used an asymmetric parallel fold.
More powerful than…
For “Able to leap tall buildings”, I used a floating plane. For these simpler ones, most of the time was spent filling in the details on the progressively smaller train cars and windows.
Able to leap…
All of the minis used colored cardstock, illustrated with ink pens.
Finally, I had to keep the three mini pop-ups closed when the card was opened. To do this, I used small flaps to tuck in the corners. I used this technique in the twelve pop-ups of 2015. That year, all twelve pop-ups had mini pop-ups on the inside, demonstrating different pop-up techniques.
These photos show cutting the slots for a corner tab and setting it in place. When gluing them down, I used a piece of card three layers thick to avoid crushing the corner or making it too tight.
Corner flaps to hold mini pop-ups closed
Here’s the view of the back showing all the corner tabs glued down.
Back showing the corner tabs
Cover
The cover was created on the computer and printed out.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base is Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb.
- The mechanisms are index paper.