Source: Man of Steel #1 (1986)
Type: The real deal (since retconned)
I'd read my share of Superman stories before 1986, but I wasn't a loyal subscriber to any of his series. Then, my fave writer-artist from Fantastic Four, Alpha Flight, et al., John Byrne, jumped ship and rebooted Superman for the post-Crisis era and I was hooked. Getting into Superman from the ground floor was an experience you couldn't really claim to have had before unless you were around in 1938, but here I was, holding the Man of Steel mini-series in my hands and living the dream. His Krypton was an alien wasteland, his Clark Kent a football hero, and his Lex Luthor DC's answer to the Kingpin. It was awesome.
It wasn't without its problems, mind you. While it was great to see all the Superman concepts reinvented, it also played havoc with DC's timeline. Had Superman only been fighting two-bit crooks for all those years before a single supervillain came out of the woodwork? Or was he something of a rookie compared to other Justice Leaguers? Some revamped concepts didn't really work. His Brainiac was lame and his Supergirl didn't really work, but at least he threw us for a loop each and every time.
In a quest to take Superman away from the excesses of pre-Crisis continuity (what the Silver Age wrought), Byrne also changed the nature of Superman's powers, making them more psionic in nature. Superman could lift an outrageous amount of weight, but after a certain limit, would somehow project an antigravity field around the object so that it wouldn't collapse from the stress. His hear vision became a type of directed pyrokinesis, with only his red eyes the only tale-tell sign that he was using it. Over-explaining things? Yes, there's definitely a Marvel sensibility at work, where powers had to be explained to get No-Prizes or be detailed for the Marvel Universe Handbook.
In time, and with each passing Crisis, much of what Byrne (and the writers that supported or followed him) did with Superman passed into the night. Superman once again shoots beams from his eyes and freeze breath from his mouth. He was once again the Legion's Superboy. Supergirl and Krypto also survived Krypton's destruction. Brainiac is back to bottling cities. And yet, there are things he did that have become Superman canon. That Superman is a solar battery, thus explaining why his powers work under a yellow sun. The place his human parents hold in his world. Cat Grant and Ron Troupe. LexCorp. And going all the way back to the beginning, the look of the Kryptonian Science Guild and Kal-El's rocket.
No matter the realities undone since the mid-80s, Byrne left an indelible stamp on Superman and his family of books. Most of all, he's the reason a whole other generation of readers flocked to the Superman books when they were at their ebb, putting the #1 superhero back on the pedestal where he belonged.
(Two weeks in... how m'I doin'? Personally, Reign has been a great motivator. I hope you're having as much fun with it as I am.)
Type: The real deal (since retconned)
I'd read my share of Superman stories before 1986, but I wasn't a loyal subscriber to any of his series. Then, my fave writer-artist from Fantastic Four, Alpha Flight, et al., John Byrne, jumped ship and rebooted Superman for the post-Crisis era and I was hooked. Getting into Superman from the ground floor was an experience you couldn't really claim to have had before unless you were around in 1938, but here I was, holding the Man of Steel mini-series in my hands and living the dream. His Krypton was an alien wasteland, his Clark Kent a football hero, and his Lex Luthor DC's answer to the Kingpin. It was awesome.It wasn't without its problems, mind you. While it was great to see all the Superman concepts reinvented, it also played havoc with DC's timeline. Had Superman only been fighting two-bit crooks for all those years before a single supervillain came out of the woodwork? Or was he something of a rookie compared to other Justice Leaguers? Some revamped concepts didn't really work. His Brainiac was lame and his Supergirl didn't really work, but at least he threw us for a loop each and every time.
In a quest to take Superman away from the excesses of pre-Crisis continuity (what the Silver Age wrought), Byrne also changed the nature of Superman's powers, making them more psionic in nature. Superman could lift an outrageous amount of weight, but after a certain limit, would somehow project an antigravity field around the object so that it wouldn't collapse from the stress. His hear vision became a type of directed pyrokinesis, with only his red eyes the only tale-tell sign that he was using it. Over-explaining things? Yes, there's definitely a Marvel sensibility at work, where powers had to be explained to get No-Prizes or be detailed for the Marvel Universe Handbook.
In time, and with each passing Crisis, much of what Byrne (and the writers that supported or followed him) did with Superman passed into the night. Superman once again shoots beams from his eyes and freeze breath from his mouth. He was once again the Legion's Superboy. Supergirl and Krypto also survived Krypton's destruction. Brainiac is back to bottling cities. And yet, there are things he did that have become Superman canon. That Superman is a solar battery, thus explaining why his powers work under a yellow sun. The place his human parents hold in his world. Cat Grant and Ron Troupe. LexCorp. And going all the way back to the beginning, the look of the Kryptonian Science Guild and Kal-El's rocket.
No matter the realities undone since the mid-80s, Byrne left an indelible stamp on Superman and his family of books. Most of all, he's the reason a whole other generation of readers flocked to the Superman books when they were at their ebb, putting the #1 superhero back on the pedestal where he belonged.
(Two weeks in... how m'I doin'? Personally, Reign has been a great motivator. I hope you're having as much fun with it as I am.)
Comments
As for today's installment, I have to say I really liked the reimagined Brainiac. I suppose he might have come into his own under the pen of Roger Stern, but I thought that version of Brainiac was one of the highlights of the era.
Dan: Oh, yeah, a great Luthor.
I did very much agree with getting rid of Krypto and Supergirl though. Superman is the Last Son of Krypton, an alient living as a human. It slightly ruins that if the actual tag-line is "The Last Son of Krypton. Who hangs around with the last Daughter of Krypton. And Last Dog of Krypton. And All Those People In The Tiny City of Krypton."
Also, the Byrne Superman seems to be what influenced the DC Animated Superman, and Lois and Clark Superman, who (to me) said the line that defines how I think of him:
"Superman is what I can do. Clark is who I am."
Making Clark a functioning human was the best change made. Pretending to be an absolute moron 90% of the time was just... silver age.
I. Turning Krypton from a place of wonders whose loss was a great tragedy for Kal-El and the entire universe into a thing of dystopic sterility who's destruction comes mainly as a relief was almost as boneheaded a move as possible.
II. Making Luthor a powerful businessman was a great idea. Making Luthor _only_ a powerful business man was a horrible one. Superman needs for his archenemy to be a genius inventor, not just someone who buys the work of other geniuses. (Alan Moore, armed with only a two-sentence description of what Byrne was going to do, got the character right and gave us what he would eventually slide into...) If Byrne wanted a pure kingpin figure, Morgan Edge was available.
III. Byrne had no right to destroy and forbid load-bearing pieces of Legion continuity, darn it. And besides that, taking out that early career, the time spent with peers from the future, and most importantly the early friendship with Luthor. [Luthor is not supposed to worry Superman just because he's trying to kill him, but because he represents his greatest failure: but for him, Luthor might have been a great man.] The details with the hair were silly, sure, but the underlying psychology was a loss that eventually had to be restored.
The nice thing with the multiple versions and timelines is that we can have a Last Son of Krypton AND an inventor Luthor AND a childhood friend Luthor AND a businessman Luthor AND both a sterile and a lively Krypton and enjoy stories from all those versions (for example, I really like the Krypton destroyed by its computer Brainiac from the animated series).
There was potential for stories in the sterile Krypton etc., while writers today find more potential in different versions. They'll tell those stories until the well runs dry, then find new avenues.
Current continuity seems to have migrated towards a certain consensus mixing pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, movie and television (Smallville) elements of the character.
Mainly though, I was thinking "why?" Marvel don't republish Spider-Man's origin story every 15 years, sending fans into a tizzy as to whether the name of Uncle Ben's killer was revealted or not. With the occasional horrendous mistep aside (I'm looking at you, "One More Day"), Marvel Big Events seem to be "what can we do with the universe now?", rather than DC's more backward looking "what can we change about the origin of our universe now?"
(And yeah, I know that there was a cartoon about the Legion that was supposed to be quite good. I can't say if it added anything to Clark's character though.)
Liam: As Jeff says, Marvel retcons its properties too, it just doesn't normally make an event of it. Nor does DC ONLY do retconning events.
And fair enough, DC events aren't solely We Are Now Changing Continuity. But the 80s had the first crisis, the 90s had Zero Hour, the 00s had Infinite Crisis... I'd say rebooting history every 10 years is a bit too much. Yeah, it means that if you don't like a certain aspect of Batman's origin you can wait around knowing that it's likely to be retconned out in a few years, but it also means you can't get attached to it.
He engineered the reboot, they added a lot to it (like the aforementioned Cat Grant).
(Probably didn't help that I saw it a couple weeks after visiting my brother, sister-in-law and three-year-old niece on the other side of the planet. But damn.)
But yeah, huge fan of the animated series here.
And myaybe it's just because as much as I love DC, I started out as a Marvel guy, or maybe it's because I adore the Marvel Handbooks, or maybe it's because I'm just a pedantic geek, but I quite enjoy the Byrneified Superman.
I didn't read it as it was released (still a Marvel guy then) but have read most of it via backissues and trades.
What it boils down to for me, and the reason I like it, is the emphasis it put on Clark Kent, the man. Like LiamKav quoted: "Superman is what I can do. Clark is who I am."
For all the little changes that kinda bug me (I love Byrne's Luthor but wish he'd been more of a mad scientist too, some of the psionic explanations get too nitpicky even for me) they are worth it to get that complete 180 on the relationship between Clark and Superman, and that's something that, for the most part, has stuck, even after most of Krypton has been brought back.
I love the idea that Superman is the secret identity. Plus, it's such an elegant way of explaining away the whole "how good a disguise are glasses, really?" thing: no one has any reason to believe Superman isn't just Superman.