"The Death of Superman" Topic

A child born when the Doomsday story arc started would be legally able to drink now. If you read comic books at the time what, if any, impact did this have on your enjoyment of the medium?

If you started reading comics since then have you gone back and read it? If so what did you think?

If you quit reading comic books before it was published or never read them, did you hear about it at the time and what did you think?

Personally I thought it was rather anti climactic. It would have been more powerful if Superman had died at the hands of Lex Luthor an established villain rather than a new character created for the sole purpose of selling more comics. It worked on me I guess as that is the one of only two Superman comics I own. The other is the return of Superman after his much hyped demise.

The comics of early 1990's were over hyped garbage. It was the last straw for me and I stop collecting.

That was after my comic heyday but I remember it well. I never had much interest in Superman. I did think it was lame that they used a new villain. Darksied would have been a much better choice.

I thought that too. It seemed lame that they came up with some new bad guy when there were a few old bad guys that could have done the job.

Of course his death and then return with nothing changed but adding a mullet left quite a bit to be desired, I thought.

A better ending to the series would have been Superman coming back as the Cyborg Superman. Like that had actually been him. If they had Darkseid send Doomsday or someone similar, maybe Kalibak and a couple of other dudes and them kill him with some type of nuclear bomb or kryptonite bomb after an extensive fight. Then Darkseid steals the corpse and robocop-like replaces a lot of the parts that are damaged with new cyborg parts.

Then Superman comes back but has all these issues with control, sort of like Wolverine except he is Superman not Wolverine.

So he is there to destroy most of the heroes and they have to fight him but he is slowly healing and the mechanical parts start falling out. Obviously there is some sort of mental battle with the cyborg control thing that he ultimately wins and then struggles to keep the evil under control until it all falls off or is pushed out by new growth.

I never had much interest in Superman either and lost interest entirely after that.

I don't think the comics of the early 90s were over-hyped in total. Some were. But there were some good things, even the big things. The first Infinity Gauntlet series was pretty good along with all the Thanos and Silver Surfer stuff leading up to it.

The Fall of the Mutants in X-Factor and New Mutants was pretty good. The cross over with Daredevil was one of the best, if most irrelevant to the story line, crossovers ever.

There were a lot of other good things in there too. But they lost me too in the mid to late 90s. I think I stopped collecting in 97 but that was mostly due to all the cross overs. It was impossible to just read 1 of something.

I was working in a comics shop at the time. My enjoyment of the medium was getting seriously undermined by the fact that the Big Two (Marvel and DC) were churning out product for a speculators' market, and that many customers were not actually reading anything they bought. It wasn't many more years before that shop was gone.

Ron

It almost destroyed the comics industry by killing more than half of the shops in the country. I hated it then and thought the entire storyline was lame, and I still do. I remember seeing all these non-comics readers flashing their multiple copies of every issue of the entire line of crappy Superman comics and bragging about how rich they were going to make them. Idiots.

Never cared for it, nor the Bane storyline with Batman, or the murder of Jason Todd/Robin (especially as the killing was completely out-of-character for the Joker as far as the way it happened. The Joker has more style than that.)

All were lame gimmicks rather than well crafted stories.

Comics had always relied on gimmicks. Just pick up any random silver age comic to see the promise of some weird, often mind-bending story like Superman transformed into a chimp, Lois Lane forever sealed in a bubble or Supes threatening to kill Jimmy Olsen for his own good.

Death of Superman was pretty much the same thing, but with the added delusion that by the 1990's comics had become a lot more sopomophisticated by simple virtue of being chronologically younger and therefore better. That and mullets …

I didn't like it back then.

This doesn't mean there aren't good comics, there are plenty with gripping stories, solid continuity and interesting characters.

I am echoing everyone else pretty much. I bought it, read it, and was highly disappointed.

This guy from no where comes flying down from outer space destroying everything in his path and has a punching fight with Supes. A very lame punching fight. And then they both punch each other at the same time and "die".

And then you find out… Supes didn't really die. Pissed me off and I dropped comics after that.

I watched an episode of the Justice League Cartoon and it had a better fight between Supes and Darkside… the best part was Supes saying "I am always afraid I have to hold back, but you can take it!" or something like that. That was awesome.

I had a friend at DC at that time and her version of the reason the story was done went like this. The big storyline in Superman that Summer was supposed to be the Marriage of Lois Lane and Clark/Superman. At the time there was a Lois and Clark tv show that was building up to the marriage of their titular characters. TV is BIG comics are not worth much for major companies except for the ability to make movies from the stable of characters so it was DC comics that had to back down and come up with a plan B.

Coming up with the plan wasn't going well and out of frustration one of the writers or editors said facetiously "Why don't we just kill him?" No one took it seriously at first but as deadlines loomed they decided to go with the Death of Superman storyline.

And yes it sucked despite some good people like Roger Stern being involved. The makers of Warner Bros. Justice League animated series did a number of better stories involving elements of the story to much better effect and I recommend those over the comic.

Artist Simon Bisley said it best I think (I'm paraphrasing his words here) "When you hear the death of Superman you expect continents shattering, Oceans boiling and a sacrifice that saves us all at the highest of price. Superman does not die by being beaten to death in the street by a nobody."

Never read it, never was interested in Superman. Also saw the come-back a mile away, even if I thought they should have left him dead.

Also it did not stop me collecting comics. I still do, and I still collect one of the same titles I collected back then (Wolverine). That being said, the big change in ME over the intervening time is that now I collect DC titles alongside Marvel, something I would never do back then.

Damon.

@Redmenace:

Especially given the two epic self-sacrifice deaths only a few years before in Crisis on Infinite Earths of Flash and Supergirl.

I'd dropped out of superhero comics by that point, pretty much. Compared to the mid-eighties, quality had nose-dived considerably. Crossover hell was what pretty much stopped me buying 'em though. Didn't much matter. There were (and are) plenty of good comics out there not made by DC or Marvel.