Death of Superman - 20 years later

[Chad]

First I heard of the upcoming death was an article in the paper describing Superman's killer as an escapee from an intergalactic mental hospital. It was actually just a few months ago that I found out that this tidbit was taken from an offhand comment Mike Carlin made about Doomsday's motivations. The last time I had heard about anything Superman related in the news would have been a fairly short time before that blurb announcing that Joe Shuster had passed away - strange timing.

Although I figured Superman would be back, I didn't know how long he'd be gone for. A year? Year and a half? When DC later got rid of Bruce Wayne for that amount of time I lost enough interest in the titles that I've never really been able to go back with any great amount of enthusiasm.

Although I can now look back and see that this was a pretty lousy story - seven issues of Superman punching a big dumb monster/Big dumb monster punching Superman - at the time I didn't really think along those lines. I don't think I had enough experience with bad comics at that time to really recognize one...until I opened up my copy of Superman and read it. Even at 13 I could tell this wasn't a good story. Nothing but giant splash pages of Superman once again punching Doomsday and being punched back. I would have thought a death of Superman story would have contained some poignancy - a last message from Superman, last moment/words with Lois - but there was nothing. I thought Funeral for a Friend was much better and lost interest in the four Supermen fairly early on. What felt strange were those empty Next Issue boxes in the letters page for Action/Adventure/etc in those final issues of the funeral. "There is no information on Superman 78 at this time" "There is no information on Action Comics 688 at this time" "There is..."

I also remember the trading cards that came out at this time - I think they were released the same day at Superman 75 - and how any images of Batman had to be replaced with Captain Marvel due to DC not owning the licence of Batman for trading cards at this time. There was a decent parody comic released as well - Death of Stupidman which was actually pretty funny. Interesting thing about this was that it was released with two different covers and two different interiors (each one contained a different six page sequence or so than the other).

Surprisingly, the best thing to come out of the death in my opinion however, was the special Wizard released at the time. Including interviews with Alvin Schwartz about the earliest Superman/Batman team-ups and Mort Weisgner; Eliot Maggin about who Superman is and what purpose Clark Kent serves in his life; articles in which various creators relate their favorite Superman stories; a Who's Who of Superman's cast of characters both pre and post Crisis; this magazine remains a valuable and fascinating look at the character.

[Venomous Mask]

The Death and Return of Superman was the first Superman comic that I ever read. I loved the whole thing, though Reign of the Supermen is definitely the best part. Cyborg is one of my favorite Superman villains, and I love how the whole thing seemed to be channeling T2.

[Jezebel Bond]

Cyborg is one of my favorite Superman villains, and I love how the whole thing seemed to be channeling T2.

I gotta admit I liked this cover when I first saw it...it was also one of the first books I ever ordered from East Coast Comics, I think I still have one of Clyde's Credit Notes somewhere (worst red hand-writing ever on a yellow piece of paper)....

[SJNeal]

I gotta admit I liked this cover when I first saw it...it was also one of the first books I ever ordered from East Coast Comics

I loooved East Coast Comics! They were the first mail order company I ever used.

Their shipping times were excrutiatingly long by todays standards, but every time I got a big brown box from them it was like christmas morning!

On topic: I used them to fill in a couple of issues I'd missed during the "Reign" arc, and of course they were well above cover price by then... *sigh*

[dupersuper]

Pa Kent made a remark similar to that in the story

Yeah: he implied Clark was dying partially because he expected to die.

According to Johnny Blaze, if a streetfight lasts more than a few seconds, you've lost.

...Both of you?

[Mace Dolex]

When the news broke out months before the actual comic I remember coverage of it on CNN, Entertainment Tonight and people saying that this was permanent of which I actually believed and wondered how they were going to pull it off.

And of course the usual non-Superman fans giving their two cents on how outdated Supes was and were thrilled to have him die because of course in the turbulent crime ridden 90's you needed hard edged heroes like Wolverine, Punisher. what idiots.

I did manage to buy a 4th printing of issue #75 for cover price but I wasn't pulled in by the hype entirely, nowadays I've gotten into a nostalgia craze that I managed to get all Death, Reign, Return Of Superman issues in bargain bins.